eChai in

Melbourne

Melbourne is Australia's biomedical capital and one of its two great startup cities. The Parkville precinct, a short walk from the CBD, packs CSL's global headquarters, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, the Doherty Institute and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre into one of the densest life-science clusters in the world, and it has seeded a run of listed and venture-backed names: Telix Pharmaceuticals, Mesoblast (the first FDA-approved MSC cell therapy), Neuren and the fast-growing Heidi Health.

Alongside biotech runs a deep fintech and marketplace lineage. Both Afterpay (which became part of Block) and Airwallex, Australia's most valuable fintech, were founded in Melbourne, sitting atop a real crypto cluster (CoinJar, CoinSpot, Zerocap, Banxa) and payments names like Zeller and Judo. The city's marketplace-and-SaaS heritage is the 'Silicon Yarra' trio, SEEK, REA Group and CAR Group, plus Culture Amp, MYOB and Envato, and gaming is a genuine local strength led by PlaySide and Crossy Road maker Hipster Whale.

For eChai, Melbourne matters as part of the India to Australia bridge. Indian-founded companies build here (Everlab, Akula Tech, Zetaris, Caleb and Brown), and India-linked bodies like TiE Melbourne, the AIBC Victoria chapter, IABCA and the IIT alumni network are woven through the ecosystem. eChai ran founder meetups in Fitzroy through 2022 and 2023 and the chapter is dormant now, so this page maps the ecosystem and invites founders to help re-activate it.

Join eChai What is on

What is on in Melbourne.

Thu 15 Oct 6 pm eChai Melbourne Startup Mixer

Every gathering in Melbourne

Where founders in Melbourne build.

275 of Melbourne's startups, on one map where they work.

The Startup Grid puts them with the city's investors, incubators and coworking spaces, and walks you round them part of town by part of town.

Open the map of Melbourne

The Startup Grid

Founders here come to know a few brands well.

Those are eChai’s partner brands. Over a year, founders across the network learn their names and their work, and when somebody asks around for what they do, theirs is the name that comes up.

Partner brand founders together at Zestard HQ, Ahmedabad

What a year inside eChai does for your brand.

Each partnership comes with presence across eChai, introductions to the right founders, and a team that stays involved through the year. And each one is shaped around what the brand wants out of it.

Who you meet

Founders learn your name, then your work.

Over the year they keep running into you: at the gatherings, in the series, on the pages they read through the week. So when one of them needs what you do, they come straight to you.
We introduce you to the people you want to reach.

After seventeen years of gatherings we know who has built what, and who works with whom. Tell us who you are after, or we come to you when the right person shows up, with your story and why you two should talk.
You are invited to the gatherings that fit.

Open houses, Demo Days, the AI sessions, FailCode, the curated socials and the smaller dinners, some of them by invitation. When one fits what you do and who you want to meet, you are on the list.

What we do with you

We sit down with you on your story, your brand and your business.

One to one, more than once in the year. We have heard a few thousand founders, so you hear fairly quickly what is working, what is not, and what we would change first.
We take your team through what AI changed for us.

Almost everything eChai builds now has AI in the workflow. We go through what we tried, what worked and what wasted our time, and then connect you to founders further along than us.
You can ask us anything, whenever it comes up.

Every week we hear what founders are building, what they recommend to each other and what they have moved on from. Twice a year we go through what it means for your category. In between we answer, or find a founder who can.

Where your name runs

Your mark comes round under every page on eChai.

The wall of partner brands under the site's pages draws a different ten each time, so yours comes round on the city pages, the event pages and the notes founders read, all year. Your page on echai.ventures stays up after it, and your name runs through our LinkedIn, Instagram and X.
The blue tick puts you first wherever founders are listed.

The tick and your company's mark sit beside your name across eChai, and lists of founders put the blue ticks first: your city's people, the directory, and the roster of every gathering you go to, after its hosts and speakers. Every blue-tick founder with a photograph is on the wall of founders a member sees on signing in.
Your company carries its mark on the Startup Grid.

Where your company is on a city's map of its startups, it is drawn by your mark rather than a dot, opens on your own words and pictures, and is a stop on the tour the map offers of its partner brands.
You write and speak here under your own name.

You come into the series we run online (How Founders Use AI, the founder conversations, the long reads) where you have something real to say, and you write in Founder Notes, where founders across our cities write about what they are building.

The brands working with us.

How it works.

A partnership is for growth stage founders who want to come in as a partner brand, and it runs one year at a time. The brand fee for the year is paid to eChai. An affiliate share runs alongside it, linked to the outcomes we drive together. Both carry GST.

Everything a partnership comes with

To come in as a partner brand, write to me at [email protected] and tell me what you want the year to do for your brand.