Startmate backs 17 startups for its winter intake

Startmate has revealed the 17 startups in its Winter ’26 Accelerator, unveiling the cohort after an intensive Week Zero at a remote setting on the Victorian–NSW border

Dubbed Camp Startmate, it brought the founders and Startmate team before before the latest Accelerator began. Week Zero is a longstanding Startmate tradition where founders decide where they are going and how ambitious they’re prepared to be. Normally it was a few hours daily. This year it went to the next level in a chill remote mountain setting, where all the founders lived, worked, ate and built together ahead of the 12-week accelerator program.

Special guest Dom Pym shared his lessons from building digital bank Up Bank. And recent alumni Kai Bloomfield and Cordelia King, founders of Superstat, who just closed a $3.5m round, also swung by before heading to the US to share how to make the most of the program.

Startmate CEO Phoebe Pincus said the relationships formed during Week Zero are as important as the strategy.

“Founders arrive at Startmate extraordinarily hungry. Our job is not to temper that hunger, it is to amplify it and help direct it toward the biggest version of the company they could build,” she said.

Head of Founders Emma Grife said Camp Startmate gave founders the time and space to have conversations that otherwise rarely happen.

“They leave with a clearer strategy, a more ambitious view of what is possible and a group of founders who will be beside them through everything that comes next,” she said.

Several companies in the winter cohort are building critical infrastructure for a world in which AI agents increasingly write code, operate software and make decisions inside enterprises.

Others are applying software to industries that have resisted it for decades, from construction approvals and body corporate management to dental operations, private credit and space testing.

The Accelerator culminates in Winter ’26 Demo Day, followed by a week in San Francisco to pitch to US investors.