Meet the Founders

Marisa Warren and Kate Vale have had successful careers in tech as operators, advisors and investors, with a proven ability to predict market trends and discover incredible founders building unicorns at an early stage.

Kate: former Managing Director @ Google and YouTube, Australia and New Zealand, Kate grew the business from $0-$500m in 9 years. As Managing Director, Kate launched Spotify to be the #1 streaming service in the Australian and New Zealand regions.  Leading both businesses too IPO.

As an investor, Kate has invested in early stage companies with the current valuation exceeding $3.5 billion.

Marisa: spent 18 years in enterprise software sales across North America and Australia, selling direct and building channel businesses for companies including SAP, Microsoft and Workday.

In 2015 whilst living in New York, Marisa founded ELEVACAO, a global pre-accelerator empowering women tech founders to get investor-ready and funded.

Fast forward to today and ELEVACAO has had:

• 175 women through the program across the U.S and Australia;

• who have raised $120m+ in funding; and

• produced 3 successful exits

We’ve consistently seen that female founders deliver 35% higher ROI than all male-led companies, yet attract only 1.9% of venture funding in the U.S. and 0.7% in Australia, and generally encounter many challenges raising capital.

Kate and Marisa are determined to have a positive impact on the funding gap. Together they have the backgrounds, the right team and unique deal flow to source and back underfunded outperformers #FemaleTechFounders.