Mike Aston, CEO, Distra
Mike is an experienced senior executive with an international career in building technology businesses. His experience also includes the development, sale and implementation of 'mission critical' applications, supplied to sophisticated government and blue chip corporate clients. During his 30 year career, Mike has operated throughout Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region, across a range of sectors including government, finance, IT&T and transport. Mike has held a number of executive and board positions with large global corporations including; General Manager Support for GEC Marconi, a UK defense company; Marketing Director for Serco Systems Ltd, a global systems engineering group for aviation, transport, communications and control; and President Asia Pacific for CAE Inc, the leading world supplier of flight simulators.
More recently Mike has been bringing his experience to a number of small start-up technology businesses including two companies supplying products to the financial sector. In a momentary departure from technology, shortly after coming to Australia with Serco, Mike led their involvement with consortiums led by Macquarie Bank in the purchase of railways and airports. As a result, Mike was for a period a director of Great Southern Railway (operator of the Indian Pacific, Ghan and Overland rail operations) and the Adelaide Airport Corporation. Currently Mike is leading Distra Pty Ltd, a developer of payments technology, in its drive to commercialise its EFT product in a highly sophisticated global market. An engineering and business graduate, Mike has been a member of the UK Institute of Directors and is a member of the Australian Institute of Directors.
www.distra.com
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Bill Bartee, Managing Partner, Southern Cross Venture Partners
Bill is a a founding partner of Southern Cross Venture Partners and two time entrepreneur. At Southern Cross he focuses on early stage software, telecommunications, and internet services companies. From 1997 to 2001, he helped build and lead the early stage investing for Macquarie Technology Ventures ("MTV"), a balanced venture fund focused on software, telecommunications, internet and life sciences. At MTV, Bill led investments in several market leaders including Altium (ASX: ALU), LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK), Seek (ASX: SEK), Telera (acquired by Alcatel), Thrombogenix, ePredix, and onebox (NASDAQ: OPWV).
Before founding Southern Cross, Bill was the CEO of Mantara, a company that makes high performance, content based message routing systems. He also was instrumental in helping start up and launch both Dilithium Networks and Sensory Networks, where he was a founding investor/Board Member of both companies.
Prior to moving to Australia, Bill had 12 years of research, operational, and entrepreneurial experience in the United States, beginning his career as a research analyst at CIGNA in one of its private equity groups. He went on to hold the operational role of National Sales Manager of several companies including Angeles Corporation and Heartland. He was the co-founder/CEO of a successful asset management company in Los Angeles.
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Doron Ben-Meir, Principal, Private Equity & Venture Capital, Jagen
Since 1991, Doron has founded and managed five technology based businesses across a variety of industry sectors including: Gaming & Wagering, Loyalty Marketing, Access Control, Specialised Off-Set Printing, Smart Card Manufacture and Payment Systems. Geographically these businesses have been active in Australia, U.K, Germany, Singapore and the U.S.
An active venture capital manager since 1999, Doron has led a number of early/expansion stage investments and provided investment management services for many more.
In partnership with Jagen Pty Ltd (a substantial Melbourne based private equity investor) Doron is currently an investment principal (head of Jagen’s venture capital practice) with Board level responsibility for 6 Jagen portfolio companies as well as being a member of Jagen’s Management Committee which determines investment recommendations for the group.
Portfolio companies for which Doron is currently responsible encompass the following industry sectors:-
Security/Surveillance, Broadcast Technology, Electrical Services and Home/Office Automation, Alternative Energy & Clean Technology, Concrete Pole/Pile Manufacture, Marine Drive and Control Technology, Internet Security and Edible Oils & Margarine Manufacture.
Doron holds a Science Degree in Physics & Mathematics and a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical & Computer Systems Engineering, from Monash University. He is a graduate of the 28th Annual Venture Capital Institute (sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association in the US) and is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).
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John Grimes, Managing Director & Founder, Perpetual Water
John has extensive business and media experience. His talents lie in project and resource management and ensuring product development is in line with strict guidelines.
Prior to pursuing his commercial interests, John served in the Royal Australian Air Force and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for ten years .
John is a graduate of Flinders University (BA, Asian Studies) and the Australian National University (MA, Strategic Studies)
Perpetual Water was established in 2003 in order to find safe and effective solutions to reusing grey water.
The brainchild of a Canberra company, Perpetual Water was developed with the support of the ACT Government, Business ACT, the Australian Government's AusIndustry, a chief scientist, chief engineer, and other experts.
www.perpetualwater.com.au
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Dax Kukulj, COO, RPO
Dax has over 10 years experience in product development and technology management in consumer and high-tech markets. He joined RPO as a founding member and developed the company’s core polymer technology, which is being applied in waveguides for a revolutionary touch-screen product.
