Skalata’s Post

Congrats to Lochie Burke and Afonso Firmo from NetNada (Best Sustainability Startup 🌏) and Sean Law from Doohly (Best New Founder ✨) for your nominations in Startup Daily's Best in Tech Awards  🏆 We may have also made the Startup Investor of the Year shortlist... 🫣

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) 👇

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 👇

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 👇