👋 Howdy to the 1,364 new joiners since our last edition! You are now part of a 574,336-strong tribe outperforming the competition together. Here’s what you missed recently…

⚡️ Zapier’s AI Offer: Valuemaxxing. How the smartest AI companies are spending less on AI.
🍀 Happenstance: 10x Your Luck. An interview with Alex Teichman, Founder & CEO at Happenstance.
🚧 Selling Safety, Pricing Blind & Scaling Infrastructure AI. An interview with Shelley Copsey, Founder & CEO at FYLD.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Today’s piece is about Startmate, which reminds me of a new tool we started using in the recent cohort. That tool is Happenstance. They’ve recently become a partner of the newsletter, so I thought I’d give them another quick shoutout. Happenstance mines your network to find great contacts just one degree away.

If you are looking for more pipeline, faster turnarounds, and more revenue overall, check them out. Apart from that, I am about to go off on some well-deserved R&R to the World Weightlifting Championships in Ningbo, China, of all places. Wish me luck!

BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

My Favorite Startmate W26 Companies

One of my favorite days of the year happened this week: Startmate Demo Day. Startmate is the Y Combinator of the Southern Hemisphere. I mentor and invest there, meaning I give money and time to the best new startups coming out of Australia and New Zealand.

This is my favorite day of the year (upgraded from one of) because it’s the center of ambition in our region. It’s where the next set of founders trying to put a dent in the world hang out. Demo Day happens twice a year, and seeing every founder up in lights is the absolute culmination of that ambition.

Fun fact: Australia produces more billion-dollar startups per VC dollar than any other country in the world. Think about Australia at the Olympics: tiny country, but wins a lot; the same goes for technology. Australia is small, but we are mighty.

Today, I'll give you a quick look at a handful of my favorite companies from the Winter 26 cohort. I'll also give you a brief look at Startmate and the broader cohort. Buckle up, legends. Let’s dive in!

Firstly, Startmate 101

Startmate, for those who don’t know, is a twice-yearly accelerator founded in 2010 by Blackbird founder Niki Scevak and a small collective of 25 successful tech founders and investors. Early investors included Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, among others.

The TVPI (total value to paid-in capital) for Startmate’s first 5 mature funds return-mogs top-quartile VCs worldwide, with a 13.68x return against the global VC benchmark of 3.80x.

Startmate is a micro-fund, which gives it a major advantage over top-tier global VCs managing billions of dollars. If you are lucky enough to be invited to invest with Startmate, chances are you’ll do great.

Alongside its much bigger sister fund, Blackbird, Startmate is a great place to invest. It’s also the fulcrum of the ANZ tech community. I invest in both funds and think I may be their #1 fan, so I'm happy to share my favorite founders from this most recent cohort.

1/ EstiMate

My favorite company of the cohort was EstiMate, founded by Ashton Dobbin and Baylin Spencer. Choosing these guys is controversial because I was a partner mentor for the team that placed second, but I flagged EstiMate during the Accelerator selection phase because I’d seen the problem firsthand.

EstiMate's entire value prop is taking the onerous task of quoting off tradespeople and putting it squarely in AI's capable hands, saving not only money but, more importantly, time. I love the problem because I worked in construction through my twenties and saw my own father spend countless hours at the dinner table after slogging it out on site for 10 hours a day.

When I saw EstiMate’s application, I gave them the highest ranking possible, a ‘Hell Yes,’ and was stoked to see them make it into the Accelerator on day one.

They take a typical 20-hour quoting session and deliver it in minutes, with early signs showing thousands of dollars in savings thanks to improved pricing accuracy. Either fact alone is life-changing for people making ends meet in construction.

And it shows. The team at EstiMate launched a month into the Accelerator and have grown to A$120k in ARR in the last eight weeks. On top of that, they are flooded with inbound demand not only from Australia but from around the globe.

EstiMate are raising A$3M right now, so any investors out there looking for new opportunities, reply to this email, and I can introduce you to the team.

2/ Hyperlocalise

My next favorite startup was the team I mentored directly: Hyperlocalise, founded by Minh Cung and Hans Bui (with third co-founder Michael Levot joining this week). Hyperlocalise is the AI-native infrastructure for multilingual content operations. If that sounds like a mouthful, put simply, they have created a tool that helps companies launch globally in days, not weeks.

