Skalata

Hats off to Jeanette Cheah 💁🏻♀️, Jodie Imam, and Rachel Yang who clinched top honours at LaunchVic's Governor of Victoria Startup Awards this week! 🍾 You are all incredible ambassadors for our ecosystem. From everyone at Skalata, thank you for everything you do to support the next generation of Victorian founders 🙏🫡

It's official. Skalata is the most active investor in Australia this year. 🏃♀️🏆 Investing at the pace we do, while prioritising portfolio support is no mean feat... A special thank you to Claire Bristow, Rob Greco, Tuong Cat Tran 🐱, Tom Smalley and Shahirah Gardner who put in the hard yards every day to make sure our value prop is more than just words on a website. We may not scream it from the rooftops, but we're quietly proud to have the highest support-to-cheque size ratio in Australia. We’re anti-hype, anti-insane pressure - instead giving pre-seed startups what they need at the time… which it turns out is time. With more people on hand and more hands-on support, we're helping founders build the capabilities for long-term success. Keep your eyes out for another investment shortly... 👀 Read the full article (link in comments) 👇

📢 “Must see event of the week (Caveat: In Melbourne, in the startup space)” - Rani Heraputeri Tomorrow (this Wednesday)! In Collingwood. Open Mic Night 🎭 presented by Airwallex, Skalata, Antler, Rampersand: ▶️10x 2-min pitches from founders ▶️1x prize for the audience choice of best pitch ▶️1x musical performance ▶️2x comedy performances ▶️1x fun night of networking <25 tix left. Registration link in comments. Artwork by: Taylor Fox-Smith, Scott Dommett, ChatGPT.

Although we constantly invest in its replacements, we’ve got a lot of love for our friend Excel. 👩💻 So many happy memories of confidently typing in a formula and being met with # REF. Turns out the supply chain industry shares the same fondness... So much so that billions of global goods are still travelling thousands of miles on a wing, a prayer, and a manually entered sum. Over 67% of supply chain managers are still using our beloved green friend. The industry’s plagued with errors, missed deliveries, and a bleeding bottom line. Trucks are crossing entire states half full. And every one of us saw the effects of this inefficiency when the pandemic crashed into our lives, leaving cars without chips, villages without food, and everyone without toilet paper. Hugh Dixson is a man with a very logistical plan, having spent years in supply ops at BCG, Uber, and Aussie scale-up Ofload. He’s built Switchboard with the aim of bringing global logistics out of the filing cabinets and into the 21st century. We're stoked to join a who's who of early-stage investors on Switchboard's cap table – Archangel Ventures, AfterWork Ventures, Investible, Startmate, TEN13, and The Fund. Phew. Read 𝘰𝘶𝘳 investment note though, because it's more fun. Promise. Link in comments 👇

📣 Experience impact through entrepreneurship at the LaunchHUB Pitch Night event – Get your tickets before they're all gone!   Introducing our esteemed panel of judges who will help us decide the Best Pitch of the Night *dun dun dun* Katarina Throssell from Giant Leap  Tuong Cat Tran from Skalata  Olga Hogan from Breakthrough Victoria  Stephen Grocott from RMIT Activator / ACF Board    And we’ll need YOU to vote for the People’s Choice Award!     ➡️ See you there! https://bit.ly/44ENE6e    RMIT University | RMIT University Alumni | RMIT University Student Union #entrepreneurship #startup #preaccelerator #earlystagestartups #pitch #night #melbourne #rmit

For most of human history, we did Shopping 1.0. 🗣️ Merchants bartered merrily with customers, present in the customer journey from start to finish (which, to be fair, was walking into a shop –> walking out of it)... It’s a little more complicated now. Shopping 2.0 has given every store owner a seat at the global marketplace. But it's put oceans between them and their buyers. Brands have been seeking a reconnection with actual, usable, human feedback ever since. 👍👎 NPS is so old it predates online shopping. Reviews are biased. Analytics tools like Hotjar and Glassbox offer drab data. 🥱 And millions in dev/ad spend is wasted as brands take shots in the dark at what customers want to see. Led by Andy Evans and Mareile Osthus, humii is wading through blurry big data to put product managers back in the chat with customers. Taking the traditional mystery shopper strategy and mixing in a FOMO-driven acquisition model, Humii targets business with an irresistible proposition: “wanna hear what people are saying about you?”. 🤔 They're taking us past Shopping 2.0, but reviving all the best features of 1.0: interaction, real-time qualitative feedback, and actual human insight. More on why we invested via the link in comments 👇

