Incubator partnerships boost quality of Carnegie’s Den applicants

The quality of applicants involved in the first Carnegie’s Den event of the year is a significant improvement on those in the past, thanks to partnerships with startup incubators, according to event organisers.

Venture capitalist Mark Carnegie says this is because incubators in the Australian startup ecosystem are doing their job.

“This round of applications has been of high calibre,” Carnegie says.

Created by investment firm MH Carnegie & Co, Carnegie’s Den provides a platform for leading Australian entrepreneurs to gain media exposure and direct funding from prospective investors.

The finalists hoping to woo prospective investors in Carnegie’s Den this Friday at The Church in Darlinghurst include:

• Liquorun; an appropriately named crowdsourced liquor delivery service.
• CricHQ; a cloud-based cricket administration program.
• APE mobile; a construction and engineering site information management system.
• TokenOne; a unique two-factor authentication platform that enables users to securely login to third party systems using a patent protected method.
• Digivizer; a service which searches, analyses, connects and maps the social web and the comments made on it in order to keep clients informed.
• Switch Automation; a cloud-based energy management and environmental monitoring system that gives users the ability to manage building energy usage online.
• Selera Labs; a software developer which has developed data analytics that improve financial governance, ensure transactional compliance and automates internal auditing processes.
• Qwilr; a web-based productivity tool that allows sales teams to create and send the best quotes and pitches to clients.

Carnegie said he had noticed pitches geared toward software-as-a-service, which can be attributed to a number of other startups who had been successful in this area in recent years.

One such success story is Xero, the cloud accounting software startup that raised $US150 million ($A162m) in capital from a range of investors last October.

“They see the low cost to establish and the big prize at the end of the rainbow,’’ he says.

For these startups the path to the pot at the end of the rainbow leads through Carnegie’s Den.

“We shortlisted 35 startups and met with every one of them,’’ Carnegie and Co investment consultant Zachary Midalia says.

“And I made the point of saying to them, we’re not here to humiliate you, we’re not here to create drama, we’re purely here to help an innovative segment of the community.’’