Founders reflect on The Investible Games Sydney

The Investible Games returned to Sydney in October, kicking off a three-week series of Investible Games events across Asia-Pacific.

It was a massive event from the start, with our investment team putting in countless hours to screen and select 10 innovative businesses.

‍Here’s a quick rundown of this event’s participants:

‍Advice Revolution - Advice Revolution seeks to make providing financial advice enjoyable again by digitising client engagement process to drive efficiency and improve compliance outcomes.

‍Cheq - Cheq aims to disrupt the payday lending industry by giving people access to their earned wages the same day they work.

‍Collabosaurus - Collabosaurus connects complementary businesses for powerful cross promotions and collaborations in events, social media & product partnerships.

‍CYNCH – CYNCH is the only cyber fitness platform built for small business owners.

‍EduGuide – EduGuide help international students create a better life abroad.

‍OIS – OIS is a physical verification & auditing platform purpose built for the Australian out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry.

‍QuickySafety - Quick Safety provides solutions for every electrical job to eliminate risk by validation and transparency of compliance.

‍RentalHeroes – RentalHeroes helps Property and Facility Managers automate and reduce the manual interactions when coordinating tenant maintenance requests and common questions.

‍Superdraft - Superdraft is a scalable home design platform that solves the major problems for both Consumers and Suppliers in the home design & build market.

‍uPaged - uPaged is a mobile first, workforce marketplace connecting on-demand nurses to hospitals, and hospitals to on-demand nurses, cutting out the traditional agency middleman.

Due to the large number of quality applications, we also invited one additional founder team as an Observing Startup Team, for the first time:

‍Visuo – Visuo is making professional-quality video creation quicker, easier, and more affordable than ever before, offering intelligent video creation for business in under three minutes.

There were 10 unique challenges ready and waiting for our founder teams, each testing different areas of their business – from the compatibility of the founder teams, to the durability and scalability of their business models, and the founders’ ability to think big, crunch the numbers and wow the investor judges.

It was a tough two days, but the founders said the intense format enabled them to focus on results.

“Usually in a five or 10 minute pitch, you have the opportunity to explain the business on a broad level. But with the Investible Games programme, you are placed in a pressure cooker environment and forced to pitch all areas of the business to judges and that pressure exposes your weak points and sharpens your ability to communicate your investment proposition more concisely," said Jake Robinson, co-founder of Superdraft.

The Games also gave the founders a much-needed opportunity to work ‘on’ their business – instead of just ‘in’ it.

"As a founder, you tend to get stuck in a bit of a silo and for us, it was great to understand how investors are engaging with similar companies and how we can use that insight to get ahead."

"It’s helped us focus in and identify the most important factors that will help us secure investment and provided that pathway to make it happen,” said Adrian Patty, co-founder, Advice Revolution.

More than 20 investors participated in the Investible Games Sydney, serving as challenge judges and taking the time to sit down with the founders 1:1 to learn more about their businesses.

‍“We’ve had questions over the last two days that we’ve never been asked previously, even after speaking to mentors and investors for months. Those questions have been really valuable for me and it demonstrates Investible’s ability to bring together a high-quality and diverse group of people,” said Susie Jones, co-founder, CYNCH.

“It really helped us to hone in on the next steps for our business and sparked ideas on how we can overcome certain challenges.”

Zara Lord, founder of uPaged said:

“This has been an incredible opportunity. I loved the energy that Investible and all of the participants brought to the event. The networks that we’ve created, I can already see value in those connections.”

While it was an impressive showing by all of the event’s participants, the judges selected Quick Safety as the event winner, followed by Collabosaurus.

“We’ve been through two really incredible accelerator programs and (the Investible Games) provided a completely different perspective. The material Investible has put together and the structure of the event was really valuable for us and it’s something we can continue to revisit and revise as we progress. We’re fortunate to have been a part of the event!” said Kurt Alexander, Founder, QuickSafety.

The Investible Games is coming soon to a city near you, so stay tuned for even more Investible Games updates.