Our Chief Awesome Officer, Marian Johnson, has been invited to be a Hillfarrance Scout on behalf of MoA. This means that high growth startups coming through the MoA and Te Ōhaka pipelines could have access to highly focused small seed investments from the Hillfarrance Scout Fund.
“We are delighted to have been selected by Hillfarrance as part of their Scout programme. There are a number of talented startup founders working through our incubation programme at Te Ōhaka and having the ability to strategically fund where required will help some of these founders focus – at least for a short time – on building their ventures,” says Ms. Johnson.
While scout programmes are common in the California venture capital market, Hillfarrance’s scout programme is the first of its kind in New Zealand. Scout programmes will generally give startup ecosystem leaders an opportunity to invest in startups on behalf of the scout programme.
Rob Vickery, founder and managing partner of Hillfarrance Ventures, says, “Hillfarrance thrives on the people that we invest in and the people we partner with. Marian is one of the most driven and passionate tech ecosystem architects that I have met and I am really glad and excited that she has joined our Scout community.”
With the Hillfarrance Scout Programme, Scouts are on the lookout for a startup team or founder with an idea they deem worthy of investment. In the event of any of these investments becoming successful, any gain will be re-invested into a seed capital fund tied directly to the Te Ōhaka and Ministry of Awesome startup pipelines.
Marian notes that the Scout relationship with Hillfarrance varies slightly than with other Scouts because of our focus on startups first and MoA’s commitment to connecting talent to any investor who will offer them value and opportunity for growth. “The Scout relationship is a fantastic opportunity for our startups but does not preclude our ongoing pipeline activity to all investors,” says Ms. Johnson. “We represent the best interests of startups first and foremost and have been and will continue to be a pipeline for all investors in the startup ecosystem.”
To find out more about the fund, contact Ministry of Awesome at [email protected]