**Let me start this blog by making a bold prediction – within five years there will be at least three other Atlassian’s in Australia.** The Australian start-up community often talks about creating more ‘Atlassian’s’ i.e. creating a $1 Billion plus international tech company in Australia. The Startmate Accelerator program was created to give Australian tech startups a platform to do just this!

If you haven’t heard of Startmate they are a Sydney based network of mentors, successful entrepreneurs and investors. They were named the “Best International Accelerator” by Naval Ravikant Co-founder and CEO of AngelList. What makes Startmate special is they provide a 5 month Accelerator program that involves ‘hot-housing’ startups for 3months, $50k in funding and access to an amazing network of people. After 3 months you are then flown from Australia to San Francisco where you will spend 2 months building an international network. This last part is critical (remember we are talking about creating an international business).

Last night in an old jail cell block in Sydney’s Darlinghurst 300 start-up enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and investors got together for Startmates latest Demo Day. The Startmate Demo Day is a showcase and pitch opportunity for the eight startups that have recently completed the first 3 months of the Accelerator program.
The evening kicked off with food, a few beers and a bit of networking which then morphed into a half hour Q&A between Niki and Andrew Rothwell Co-founder of payments startup Tyro. From there we launched into the eight pitches followed by a brief Q&A for each pitch.

The eight companies that pitched were:
• Lumific: Effortless photo organization, beautiful enhancements. Automatically. [https://angel.co/lumific] (https://angel.co/lumific)
• HaystackHQ: Visual analytics for legal eDiscovery. [https://angel.co/haystackhq] (https://angel.co/haystackhq)
• Inductly: Mobile staff induction platform. [https://angel.co/inductly] (https://angel.co/inductly)
• Drawboard: PDF editing for construction engineering. [https://angel.co/drawboard] (https://angel.co/drawboard)
• Flirtey: Parcel delivery by UAV to smartphones. [https://angel.co/flirtey-1] (https://angel.co/flirtey-1)
• Foogi: Whatsapp for Calendars. [https://angel.co/foogi] (https://angel.co/foogi)
• Composure: Autocomplete for email. [https://angel.co/composure] (https://angel.co/composure)
• SportHold: The prediction game for sports. [https://angel.co/sporthold] (https://angel.co/sporthold)

**What amazed me about all eight pitches was the quality. All eight were very well executed, polished and despite the high failure rate of startups made me feel confident that a genuine $1 Billion tech company existed amongst anyone in this intake.**

Without wanting to play favourites as I genuinely loved all eight pitches a few special mentions are required:

• Flirtey – these guys are ambitious, this is a drone delivery service which aims to take the cost of delivery’s down to $1.50 per delivery. Amazing, ambitious and can’t wait to see what happens!
• Foogi – Ever had problems organising free diary slots? Foogi solves this annoying problem – love it!
• Composure – Using Machine Learning to assist in autocompleting emails. This is awesome as it grabs data from both email history as If it works as well as it should another amazing timesaving tool!

The Startmate teams all leave for the US in the next week! We wish them well and congratulate the team at Startmate for an amazing event!

**Check out [http://www.startmate.com.au] (http://www.startmate.com.au)**

Author

**Anthony Sochan** joined the MitchelLake Group in 2007 and is a Senior Consultant in our technology practice. He has completed over 150 projects ranging from Chief Technology Officers to Android Engineers and Technical Product Managers.

Anthony is passionate about technology and enjoys helping Aussie startups grow.