Innovation Bay Breakfast: Rampersand x Goterra

Kicking off our 2020 Melbourne events with the VC x Founder Breakfasts. For this event, we are handing the mic over to Paul Naphtali, partner at Rampersand who will be delving deep with one of their investments, Olympia Yarger, Founder of Goterra!

Our VC x Founder series explores the relationship between a founder and a VC, a unique and not often publicly shared story.

Founders thrive when they get more than just money from their investors, this is what Paul and Rampersand offer. They back visionary Australian and New Zealand founders who are using smart tech to solve big problems.

Originally created to help find a sustainable live-stock feed, Goterra, founded in 2016 by Olympia, is now an ag-tech business solving Australia’s $20 billion food waste problem, with maggots!

Goterra builds and deploys smart city infrastructure for food waste management. Harnessing the power of maggots to process food waste. Automated capsules are installed at locations such as farms and shopping malls, with the byproduct able to be sold as feed for livestock.

Join us as Paul and Olympia share the journey of VC and Founder and explore what it's like to work with ambitious teams solving genuine problems that enhance the way we, as a society live and work.

As always we will have a Q&A with the audience to ask what’s on your minds and meet others in the IB community. We hope to see you there!

More about Paul Naphtali:
Paul is the Co-founder of Rampersand VC, an early stage Australian tech fund established in 2013. He returned to Australia after several years working with startups in Silicon Valley and the UK as a senior marketing and strategic communications exec and consultant. He has been through a number of successful exits and had a number of learning experiences.

More about Olympia Yarger:
Olympia is a farmer, innovator and leader in insect farming in Australia, and Founder and CEO of Goterra . She’s also the founding Director and Chair of the Insect Protein Association of Australia. A species of fly discovered in the Daintree rainforest in 2018 was named Hermetia Olympiae after her—something that still feels very surreal. Olympia is a Canberra native with a global vision for waste management, decentralised, with robotic insect farms.