Dax played a critical role in the company’s corporate restructure to establish a US parent entity and execution of a US$9.5M Series B investment transaction involving a range of international investors. He managed the due diligence process for the company’s Series A and B rounds. Dax has also secured numerous grants from the Federal and ACT governments for both RPO and other start-ups.
Prior to joining RPO, Dax was a program leader at Unilever Research in the UK. He has a PhD in Polymer Chemistry from the University of New South Wales and an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management.
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David Landers, CEO, Allen & Buckeridge Emerging Technologies Fund
David is responsible for A&B's pre-seed and seed stage investments into discriminated intellectual property arising from R&D efforts within major research universities, government research organisations and corporate research labs in Australia.
His background comprises a blend of senior entrepreneurial, operating, corporate finance and strategic roles across Asia. A proven entrepreneur, he was Executive Vice President of Sales and Chief Financial Officer of AFL Ltd, a manufacturing business he co-created in Shanghai and Beijing from 1995 to 1998. David was the driving force behind the company's successful fund-raising efforts and eventual trade sale to a major UK based multinational.
Prior to that he was the Asia regional head of M&A for Pepsi Cola International; where he completed close to $1 billion in acquisition and joint venture transactions. David began his career with leading global management and technology consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton, where he gained over five years experience in technology driven strategy development and implementation for clients throughout Asia.
David has an MBA in International Business from the New York University Stern School of Management and is an honours graduate of the prestigious International Management Program at the Stockholm School of Economics. He received his undergraduate degree with distinction from America's top ranked school of entrepreneurial management, Babson College, in Boston.
www.a-b.com.au
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Steve Lane, Partner, CM Capital
Steve is a Senior Partner with CM Capital Investments Pty Ltd, one of Australia’s largest early stage technology VC Managers. He has worked in the VC industry for 7 years and prior to that was an entrepreneur and senior executive in the Telecommunications and IT industry.
Steve focuses on telecommunications, and information technology investment opportunities. He is actively involved in CM Capital's portfolio companies, serving as Chairman of uiActive and Director of numerous others.
Steve began his career as an engineer with Telecom Australia. In 1981 he founded and was Managing Director of Lane Telecommunications P/L, one of Asia Pacific's leading telecommunications consulting practices. In 1996 he successfully managed its sale to the Bell Atlantic/ Telecom NZ joint venture, Pacific Star. In 1996 he joined the Asia Pacific executive team of DMR Consulting, a global IT consulting firm, where he successfully undertook a major turnaround project.
www.cmcapital.com
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Dr Paul MacLeman, CEO, Hatchtech
Paul's previous roles have included Chief Operating Officer for Imugene Ltd where he was involved in re-focusing the company's commercial strategy and systems to deliver products and identify areas of unmet need for the business. Prior to this Paul was Vice President of Agenix Ltd, heading their global veterinary immunodiagnostics business and was on the senior leadership team. Here he gained additional experience in managing global business units and on-market product portfolios. Paul also has experience in founding veterinary pharmaceuticals, has founded life sciences start-ups and has worked in Investment Banking focusing on the analysis and financing of life science companies.
Paul is currently CEO of Hatchtech, a company commercialising novel pest control technologies and Cryptopharma, a developer of novel anti-inflammatory drugs.
www.hatchtech.com.au
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Nick McNaughton, CEO, Blue Cove Ventures
Nick established Blue Cove ventures in 2007. Nick has a strong heritage in IT Investments and has a long track record of helping to build and grow software and web companies. Prior to founding Blue Cove Ventures he was co-founder of Quivalent Pty Ltd an email and blog marketing company behind www.zookoda.com and www.quivamail.com. In March 2007 Zookoda was sold to www.payperpost the leading marketplace for Consumer Generated Advertising based in Florida, USA.
From 2002-2004 he was Director - Asia/ Pacific for Wily Technology www.wilytech.com - Wily Technology provided performance monitoring and management solutions for enterprise java applications. Nick established their presence in the Pacific and helped them to identify, evaluate, mentor and manage their partners in Japan, Korea and Australia. Wily Technology was sold to CA (NYSE: CA) for US$375M in Jan 2006.
In 2001-2002 he was VP Strategy for Soulmates Technology. This company provided multi-lingual, multi-currency private-label ASP dating solution for MSN. Nick was instrumental in engineering a trade sale for Soulmates to Interactive Corporation (NASDAQ: IACI) the owner of Match.com for US$24M in April 2002.
