Gardiner’s of Jelix to raise a $30m seed fund

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Local VC Jelix Ventures targets $30m raise 

September 24 2018 - 3:00PM

Australians Ian and Andrea Gardiner are looking to raise a $30m seed stage Vc  fund Jelix Ventures after the seed-stage investors scored their first home run exit from the sale of StorReduce to $9 billion US company Pure Storage.

              

Having invested just $180,000 in StorReduce in 2014 when the business was still pre-revenue, Jelix investors have banked a 10-times return from the sale of the company, which de-duplicates, manages and migrates data.

For 16 years they have been running Innovation Bay and at one of the functions in May 2014 Vanessa pitched her company - StorReduce. 

Pick and choose

Jelix has provided other investors in the fund with the ability to pick and choose which companies they invest in, similar to the model of Israel's iAngels. 

With the raise of its first VC fund, for which it already has some multimillion-dollar commitments, it will also provide a "set and forget" investment option.

The Gardiner’s share some gems with Yolanda Redrup at AFR 

"We want to give investors access to this asset class in a more curated way and I'm on a personal mission to get more financial fuel into the best Australian start-ups and strengthen the ecosystem, as well as building a global investor base."

Investments

Jelix other investments include 

•  mixed reality technology company tagSpace, 
• on-demand photography start-up Snappr 
• inclusive-recruitment platform Enabled Employment.
• podcast platform Whooshkaa 
• fintech start-up Trade Ledger. 

"We hypothesised [when we started] that there was a lack of leadership and appetite to invest in these high-risk assets and there needs to be a leader for other investors to feel confident in their judgment. It was after that realisation that we started Jelix."

New focus

Mr Gardiner, who was previously the founder of streaming service Viocorp, has more recently been the head of the Australia and New Zealand start-up division at Amazon Web Services, resigned from that role last week in order to dedicate time to Jelix, as well as Innovation Bay.

Traits that the Gardiner’s look for 

"[I look for] tenacity. It's a brutal journey in the start-up kingdom. The first day you wake up and get smacked hard in the nose, you need to be able to get back up and go again," he said.

Ms Gardiner added: "I look for intellectual firepower, a voracious appetite to learn, someone without an ego that will stop them from learning 

and 

I look for someone passionate that can attract people and engage them, so they can build good teams and the relationships needed to drive growth."