Championing Women in the Startup & Tech Ecosystem
Last Tuesday evening the Victorian startup community came together to celebrate female founders at the last Startup Victoria pitch night of the year. In fact, it was the largest ever pitch night run by Startup Victoria and Inspire9 was delighted to be involved alongside MYOB, KPMG, OneRoof, and Lawsquared in making this a success.
On the night Inspire9 and OneRoof teamed up with MYOB to offer eight free full-year residencies at Inspire9, Richmond or OneRoof, Southbank. That’s one full-year’s worth of desk space, a vibrant community and all the trimmings of a supportive, thriving coworking space to some very talented ladies on the night.
To make this dream a reality, for the first time ever, the pitch night stage was opened up to female founders in the audience for a 60-second impromptu pitch! Together, we chose some standout female entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas aiming to solve real business challenges and have the drive get their businesses off the ground.
Massive congratulations to Nanager for taking in the big win on the night and well done to other finalists Circle In, Le Buns and Parachuute who all delivered four-minute pitches.
Nanager is a solution created by Lauren Brown after identifying the need for flexible childcare by working families. Nanager reinvents the modern nanny by combining quality childcare with effective home management to help working parents juggle a happy home alongside a healthy career.
Circle In, created by Jodi Geddes & Kate Pollard, supports working women through all stages of parental leave & returning to work with free access to advice, resources & stories from real women.
Maggie Scott started Parachuute to help parents reduce the chaos of family life by making it easy to get by with help from their trusted network. Their initial focus is kids carpooling & they launched a carpooling app in July that is safe, easy & guilt-free.
In the 60-second audience pitch section, we were wowed by Podcast Services Australia, Human Parity and The Voices of Movement for winning one-year of free coworking space, generously sponsored by MYOB.
Inspire9 are delighted to welcome Podcast Services Australia, Human Parity and Le Buns to live, work and breathe the Inspire9 coworking community for the coming year.
The brainchild behind Le Buns is Keisha Dessaix. Keisha has created an innovative, eco conscious apparel label, servicing the fast growing demand for sustainably made products, while on a mission to make ethical fashion mainstream. Le Buns offers contemporary yet eco conscious & affordable solutions to intimates & swimwear.
Podcast Services Australia are passionate about fostering better communication within companies. Christina Canters and COO Aaron Heath want to empower organisations with the ability to give their staff a voice. They believe that the podcast medium has huge potential for helping staff across all levels of organisations to feel more engaged, heard and appreciated.
Aklesia Kiflemariam took to the stage to pitch Human Parity pioneers in implementing natural language processing and artificial intelligence for customer support, conversational interfaces, and chatbots. She’s also involved with the Chatbots, Messaging and AI meetup in Melbourne that runs out of Inspire9.
OneRoof welcomed winner of the top spot Nanager alongside Circle In, Parachuute and 60-second pitch winner The Voices of Movement into the fold.
We’ll be releasing a series of interviews and stories with our coworking desk winners on Medium, we can’t wait to share their journeys over the coming year with you.
As part of November being female founder month, Startup Victoria launched Female Founders Australia on Instagram where they feature a kickass founder each day. If you’d like to get involved all you need to do is email through a 20 second clip covering name, company and secret weapon as a female founder.
