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Core Team
Venture Partners
Venture Partner
Leena is the Managing Director, APAC for Winning By Design, a global B2B revenue consulting and training company that enables recurring revenue teams to architect sustainable growth. She was previously VP of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce leading APAC’s Marketing Cloud division. Lina knows the playbook of taking a startup from founder-led sales to scale and beyond. Master of methodologies, Leena can quickly diagnose go-to-market challenges and put fuel on the fire for rapid sales growth.
Venture Partners
The peoples security expert, Scott is best know for founding CyRise, The Cybersecurity accelerator in Australia. Scott is also a multi time founder and board member for Startup Victoria with an enviable network of partners to support Cybersecurity founders.
Venture Partner
Dan is currently the Managing Director, Business Development APAC for Uber – leading the team that delivers the most strategic and complex BD work across all of Uber’s Mobility and Delivery efforts for all markets in APAC. 2-time startup founder (Cleardocs, Limepay), seasoned technology executive (ex Google and current Uber), expert in all things go-to-market. Dan has led teams for Google and Uber, responsible for delivering multi-billion dollar deals.
Venture Partners
Founder of Start Growth, David Kenney, is a key figure in Australian business and is respected for impacting the nation’s most promising entrepreneurs and CEOs over the last two decades. The startup whisperer, ex Managing Partner, Hall Chadwick turned founder growth coach, David has been an investor in and mentor of some of Australia’a fastest growing startups and most prolific founders. David has mentored at Startmate, UNSW10X, Incubate, Tech Ready Women and The Founders Institute.
Elon Aizenstros
Venture Partner
Elon is the Founder and Chairman of notable data security software RecordPoint, has successfully built, operated and fully and partially exited 8 and 9 figure information management technology businesses (Consulting Services and SaaS). Multi time founder with exits in the 8 and 9 figure range, Elon has been through all stages of the founder journey. A stickler for governance, Elon knows how to get a companies hygiene in place for rapid and sustainable growth. Also an ex Economist / Games Theorist with Telstra Research Labs giving him an enviable perspective on what makes companies tick.
Dan Ross
Venture Partner
Dan is Black Nova’s growth specialist. Having expanded Optimizely across the Asia Pacific, he is able to advise the portfolio on scaling challenges in particular as it relates to growth metrics and conversion funnels, market expansion strategies and partnerships, staffing and preparing for new market entry.
Matt & Aprill Allen
Venture Partners
Matt is a self-proclaimed geek turned business guy. Reach out to him when you’re needing guidance to connect dots in your business. He is experienced and keen to support companies that allow software development teams to be as focussed as possible.
Aprill is a knowledge management specialist. She’s an experienced customer support and service management operator and a certified Knowledge Centred Service trainer. You’ll want to pull her in.
Aprill is a knowledge management specialist. She’s an experienced customer support and service management operator and a certified Knowledge Centred Service trainer. You’ll want to pull her in.
Alex Retzlaff
Venture Partner
Alex is our tech-savvy VP with over a decade of CTO experience behind him – he will be the guy you want to reach out to when you require a tech audit, or just to take a snapshot of your business as a platform play – he will guide you through the process.
Noga Edelstein
Venture Partner
Noga is your go-to for all things marketplaces. Cofounder of UrbanYou and champion for female founders, she can be called on for a broad range of issues facing early-stage startups including growth, operations and strategy particularly as they relate to building and scaling marketplace model businesses.
Bill Trestrail
Venture Partner
Bill is a senior technology executive and has veteran of the dotcom wave and beyond. Bill has unique insights on business model design, partnerships, enterprise sales, governance and business intelligence tools.
Anthony Hollis
Venture Partner
Anthony has over 40 years experience as a senior executive across a broad range of diverse roles including business strategy, managing high-performance teams, running businesses, sales, innovation, fundraising, investment and advisory services. He has held various roles as an executive, board member and advisor where he has sustainably grown business for multinationals, Australian Corporates, startups and not-for-profit organisations.
Christian Wanner
Venture Partner
Christian is an exited entrepreneur that co-founded the first pure play profitable online grocery in Europe. Christian led LeShop.ch as CEO to $300Mio in revenues with 4 logistic centers delivering nation-wide in Switzerland, including the first Drive-thru supermarkets in the country. Christian acts as a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co on e-commerce and multi-channel projects globally and is also an active venture investor in its own capacity as well as a venture partner with Blacknova and Antler.co.
He is active on a global scale helping companies succeed in their digital transformation and embrace radical change.
Nikhil Pooviah
Venture Partner
Nik is a medical doctor turned entrepreneur based in the United States. He currently works as the co-founder of digital health startup Elly (backed by Google, Snap, Bayer and Morgan Stanley). He practiced and trained as a Radiation Oncology physician in Sydney, Australia for 8 years prior to founding his first Australian startup CancerAid (backed Cedars-Sinai Health System and Techstars). Nik has experience building and operating digital health startups from Australia and scaling them into overseas markets. Having previously been successful on Shark Tank, he also excels at pitching, storytelling and refining the value proposition for startups.
Nik plans to leverage his wide US investor network (1K+) to help our portfolio companies expand into the US market and beyond.
Nik plans to leverage his wide US investor network (1K+) to help our portfolio companies expand into the US market and beyond.
Cheryl Mack
Venture Partner
Cheryl is the CEO of Aussie Angels. She’s an active angel investor with 20+ startup investments, leading an angel syndicate with over 120 investors, and co-runs 361 Angel Club with 400+ investors.