Cogent Ventures

INVESTMENT + PARTNERSHIP

We invest in and work side by side with values aligned founders.

How we’re different

Creating a business is a long journey and you’ll need friends who will be committed through both the good times and the tough times. Getting through the good times is easy, but the tough times are trickier. Before we invest, we like to work with you for a while so we can both decide if our values are aligned enough to get us through the tough times.

We add value through what we’re good at. At its core, this is delivering great software with user experiences built to last. That might sound easy, but there are thousands of startup shipwrecks out there that prove it isn’t. If we build products for you, they’ll work. Period.

Additionally, we can bring to the table experience with product management, fundraising, pitch decks, sales, pricing, modelling, marketing and growth strategies. These aren’t expertise we’ve learned in books, they’ve come from decades of doing – and sometimes failing.

Your success is our success, so we always encourage investee business to fly the nest as soon as the moment is right. We’ll help your find your first tech hire and get to the point where you can stand on your own two feet.

Our focus

We invest in businesses creating positive impact in 2 key areas:

1. People – through positive socioeconomic impact
2. Planet – through positive environmental impact

We generally invest $75k-$200k per investment through services and as you grow we seek to follow-on through the same mechanism.

What we look for

Values aligned founders

Transparent, open, honest, inquisitive, willing to try, fail and learn.

Traction

Revenue, customers, contracts, product-market fit.

Domain expertise

Deep, long term mastery of your market. You know it back to front.

Commitment

A drive to solve problems. Resilient and able to bounce back from setbacks.

Useful

You’re solving a problem worth solving and creating something genuinely useful.

Our portfolio

Chargefox

Petrol is so 2016. The future is electric. Chargefox makes private, public and fleet charging and management ultra simple.

Six Park

Investing in shares used to be an expensive and risky game. Now there’s a better way. Six Park makes it easy to invest like an expert and create a globally diversified, professionally managed portfolio of investments to suit your risk profile.

Oculo

Connected eye care means better patient care. Oculo gives 800 optometrists and 480 ophthalmologists within Australia an innovative way to share clinical information securely.

Fresho

Automating the food ordering process and improving efficiency in the multi-billion dollar wholesale fresh food marketplace.

Who we are

INVESTMENT DIRECTOR

MARK WELLS

CEO, Cogent

Mark is an angel investor and the CEO of Cogent. Having held a range of CEO, CCO, CTO and Non-Executive Director roles, Mark’s a sought after advisor on topics spanning from fundraising to strategic planning and market entry. An active investor in numerous early stage and not so early stage startups, Mark has a passionate belief in the positive impact that renewable energy tech and transport as a service (TaaS) will make over the coming decade. He’s also an avid cyclist and rarely stops talking about bikes and his ever expanding collection (nine at last count).

Create something remarkable.

Talk to us today