From 1997-2001 he was Director - Asia / Pacific for Allaire (now owned by ADBE - NASDAQ: ADBE). He was responsible for establishing distribution for Allaire throughout the Pacific. During his tenure Allaire grew globally from US$9M in Revenue (1997) to over US$100M in 2001. In 1998 he participated in Allaire's successful IPO on NASDAQ.
From 1993-1996 he was based in Hong Kong as Director - Asia for Claris Corporation (owned by Apple Computer and now called FileMaker, Inc.). Once again he was responsible for the establishment of Claris' distributor and channel network in the region. Nick is also a successful angel investor and business mentor for a number of early stage ventures.
Nick has an Honours Degree in Computing in Business from The University Huddersfield in the UK.
www.bluecoveventures.net
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Matthew Michalewicz, Founder/Managing Director, SolveIT Software
Matthew Michalewicz is a Founder and Managing Director of SolveIT Software. He has more than a decade of experience in starting, running, and exiting high-growth companies.
Prior to co-founding SolveIT Software Pty Ltd, Matthew served as Chairman and CEO of a high-tech company he founded in the United States in 1999. By raising US$15 million in venture capital and completing 4 multi-million dollar acquisitions, he grew the company to more than 150 employees in 6 international offices. In 2003 he left the company and sold his ownership stake for a profit of several thousand percent.
Matthew was named to Charlotte's "40 under 40" list of accomplished business leaders by the Business Journal, "Alumnus of the Year" by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and "Entrepreneur of the Year" finalist by Ernst and Young.
Matthew currently serves on many boards and committees, including the Independent Panel of Experts for the Intelligent Island Project, the Board of Directors of the Australian Dance Theatre, and the Business Development Board of the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology. He is also a Business Ambassador for the state of South Australia, a national judge for the Secrets of Australian IT Innovation contest, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Adelaide.
He is the co-author of several books and publications, including Winning Credibility: A guide for building a business from rags to riches and Adaptive Business Intelligence.
Matthew holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration and Corporate Finance from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and a Company Directors Course Diploma from the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).
SolveIT Software is a premier provider of Profit Optimisation solutions for Global 1000 companies and government organisations. The company was founded on cutting edge research of several world renowned computer scientists, and offers comprehensive solutions for logistics, marketing and other areas.
www.solveitsoftware.com
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Fiona Pak-Poy, General Partner, Innovation Capital
Fiona Joined Innovation Capital in early 2002. She has experience in engineering, technology and retail sectors.
Prior to joining Innovation Capital, she co-founded a catalogue and e-commerce retail business. Before this Fiona worked with The Boston Consulting Group in the US and Australia. As a member of the High Technology practice group she worked in the areas of strategy definition, business planning, marketing, operations, quality improvement and cost reduction initiatives for a variety of companies in sectors including telecom, manufacturing and retail. Earlier in her career she practised as a consulting and R&D engineer.
Fiona was twice the recipient of the South Australian Women’s Scholar Award, has represented Australia in field hockey, and is on the board of a not-for-profit international aid development agency, Mercy Works incorporated.
www.innovationcapital.net
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Graeme Port, Vice President of Engineering, Managesoft
A founder of ManageSoft in 1990, Graeme has 20 years experience in software products, programming tools and high level programming systems. He has made major contributions to the conceptualisation, development, and engineering management of the suite of ManageSoft products. For the past 10 years he has been responsible for managing the company's product development efforts; overseeing the steady growth of the ManageSoft R&D lab from eight to 30 professionals.
Graeme has strong relationships with the software engineering departments at local universities and has played an important role in the highly successful graduate recruitment program that ManageSoft runs.
Graeme earned his Ph.D. in logic programming from the University of Melbourne and has worked at the prestigious IBM Thomas J Watson research and development laboratory in New York.
Founded in 1990, ManageSoft is headquartered in Boston with sales offices in the U.S, Europe and Asia Pacific. ManageSoft is a provider of software management & compliance solutions that help enterprises gain control, ensure compliance and optimize the deployment of business-critical IT and software assets.
www.managesoft.com
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Roger Price, Investment Manager, Innovation Capital
Roger joined Innovation Capital in 2006. He brings a depth of operational experience including senior engineering, manufacturing, IT services and international business development roles for a number of technology based companies across a range of industries.
Prior to joining Innovation Capital Roger was the Chief Executive Officer of Reino International, an Australian venture backed start up providing innovative and technically advanced parking solutions to the global market. Whilst at Reino he oversaw the growth of the business from 30 to 300 people, relocated the headquarters to the US and led an aggressive M&A program which resulted in the acquisition and integration of 4 companies in 2 years
Roger has worked for both multinationals and start-up organisations. He commenced his career at Alcatel, has held senior positions with a number of Australian owned technology businesses and run the Aust/NZ businesses of NASDAQ listed software companies. He has held board positions for a number of these and other technology companies.
