Startup & Entrepreneurship

Havas, one of the world's largest marketing and communications groups, has launched a Corporate Venture arm in Australia, Havas Ventures.

It’s usually easier to look back after a business has failed and identify why than it is to save a business from failing in the first place. However, it begs the question of what a business owner can do if their business is struggling?

Are you about to launch a start-up? If so, what intellectual property (IP) do you have and how is it protected? Whilst this probably isn’t the most exciting topic of conversation when starting a new business venture, it's essential to consider as these will be among the first questions investors will ask of you.

A total of $220,000 was raised through angel investment in a recent round led by the Sydney Angels group, which included capital from the Sydney Angels Sidecar Fund. Further capital raised through private investors took the total amount raised to $1.5 million.

SproutX, a joint initiative between Findex and the National Farmers’ Federation, has announced a number of programs designed to boost Australia’s $60 billion agriculture industry and herald the country’s next innovation boom through agtech.

It was on one of these trips that I really fell in love with not only the sharing economy itself, but also the seismic shift in consumer behaviour that was emerging in this area globally. I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

It can be daunting when you’re competing against much larger international businesses that seem to have endless resources, a team the size of a small country and enough marketing dollars to dazzle your customers.

Echofied empowers consumers and enables them to access hundreds of independent professionals across home loans, finance, real estate, superannuation, insurance, legal, accounting and business at their own convenience, no matter what the time without giving away any personal information.

LayAway Travel is the only layby travel specialist in Australia to offer hundreds of pre-packaged or design your own holidays which can be booked up to 24 months in advance, with no deposit, interest or fees.

The successful launch of unohomeloans.com.au in May this year has attracted a number of high profile investors, such as Westpac, that have discovered the service’s potential to redefine how Australians buy or refinance their home.

At age 12, most kids are playing computer games and transitioning into high school, but this wasn’t the case for Mel Myers. At the ripe age of 12, he became Australia’s youngest university student and then went on to become Director of successful Australian start-up, BoxBrownie.com.

The Startup Catalyst program has already taken two groups of 20 youths to Silicon Valley in 2014 and 2015, and recently conducted a mission to London and Berlin in June 2016.

RiverPitch ESIC will be held on 12 October, 2016 and has been specifically designed for early stage investors and start-ups looking to benefit from the government’s 20 per cent tax offset for investing in innovative companies. This measure came into effect on 1 July, 2016.

But as a professional CFO who has worked on both sides of the fence with Start-ups and Venture Capitalists, I can assure you that having a good CFO on board from an early stage, can make a huge difference in your company’s ability to cut through and succeed.

More than half of Australia’s small and medium businesses (54%) are using e-commerce, with 95% making most of their online sales to customers in Australia, according to the 2016 Sensis eBusiness Report.

Fingerprint for Success uses evidence-based analysis from 15-years of research benchmarking the attitudes and motivations that correlate with venture success, providing invaluable insight for aspiring entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs building their business, co-founders and angel investors, VCs, accelerators and incubators.

Mentorloop is a cloud based platform designed to make mentoring relationships easier to start, run and participate in for corporates, NFPs, government, universities and individuals themselves.

Car sales people are consistently ranked lowest on the list of trusted professions and Paul and Michael knew they could make a positive change in the industry.

In the last year alone we’ve seen a string of technology-related customer service mishaps. Telstra’s five-time outage infuriated millions of Australian customers, leaving business-owners, students and families without internet access.

“From my experience, tech start-ups tend to forget about the importance of selling and marketing and focus too much on the product. It is vital to have key members of your team who are tech-savvy people but without team members who understand sales and marketing, traction and business success may become difficult to achieve," explains Steve.