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2024: M8 Ventures starts investing
Tech venture investing is mostly about predicting the probability of startups succeeding. You’d expect early-stage tech investors to be reluctant to publicly admit when they’ve been wrong. But 2024 didn’t work out the way we’d expected — for us, or for M8 Ventures.
Actually, it’s worked out better than we expected, and in surprising ways.
We’d been working together on raising a first venture fund for a few years and we expected 2024 to be more of the same: a grind to get more commitments towards our minimum fund size, without the income of an investment management fee to help us cover the compliance and operating costs of a VC fund manager.
Then two significant events occurred, which changed everything.
In March, one of our three general partners, Elaine, told us she had run out of runway and had to go get a proper job. She’d been offered not just a proper job but a dream job (as a partner at Main Sequence Ventures) and there was no way we were going to stand in the way of that. But it meant Emily and I were left paying 50% of the operating costs each, rather than 33%.
In April, Emily was asked if M8 Ventures would lead a pre-Series A round in fast-growing telehealth startup Hola Health. A small group of investors would supply the capital, and we’d run the deal. Once the deal closed, we had a single startup in our portfolio, and no capital to make any more investments.
What to do next? Emily and I explored our options, and agreed we’d give up our AFSL (which would save us from most of the fund opex costs) and launch an angel syndicate. Perhaps later, if we performed well managing the syndicate, some of our members would develop enough trust to back us as LPs in a venture fund.
Our syndicate’s thesis would be the same as our future venture fund:
- Back teams from pre-seed stage who are building a world-class technology product;
- Back teams from Australia and New Zealand; and
- Back diverse teams.
The pre-syndicate deal: SeenCulture
While we were setting up the M8 Syndicate on Aussie Angels we were introduced to Nikki Tugano of SeenCulture, and really connected to her mission and deep experience of the problem. We thought a few of the small number of potential syndicate members we knew at the time might be up for joining us for a pre-launch syndicate investment.
SeenCulture is building a SaaS platform that helps organisations understand and improve their workplace culture. Think of it like a smart tool that gives employees a way to share honest feedback about what’s working and what’s not in their workplace, without fear of judgment or repercussion. It then analyses that feedback to give leaders insights and actions to take that will make their workplace more inclusive, collaborative, and productive. A great match for our investment thesis.
SeenCulture was also our first investment alongside Simon Wright and InterValley Ventures. InterValley (Australia/Japan) and Skalata (Australia) have been regular venture co-investors with us this year, been a pleasure to work with, and we hope we’re able to build on those two valuable relationships in 2025.
We used the media announcement of our Hola Health investment to help launch our M8 Syndicate on the Aussie Angels platform in mid-April and at the start of May, Aussie Angels’ cofounder and CEO Cheryl Mack video interviewed us both for the Aussie Angels members.
So many questions!
How many people would join our syndicate in our first year? How many deals would we be able to source for the syndicate? How much capital would our syndicate invest alongside us in our first year?
Neither of us had a clue. But we’re both experienced startup operators, and we know what to do in the absence of data — you go out and see if you can create some.
May: getting into the drug business
M8 Ventures’ first syndicated deal on Aussie Angels was unusual because new syndicates don’t typically launch with anything super-hot for their first deal. We managed to secure a small allocation in super-hot novel therapeutics startup Psylo thanks to a friendship with cofounders Josh Ismin and Sam Bannister that came from mentoring them through the Startmate accelerator.
At first glance, Psylo might look like a biotech startup, and Emily and I know nothing about making medicines. But under the hood, it’s also a software startup. Psylo’s novel therapeutics are designed in software and as an ex-CTO and an ex-CPO, we have a lot of experience in building software.
We filled our allocation, completed investment docs and transferred the funds from our still-tiny syndicate in what remains a record for M8 Syndicate — in 13 days (including two weekends)!
June: we can see clearly now the bots have come
Cheryl Mack got in touch to invite us to co-syndicate something super-nerdy she’d gained an allocation in from APAC super-angel Marvin Liao — DiffuseDrive.
