​💜 Startmate is coming to San Francisco!

​We are back in San Francisco for one night only where 16 of ANZ's top startups will take to the stage. Brought to you by the most active early-stage investor in ANZ, Startmate. 🦘☀️

​⭐ Overview

​When: Tues 27 Oct 2026 @ 6:30 PM
Where: Dogpatch Studios
What: Pitch night featuring Startmate Accelerator Winter'26 cohort (16 companies)

​🚨 Only 200 seats available. Seats are extremely limited and approved upon request. Register asap to secure a seat.

​​🚀 Introducing Startmate

​Startmate is Australia & New Zealand's leading early-stage accelerator — often called the "YC of Australia." We've backed 350+ companies over 15 years, with a combined portfolio value of $4.5B AUD.

​Our Accelerator program runs twice a year: 12 weeks, ~20 companies per cohort, under 2% acceptance rate from 1,000+ applications. We write a $120K check on entry and connect founders to a mentor network of operators who've built and exited at scale.

​Notable Startmate alumni have raised follow-on rounds from Accel, Forerunner, and other SF-based firms. Our LP base includes Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and the largest family offices in Australia.

​🎤 The Winter'26 cohort

​What unites the Winter ’26 cohort is a willingness to build where others have assumed it’s too hard, too regulated or too boring to touch.

​They’re building rockets to make space more accessible, taking paperwork out of dental clinics, turning days of construction estimating into minutes, and helping product teams launch globally without months of localisation work.

​And as AI agents move from writing code to running businesses, they’re building the infrastructure to make that shift safe and trusted: guardrails, runtime access and compliance layers for industries where getting it wrong isn’t an option.

​Most are raising their first institutional round — preseed and seed — having completed 12 weeks of structured customer validation before this stage.

​⭐ Demo Day Schedule

​5.45 pm - Doors open
6.30 pm - Show starts
7.30 pm - Show ends
7.45 pm - Mingling
9.00 pm - Event concludes

​*Please note this is an 18+ event

​⚡️ Thank you to our sponsors!

​✨ ElevenLabs ✨ is the AI research company building the audio layer of the internet. Their models turn text into studio-quality speech, music and live voice agents in any language, powering everything from instant dubbing to the voice agents now answering calls for some of the world's fastest-growing companies. For founders, it means a two-person team can sound like a full production studio from day one.

​✨ Stripe ✨ is the financial infrastructure behind millions of businesses worldwide. Beyond payments, Stripe handles billing, fraud and the unglamorous plumbing founders would rather not build themselves.

​✨ AWS ✨ gives founders the same infrastructure that runs the world's largest companies, available from the first line of code. Through AWS Activate, early-stage startups get credits and technical support as they scale.

​Got a question? Reach out to Emma at emma@startmate.com.au