About Us
Emerging fund managers for emerging founders.
Galileo Ventures is a seed VC to support the next generation of entrepreneurs.
We're changing the model – more money, more support for the next generation of global founders. Bringing Series A support to Pre-seed/Seed stage companies with hands-on operational experience.
20+
Number of Galileo Ventures investments in 3 years.
80%
Percentage of our portfolio that have raised follow-on funding within 12 months of our first investment.
$40M+
Total amount Galileo portfolio companies raised.
What We Believe
A revolution in entrepreneurship is underway.
Anyone armed with a laptop, an internet connection and a great idea can build a business that reaches people around the globe – with just $5,000 or less. They don’t need any prior business education, networks, product or market knowledge.
The world's next greatest ideas are hidden in our most ambitious emerging founders.
- 40% of students are involved in or want to start their own company – but it's difficult find and receive investment in unproven teams.
- Our universities are full of emerging founders: university-affiliated programs graduate over 300 startups per year in Australia alone.
- There's a gap in support for emerging founders, who are typically too early for VC and have limited access to sophisticated angel investors.
Who is an emerging founder?
Untapped Potential
High-potential founders, young or young-at-heart, typically graduating from university to work full time on their startup.
Earned Insight
Experts in their field or special insight into an opportunity that may create an entire new product category or ideas on a growing industry trend.
Outsized Ambition
Outsized ambition to create a high growth, high impact business that will change the world.
Our values guide how we invest.
What we believe makes a great partnership in the very early days.
1
Trust in
Founder Vision
A small group of founders with a strong vision is a powerful force for change.
2
New Technology for the Greater Good
Bringing to market new technology for the ultimate benefit of humanity, not just a few.
3
Investing for the
Long Haul
It takes (a long) time to build an impactful business, we're along for the journey.
Great Teams with Sustainable Businesses
Good ideas need great teams and business models that ensure they thrive and grow.
Meet our team of founders and operators.
We're operators, experts and emerging founders ourselves. This is just some of our team that will help you to grow.
James Alexander
General Partner
James is the Co-founder of Galileo and has supported over 200 founders launch tech startups across various industries since 2012. Previously he founded INCUBATE, a leading university accelerator and worked in global software startups.
team@galileo.ventures
Hugh Stephens
General Partner
Hugh is a builder and co-founder of Galileo. Previously, he founded Sked Social, a marketing platform with over 10,000 customers globally. Hugh has consulted on go-to-market strategy across government, startups and top global brands.
team@galileo.ventures
Luddy Graham
Program Coach
Luddy brings her experience helping scale some of Australia's most pivotal startups, Shoes of Prey, Koala and recently global VC Antler, to Galileo's platform offering for founders. Ludweenah specialises in scaling early-stage operations, building high performing teams, and cultivating thriving founder communities.
team@galileo.ventures
Zac Altman
Program Coach
Zac is a multi-time founder, most recently founding LoungeBuddy, a leading travel app (recently exited to American Express). Zac brings his CTO experience to our teams, including building and leading software teams across San Francisco and Sydney.
Sam Thorogood
Program Coach
Sam is a senior engineer, having led diverse teams at Google that built products that have collectively scaled to more than 1b users. He's interested in upscaling CTOs and senior engineering leaders in early stage startups. Previously he was a venture-backed CTO at a climate-tech startup and spent his formative years as a Staff engineer at Google.
Julia Wells
Program Coach
Julia was an early employee at WhatsApp (exited to Facebook) and has worked with hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley including Dropbox and Atlassian. She is brings operational, biz dev, marketing and PR experience to our teams.
Dr Olga Oleinikova
Program Coach
Olga is CEO and founder of Persollo, a leading social ecommerce and analytics platform with customers across 16 countries. Olga brings her expertise in building effective global and remote teams, sales and marketing automation, and fundraising experience to our teams.
David Rohrsheim
Investments & Program Coach
David is part of our investments team and was previously founding Manager at Uber Australia and New Zealand (IPO NSYE) and investor at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (San Francisco) where he advised 17 startups.
Austin Nichols
Program Coach
Austin is a Site Director at Samsara, leading sales for one of the fastest growing IoT companies globally. Previously, Austin led sales at Dedrone and Meraki (exited to Cisco) for Asia Pacific where he grew the business from $3m to over $120m in 5 years. Austin brings deep enterprise sales expertise to our teams.
Luke Fay
Investments & Late-Stage Advisor
Luke is part of our investments team and helps with our companies follow-on opportunities. He has led over 400 investments, deploying over $150m in capital across APAC.
Jo Morrison
Founder Executive Coach
Jo is the leadership coach for our founders, guiding and supporting their personal success to become better management leaders within their growing teams. Previously Jo was a Director at INCUBATE, growing the team, operations and supporting the founders.
Martin Wells
Program Coach
Martin is a multi-time founder including founding Playcraft Labs (exited to MinoGames) and advising founders and CTOs. He has helped raise over $200m across Australia and the USA and assisted with 10 acquisitions, to acquirers like Facebook, Zynga and AOL.
Felicia Coco
PR Coach
Felicia is the co-founder of LaunchLink, a tech focussed PR firm based across Australia and the US. She has strong media relations in the Australian business and technology sectors and has represented some of the most innovative startups and respected technology companies including Dropbox, Eventbrite, Square, Airtasker, Invoice2go and many more.
Andrew Dent
Program Coach
Andrew is a multi-time founder, most recently co-founding Zeetings (sold to Canva) and HubSpan (sold to Liaison Technologies). He's an expert on key technology and product decisions.
Shane Verner
Program Coach
Shane has over 20 years experience in leadership and enterprise technology sales with iconic US vendors, systems integrators, scale-outs and startups (including his own!). He specialises in negotiations of large, complex software sales involving multi-funcitonal teams. He also mentors Irish tech startups launching in ANZ.
Jeremy Colless
Fund Advisor
Jeremy the Co-founder and CEO at Artesian Alternative Investments and has over 20 years capital markets experience. He advises Team Galileo on our fund and continued growth in the Asia region.
We're growing!
We're always on the look out for startup coaches and future hires. Referrals are always valued but we welcome the right people to get in touch.
Get in touch
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