Everybody knows that large learning models (LLMs) need to be trained on enormous datasets, and over the past few years the cost of licensing datasets has gone up from zero to way-too-much.
If you can’t afford the data, you can’t train your AI and your startup dreams die. Or do they?
DiffuseDrive is using generative AI to create new datasets from scratch; as good or better in terms of quality as the real thing, specifically in the area of datasets used to train machine vision systems. In other words, they are training LLMs that create datasets to train other LLMs.
Balint Pastor and Roland Pinter were close-knit and technically impressive, and Emily’s background as the tech cofounder of a machine vision startup helped us evaluate them and their startup. They say you should invest in the company selling shovels, not in the guy hoping to find gold. Balint and Roland are selling very clever shovels. We were in! Thanks Marvin and Cheryl!
July and August: betting on the dogs
Free advice: if you’re in any kind of startup industry job in Australia or NZ you should go to Southstart and Sunrise every year. And at Sunrise Australia this year Emily met the gifted startup marketer Paloma Newton and really connected over a shared love of real-talk and about being a ‘dog mum’.
Paloma and her life partner and cofounder Jackson Gritching were at the pre-product stage with Elita Genetics, which is a stem cell bank with a twist: it’s for pets, not for humans.
Tragically, Emily lost her beloved Oz this year. He will be forever missed. And I still miss my dear Jemby although I lost her in 2016. We could closely identify with the problem Paloma and Jackson were setting out to address: improving the quality and duration of the lives of our precious fur babies. We knew our syndicate members would too. We were in!
September: planet first, pantry second
Last Christmas, Forever Girlfriend Kath and I were invited to a Christmas party by someone she does outdoor PT with. At the party, I asked one of the other guests, “What do you do?” He said, “I’m a startup founder” and I said, “No kidding? I’m a startup investor!”
Sean Miller is a serial hospitality entrepreneur, and there are many of those, but he’s been successful, and that’s most unusual. His cofounder Mathieu Jamet used to design Danone’s warehousing and shipping algorithms. Together they’re the dream team any time you decide to disrupt food and beverage distribution from small producers and manufacturers to retailers and hospitality venues.
It’s a huge industry, ripe for disruption, and massively carbon-intensive, so making it more efficient is good for the planet too. We were in!
Prep Local became our syndicate’s second investment, alongside Skalata Ventures.
November: finding ourselves
Anna Wright and I have been friends since she was an idea-stage solo founder in Australia’s first female founder-focused accelerator, BlueChilli’s SheStarts, in 2017. She also poached one of my oldest and closest friends Tony Burrett to be her cofounder and chief product officer. So I was always ‘emotionally in’ on BindiMaps.
BindiMaps is later-stage than most of our portfolio companies but everything changed recently, when their dev team invented a couple of world-first algorithms that allow it to help you navigate your way through large and complicated indoor and outdoor spaces, “hyperlocalising” to 30cm accuracy.
It works in 3D too, so it doesn’t freak out when you’re in a multi-storey venue — it even understands when you’re in a lift or riding an escalator.
A number of large organisations have chosen BindiMaps after a worldwide search for the best-in-market solution. Great tech team and world class tech product as voted by customers? We were in!
December: raising now!
We told ourselves BindiMaps would be our last deal of the year — we and our syndicate members could use a summer break — but there was just one more deal we had to try to squeeze in.
In Australia it’s against the law to promote a startup investment to people who don’t qualify as sophisticated/wholesale investors so we can’t mention the name of the startup or the founders in our blog until the deal’s closed, and we’re a week away from that as I write.
For now, I’ll tell you the cofounders and life partners behind the business are just too good. She’s a female tech cofounder building an impressive AI stack that helps automate the full lifecycle of advertising insights research, creative development and reporting and he’s spent his career selling those sorts of services to large advertising and marketing clients.
Despite only starting a few months ago, they already have a growing A-List roster of brands paying to use their platform. We’re in!