He has a broad interest in Australian based technology, with direct experience within the areas of IT services, software, telecommunications, mobile services and electronic device manufacturing.
www.innovationcapital.net
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Dr Deborah Rathjen, CEO and Managing Director, Bionomics
Deborah joined Bionomics in June 2000 from Peptech Limited, where she was General Manager of Business Development and Licensing. She was a co-inventor of Peptech's TNF technology and leader of the company's successful defence of its key TNF patents against a legal challenge by BASF; providing Peptech with a strong commercial basis for licensing negotiations with BASF, Centocor and other companies with anti-TNF products. Deborah has significant experience in research, business development and licensing and is an expert in the field of cell biology with specific expertise in inflammation and cancer. She is a member of the Federal Government's Australian Biotechnology Advisory Council, Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation Council and Industry Research and Development Board.
Bionomics Limited is a biotechnology company creating novel, small-molecule drugs to treat cancer and disorders of the central nervous system. Founded on a deep base of expertise in genomics, the company has grown rapidly since its founding in 1999, and is now Australia's first fully integrated drug discovery company. Bionomics has proprietary platforms in target identification, high throughput screening, medical chemistry, and preclinical development.
www.bionomics.com.au
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John Riedl, Executive Chairman, Signav
John Riedl has had a long career both in Venture Capital and in start-up and mature technology companies, mostly as CEO for the last 25 years. In the last 3 years, he has been Executive Chairman of SigNav, an executive director of Kingfoil Containers, an aluminium manufacturing company and a director of CVC, a listed Venture Capital Company. He has also been a director of investee companies on behalf of Deutsche Bank and Allen and Buckeridge. Prior to that, while living in Beijing, he helped founded PowerTong Limited, a systems integrator and start-up national Telco in China. From 1986 until 2001, John was CEO of Techniche Limited, a listed Venture Capital company operating in the telecommunications space and during the same period he was Executive Chairman of Jtec Pty Ltd, a telecommunications equipment and services company which he grew from start-up to over 300 staff. Prior to that John was a Divisional General Manager with AWA, then Australia’s largest locally owned company, and ran 11 operating businesses in IT&T with 1200 staff. From 1974 to 1977 he was responsible for process control sales and project management with Honeywell Pty Ltd and prior to that he spent 6 years with the Royal Australian Navy and 2 years with the Australian Weapons Research Establishment (now DSTO).
www.signav.com.au
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Malcolm Thornton, Investment Director, Starfish Ventures
Malcolm Thornton joined Starfish Ventures in January 2003, after returning from the USA. Malcolm started his career in venture capital in 1997, when he joined JAFCO Investment (Asia Pacific) Ltd. as an Investment Analyst. Later an Investment Manager, Malcolm reviewed over 300 investment proposals and was involved with the investment of $40 million into 13 new and follow-on investment opportunities. Malcolm was heavily involved in helping Australian portfolio companies gain access to the Japanese market and established a valuable network of business contacts in the Japanese investment and services industries.
In September 2000, Malcolm was appointed as Business Development officer with Platypus Technology Inc in the USA. Malcolm was responsible for a wide range of business development activities during Platypus Technology's start-up phase of the US. Malcolm brings to Starfish Ventures first hand experience in the challenges that an Australian technology company faces in establishing a market presence in the USA. This experience will prove to be vital to future Starfish Ventures investee companies.
Malcolm holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and a Master of Applied Science (Medical Physics) from Queensland University of Technology and a MBA from Melbourne Business School. Malcolm also completed a Monbusho Research Scholarship at the University of Okayama and University of Tokushima, in Japan. Malcolm is a fluent Japanese speaker having lived and worked in Japan for over four years.
www.starfishventures.com.au
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Mike Zimmerman, Principal, Technology Venture Partners
Mike joined the TVP management team in March 2002 from the US and is responsible for TVP's investments in Eurekster, Threatmetrix, Optium, Project Goth/ MIG33 and Xelor Software. Prior to joining TVP, Mike was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Altos Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Before this, Mike ran business and corporate development at iOwn , a venture-backed technology company which he helped to grow from 9 to 320 people, raise US$100m, file for an IPO and sell to Citibank. Mike has additional work experience in strategy consulting and investment banking with Bain & Co. and Goldman Sachs and holds an Honours degree from Amherst College and an MBA from Stanford University.
www.tvp.com.au
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