I am delighted to announce that Victoria's startup agency, LaunchVic, has invested in Skalata's management company. Paul, Darrell, Martin and I founded Skalata with the support of LaunchVic in 2018, and this new investment reaffirms our joint commitment to cultivating a strong Victorian startup ecosystem. Victorian companies now make up about half of our 70-strong portfolio, and we're excited to invest at least $20 million into 30 new Victorian startups over the next five years. (as I write this, we've just signed another term sheet for a VIC startup   - investment note coming soon 👀) A special thank you to Kate Cornick, Leigh Jasper and the entire LaunchVic team for your continued support of our mission at Skalata, and the VIC startup ecosystem as a whole. Over the years we have seen our portfolio companies benefit immensely from initiatives like the Alice Anderson Fund and 30X30. Aptly, today we also said bon voyage to Claire Bristow from our investment team who heads off to Silicon Valley for 3 months, thanks to LaunchVic's International Education program. 🎓 It's shaping up to be a transformative year for Skalata and I can't wait for this next chapter. Now back to work...

I’m about to jump on a plane to the US but before I’m completely drunk on the Silicon Valley Kool Aid… I’ve seen a lot of commentary around slamming Australian VCs for being conservative/risk averse and that the US is so much better etc etc. I’ve actually also said this a bunch too which I now find really annoying by me. Reflecting on this sentiment, I don’t think it’s helpful at all. I’m all for constructive criticism, but that which is shallow and lacks critical analysis is not helpful. ‘Silicon Valley’ was apparently termed in 1971, though it’s estimated that the wheels were already well in motion at this time. Most of the large Australian VC funds weren’t established until the 2010s. The US literally has decades on us as an industry. They have HUNDREDS of successful examples to point to that prove VC to be a viable asset class that can outperform traditional markets. Companies they’ve invested in are household names globally. LPs in funds have been made mega rich as a result. It’s estimated to be home to over 700 Unicorns right now. Australia? About 9. We’re only JUST starting to see evidence of success and are hanging our entire industry’s hats on companies I could count on both hands. So yeah, of course Australian VCs are conservative. They’re severely limited by both a small pool of LPs to invest in their funds, as well as companies to invest in. Get it wrong, and your career is over (with your name likely plastered all over certain mastheads on the way out). Is there room for growth? Of course. Are there lessons that can be learnt from more established markets? Absolutely. But Australia versus US as it currently stands is a silly comparison.

Capped off our Sydney trip last week with a Friday latte, eggs and some chats with some Skalata Portfolio Company founders (and a couple of others!) ☕️🍳💬 Thanks to those who attended! The logistics software end of the table were getting quite excited, sharing intel on some crossover targets and customers. Coming back from Sunrise Festival, I owe people a multitude of emails, intros and phone calls. Incoming! 🙂↕️

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are only getting… massive-er. Gaming “lore” - the narrative behind characters, factions, kingdoms, and histories - is biblical in its size and complexity... 🧙 It filters down from the main quest to the most arcane in-jokes shared in subreddits. Modern audiences want to obsess over intricacies and connect with vast virtual stories. But the time spent mapping, tracking and cranking out huge volumes of content means even 20-strong writing teams at major studios are cracking under the pressure. The “human touch” can also get lost… which is maybe why NPC dialogue ends up being so notoriously corny... Leveraging LLMs and true fan involvement, Nilu Kulasingham and Nucanon are helping gaming studios generate rich lore, freeing them up to create, and opening the doors to add-ons, sequels, spin-offs, and TV/film acquisitions. Gaming isn't our usual B2B SaaS. But all work and no play makes Skalata a dull VC. 🥱 And this is an industry set to reach $294 billion in 2024 (10x global cinema). Here's why we invested, and why we think gaming models of old could be taking an arrow to the knee… 🏹 Antler, Outlier Ventures, Paperclip Partners 🖇, LAUNCH, Mark Aubrey, David Yin, Nicholas Wong Link in comments.