2025: yes, we have deal flow
In our first partial year M8 Ventures syndicate members have invested approximately $1.7M in eight startups, between idea stage and pre-Series A — about one deal per month. In that time our syndicate has grown to 176 members. We’re taking a few weeks’ vacation now but we already have a few promising startups to decide on for our first deal in 2025. It hurts to turn good startup founders down, so our 2025 goal is to keep recruiting new syndicate members to allow us to increase our number of deals and our average cheque size.
Thanks to Emily Rich for being the smartest, most capable venture investment partner I could ever hope to work alongside. Thanks to Cheryl, Alex, Thomas and Vinko at Aussie Angels for being such a responsive and supportive team and for everything you’ve done to help us and other syndicates get started. Thanks to our venture intern, who prefers to remain anonymous but who has been a big help to us on many deals and operational processes and who also joined our syndicate as an investor this year!
Thanks to the 176-and-counting members of the M8 Ventures syndicate. Some of you have invested in several of our deals this year, some of you are still developing the confidence to invest in your first, and some of you we know are still waiting to see the right deal at the right time, but without you alongside us we might have invested $50k this year, not $1.7M. We don’t have your prior consent so we won’t list your names but we really appreciate that you’ve chosen to join the M8 Ventures syndicate and invest alongside Emily and me in these startups.
Thanks most of all to the founders we’ve invested in this year: Anna, Balint, Jackson, Josh, Lenin, Mathieu, Michael, Nikki, Paloma, Roland, Sam, Sara, Sean, Thiru, Tony and Vishnu. You have so many achievements yet to come. We see you, and we believe in you.
Let’s hear from our founders
I asked our founders two questions:
- How was your 2024?
- What will you do in 2025?
Not everybody was able to get back to me, but here are some reflections from our founders…
Paloma from Elita Genetics:
I turned to Jackson and said, “We need to write a paragraph on how the year has been for Alan Jones. What do you think?” He exhaled VERY loudly, then smiled. That pretty much sums it up. This year has been one of the most intense, rewarding, and downright exhilarating of our lives. We went from working out of a shed by the Yarra River to having our own lab space, a team of five, and building Elita Genetics, something truly novel — all in just 12 months.
Every time we bring someone new on board — someone with deep expertise — and they decide to join this wild ride, there’s this heartbeat-skipping moment: holy shit, we’re really onto something. While Alan wasn’t instantly sold (though Emily and her dogs absolutely were), once he saw what we saw, there was no turning back, and he’s now one of our fiercest supporters.
We don’t just see the M8 team as investors; we see them as two of our biggest champions. Knowing they’re in our corner gives us this unshakable confidence to keep pushing forward, and honestly, that’s what every founder should look for in their early investors.
(L to R) Paloma, Edgar Allen Paws, Jackson
Nikki from SeenCulture:
How was your 2024?
An insane roller coaster. Raised $1M pre-seed, made huge product development headway, not enough revenue, scored Atlassian, Culture Amp, and Leonardo AI as customers, struggled with mental health, doubled down on therapy, got addicted to pickleball, travelled a tonne, and fell in love.
What will you do in 2025?
Level up from Founder Product Fit to Product Market Fit 🚀🚀🚀
Nikki and her pickleball addiction
Josh from Psylo:
2024 was a year of firsts for Psylo; we closed our first priced round, formed a board, received our first significant non-dilutive funding grant, and began shifting the company to be clinical trial ready. 2025 is where the rubber meets the road as we initiate scale-up manufacturing of our first development candidate. It will also see us rebrand to reflect our renewed focus on “neuroplastogens,” a novel class of therapies that restore brain function by stimulating the growth and remodeling of neural circuits. Our team is hugely excited for what’s to come, and as always we really appreciate your support!
(L to R) Josh, Jinlong, Lisa, Will, Lachlan, Dilara, Nick and Sam
Sean from Prep Local:
2024 pushed us to the limit — testing our commitment, endurance, resilience, strategy, and the loyalty of our investors and customers.
But 2025 is where all that grit pays off. Stronger as a team and sharper as a business, we’re ready to turn challenges 2024 into the triumphs of tomorrow. LETS GO!!!!!
(L to R) Sean and Mathieu