What Makes a Startup Investment-Ready

What Makes a Startup Investment-Ready? | BOLD

Investment-ready isn’t a stage of revenue. It’s a combination of hyperscale ambition, a founder who pulls in talent, customers, and capital, and a real pain point in a market that’s about to break open. Four of Victoria’s most active VCs explain what they look for before the deck and the spreadsheets.

Watch Video

Key Takeaways

•Venture-backable means hyperscale potential plus founder appetite for the VC journey. Plenty of great SMEs shouldn’t raise.
•Three or more co-founders correlates with success; adventurousness and extroversion correlate positively, modesty and anxiety correlate negatively.
•Great founders are magnets — they pull in talent, customers, and capital. Whatever the personality, the magnetism is the signal.
•Pain-first markets beat top-down sizing. What’s “impossible today, inevitable tomorrow” matters more than a TAM slide.
•Early relationships start years before a formal raise. Small off-balance-sheet cheques and pilots build asymmetric conviction on both sides.

Great founders need to be a magnet. The things they need to magnetise are amazing talent, customers, and capital.

— Rachael Neumann, Founding Partner, Flying Fox Ventures

Featured Investors

Rachael Neumann – Founding Partner at Flying Fox Ventures. Flying Fox is one of Australia’s most active early-stage venture capital firms. Former Amazon executive with deep operator experience. Rachael backs founders at eye-wateringly early stages, invests off-balance sheet to build conviction, and champions Victoria’s tight-knit startup ecosystem. Portfolio includes 70+ companies.

Justine Carzino – Investment Principal at OneVentures. Justine focuses on Series A to Series B investments and helps companies build go-to-market strategies for international expansion. She brings a sharp lens on founder-investor alignment and long-term partnership over the 10-year fund lifecycle. OneVentures is one of Australia’s leading venture capital and growth equity firms.

Timothy Hui – Partner at Mandalay Venture Partners. Mandalay is a thematically focused fund investing in agri-food technology across Australia and Southeast Asia. Engineering background with a first-principles approach to startup evaluation. Timothy takes board seats selectively and brings deep commercial networks and governance expertise to early-stage portfolio companies.

Rohan Workman – Co-Founder & CEO at Skalata Ventures. Skalata invests at the pre-seed and seed stage across a portfolio of 80+ companies. Former accelerator leader with a practical, founder-first approach to early-stage support. Rohan is known for direct advice, strong co-investor relationships, and building the infrastructure that helps founders move from chaos to structure.

Ready to Start Your Journey?

With LaunchVic’s support and a growing ecosystem of successful founders willing to give back, there’s never been a better time to start something here.

Discover what really drives successful founders. From the initial spark to scaling success, get the complete story.

Explore Programs for Founders