For those like me who have no clue how big the localization market is, here is a quick example. Let’s say you’re Uber: you’re in 72 countries and 15,000 cities, and you need to communicate a new product launch globally. You may have 25-odd assets (app strings, help docs, emails, store listings, ads) that need translating. That’s 1,750 pieces of content for one feature. Every time. And Uber ships features weekly.

Hyperlocalise addresses this with a multilingual content studio, automation workflows, guidelines management, and more. Gone are the days of a massive localization team cranking away on assets. Now you just ask Hyperlocalise in Slack, Teams, or GitHub (wherever your team already hangs out), and its agents localize the lot in minutes.

Like the boys at EstiMate, Minh and Hans launched in week four. As of today, they’re at US$71k in contracted ARR. Hyperlocalise is currently raising a US$2M pre-seed, so if you’d like an introduction, reply to this email, and I’ll connect you.

3/ BrandViz

The next company is one I’ve also grown particularly fond of over the cohort. BrandViz, founded by ex-Google engineers Rushana Maksudova and David Andersen, helps companies win the AI search battle. Per their website, “When buyers ask ChatGPT, it recommends your bigger competitor. BrandViz is how you change AI's answer.”

I like this team for a couple of reasons. First, our SEO team at Athyna are users, and second, I've spent a good amount of time with the team. Every cohort at Startmate works the same way: mentors like me are aligned with one company, but as things progress, you make connections with other teams along the way.

I caught up with Rushana a handful of times to talk through growth, strategy, and all the other fun stuff an early-stage company goes through. She has a real force-of-nature feel, and I’m excited to see what she and David can do in the future.

BrandViz joined the cohort at $120k ARR and exited at $264k ARR three short months later. They are raising $2.5M to reach $5M ARR in 18 months, so again, if you’re interested, let me know, and I’ll make the connection.

4/ Orva

Founded by Akash Mokashi, Erika Orogo, and Saurabh Bachawe, our next startup, Orva, is building the agentic layer for healthcare systems, starting with dental clinics. Orva's best asset is their hustle.

At launch, cold calling got them 0% conversion, so they flew to Canada and the U.S., armed with a punnet of kiwifruit (they are from New Zealand) to do some boots-on-the-ground prospecting. Showing up in person at clinics shot conversion up to an insane 41%.

So what does it actually do? Orva is an AI gum disease diagnosis platform powered by voice and a computer-use agent. Clinicians speak into a mic while they examine a patient, and Orva's agent fills in complex teeth-and-gum charts for them.

The clever bit is that it works with whatever patient management system the clinic already runs. No APIs required. A lot of dental software is old-school kit with no way in for AI, so that's a big deal. The result: full, accurate charts done during the exam, instead of a clinician hunched over a keyboard afterward. And clinicians love it.

Orva are raising A$2M to grow their gum disease platform and start building their own gum health data models. If you’d like an introduction to the team, let me know.

And the rest of the cohort

The startups above are but a peek at the talent in the Winter 26 cohort. We also saw two rocket companies gain traction, a new way to predict data center failures before they happen (this could be the biggest winner of them all), an intelligent notebook for students, and more.

Below is the full cohort, including the four above. You can grab any team’s deck over on Startmate’s site. And for the umpteenth time, if you’d like an introduction to any of the founders (most are currently raising), just reply to this email.

Demo Day: San Francisco

If you live in San Francisco, the good news is Startmate is hosting its U.S. Demo Day this Tuesday the 27th at 6pm, so if you’d like to see these companies for yourself, request to join at the link below. Spots are extremely limited, so get in quick.

Summary

Every Demo Day, I leave the room with the same feeling: we’re punching way above our weight down here. Three months ago, half of these teams hadn’t launched. Today, they have paying customers across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., and beyond.

That’s the Startmate effect in a nutshell. Put great founders in a room, give them a hard deadline, and get out of the way. As for me, every time EstiMate signs a new customer, I’ll think about my dad at that dinner table. Some problems are worth solving because they’re huge. Others are worth solving because you’ve watched them steal someone’s evenings. The best ones are both. See you at the next Demo Day, legends.

Extra reading

• The Future Of New Media: a16z - June, 2026

• Take The Cap Off Your Salary Bands - August, 2026

• Startmate: The First Yes A Founder Hears - September, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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