Fund Operations Associate

Startmate is the epicentre of startup ambition in Australia and New Zealand and exists to make ANZ the best place in the world to build a startup. We see over 2,000 startups every year and are the most active early-stage investor in ANZ.

We are looking for someone to play a fundamental role in this journey, helping us raise funds, communicate with our LPs, execute on investments, and productise our internal processes.

This role will give you the opportunity to:

• 🧠 Rapidly build your investment diligence knowledge and execute on deals
• 🌏 Be involved in the end-to-end process of raising and deploying investment funds
• 🚀 Help us invest in the next generational startup
• ⚙️ Productise and improve the fund operations processes that sit behind our work
• 🧑‍🚀 Work at the centre of the startup ecosystem

This role doesn't require a track record. It's designed for someone hungry, not proven, and excited for the chance to apply their curiosity, analytical instincts, and problem-solving ability to real investment operations.

We don't need you to have worked in a similar role before, but it'd be great if you had some sort of funds, finance, investing, operations or legal experience.

Key info

• Applications close: June 21
• Location: Sydney or Melbourne
• Salary: $80k + super + equity + carry in the funds
• Reporting to: Jason Fang, Head of Finance & Fund Operations

Role scope: your responsibilities

N.B. you will receive training and support in the following areas.

1. Investment diligence

As deals materialise in the pipeline, you will prepare an internal investment checklist, seek approval from our Investment Committee (IC) on the deal and assist Startmate's external lawyers to get the deal closed.

Please note, you aren't expected to have a legal background as our external lawyers will be running the legal process end-to-end on complex deals, but an understanding of or interest in venture capital investing does help.

Examples:

• Collate documentation (e.g. Shareholders Agreements, Subscription docs, capitalisation tables etc.) from the investee company
• Draft investment instruments (e.g. SAFEs, Side Letters) from standard templates, ensuring accurate population of deal terms and company details
• Follow a Process.St checklist to execute on investments to a high standard
• Coordinate execution of investment documents with founders and lawyers
• Perform diligence on the investee company and founders (e.g. police, bankruptcy and anti-money laundering checks)

2. Fundraising execution

You will complete the investor onboarding process for the Accelerator Fund. You will be responsible for using Passthrough, Salesforce, Process.St and AirTable to ensure our records are accurate. Following up with leads in the pipeline so that they can be onboarded as investors.

Examples:

• Ensure investors meet regulatory requirements in order to invest
• Help investors set up their investor portal account
• Identify friction points in the onboarding journey and propose or implement product improvements

3. Investor reporting

You will help deliver investor reporting to Startmate's underlying investors. You will help our team collate portfolio data so that our Finance Team can accurately value the portfolio companies in our Funds.

Examples:

• Assist with collating and distilling valuation data from Startmate's 200+ portfolio companies
• Draft and review investor communications to our 500+ investors
• Produce a light touch annual investor update for each of Startmate's 26 Funds

4. Fund product owner: process improvement & fund systems

You will identify manual or repetitive workflows across fund operations and work with the team to systematise, automate, or streamline them, using tools we already have (Claude, Airtable, Salesforce, Passthrough, etc) or lightweight new ones where appropriate.

Examples:

• Map existing investor onboarding workflows and identify steps that can be templated or automated
• Build or improve internal checklists, trackers, and dashboards that the team relies on
• Document operational processes so they're reproducible and don't live only in people's heads
• Work with the team to reduce manual data entry through smarter use of existing tools
• Spot patterns across fund operations tasks and propose process improvements with a clear rationale

Position requirements

• Get shit done: you're an execution machine and love tearing through a to-do list. You can juggle many different tasks at once without getting overwhelmed.
• Attention to detail: you're detail oriented, can stick to a process, and consistently push to produce high quality work.
• Collaboration and teamwork: you thrive working in a highly collaborative environment with shared goals and plenty of feedback. You're a great communicator and want to grow your stakeholder management skills.
• Product mindset: when you encounter a manual, repetitive, or broken workflow, your instinct is to fix it. You don't need to be a developer, but you love tinkering and building with Codex/Claude or similar and figuring out how two tools should talk to each other.

Working at Startmate

We believe that building a diverse and inclusive team is critical to Startmate's success. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, or disability status.

We offer:

• Community: The Startmate community is a unique mix of founders, operators and investors; the one thing everyone has in common is ambition. Startmate is much more than just our team, it's a community built on paying it forward.
• Autonomy: You will have very high autonomy to realise your dreams within your area.
• Access: You get to work with every well-known and less well-known Australian and Kiwi startup, VC and angel.
• Great vibes: Being able to bring your best self to work is really important to us. We index heavily on well-being and engagement to make sure that you're able to turn up with energy and resilience each day. We all travel often to spend time together as a team/time with founders.

About Startmate

We're making Australia and New Zealand the best place in the world to build a startup. We're achieving that through building a platform that unleashes startup ambition and accelerates exceptional companies.

At our core, we're a community of the most ambitious founders, operators and investors propelled by a highly trusted mentor-driven community, and backed by the best angels, venture funds and tech startups in the region.

Over the past decade, we have invested in 300+ startups, with a combined value of $4.5 billion.