James Synge

Partner at Carthona Capital

📍 Greater Sydney Area, Australia🔄 Updated September 2026💼 44 investments📅 19 years investing🗓 Last invested Apr 2022
VC🌍 Australia20+ investments
44
Total investments
31
Early stage
4
Mid stage
4
Late stage
19y
Years active

Portfolio

42 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
Apr 2022
Hubble Network just became the first company in history to connect a Bluetooth chip to a satellite… Founded by a team of experts in wireless communications, space, and industrial IoT applications, Hubble Network is creating a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, regardless of cellular reception. Through this unbelievable technology, Hubble Network is primed to shake up entire industries by finally delivering a global network and platform for actionable real-world data acquisition. The applications of this technology are far-reaching: container & pallet tracking, wildfire detection, energy grid monitoring, heavy equipment, tool tracking, fleet management, logistics, predictive maintenance, safety for children, fall detection for the elderly, agricultural technology, & environmental monitoring to name a few. ------------------------ We have confirmed communication, validating our unbelievable technology and successfully kicking off their global satellite network, after launching satellites on SpaceX T-10 in Q1 2024. Moving forward, any device with a Bluetooth chip can have the ability to connect to our global satellite network. We aim to connect a billion devices, establishing the world’s first global, cost-efficient, and low-power network.
Investor
Apr 2022
Reach Alts provides Australian sophisticated investors and their advisers streamlined access to the world’s leading private market opportunities. We are democratising access to institutional-grade private market opportunities, allowing a wider audience of investors to build better investment portfolios.
Investor
Dec 2021
NayaOne is the Vendor Delivery Infrastructure for financial institutions. We help teams make faster, safer technology decisions and turn external innovation into delivered capability. Banks and insurers face constant pressure to adopt new vendors, AI tools, and payment technologies. Decision bottlenecks, fragmented validation, and slow proof cycles often prevent these initiatives from moving into production. NayaOne provides a repeatable operating system for vendor discovery, validation, and deployment. This allows institutions to move from experimentation to production with speed and confidence. We remove the friction that stalls innovation. Disconnected vendor evaluations, delayed proofs of concept, and misaligned stakeholders create uncertainty and slow delivery. NayaOne replaces this with shared evidence that supports clear decisions across technology, risk, and business teams. Through a curated ecosystem of enterprise ready vendors, realistic synthetic data, and isolated testing environments, teams can validate solutions safely and repeatedly before procurement or deployment begins. This enables parallel reviews, shorter decision cycles, and stronger alignment around what actually works. NayaOne helps financial institutions modernize at the pace the market demands without increasing operational risk. It is the infrastructure that turns external innovation into real outcomes.
Investor
Dec 2021
The IP Licensing marketplace built for games & the interactive entertainment industry.
early stageComputer Games
Investor
Sep 2021
Pathzero helps institutional investors manage climate-related financial risks by enabling transparent, auditable emissions disclosures from private market portfolios. Our network securely connects asset owners, fund managers, and reporting entities, facilitating accurate data sharing aligned with global standards, enhancing risk management and investment decision-making in evolving markets.
Investor
Sep 2021
SafeStack is a community-centric online training platform that takes a flexible, people-focused approach to ongoing secure development education at a time when it’s never been more needed. By teaching software development teams to weave in security from idea to maintenance, SafeStack offers a comprehensive way of protecting people, systems, and data in an ever-changing world. Through relevant, high-quality content created by industry experts and released regularly, SafeStack learners build and apply essential security skills and behaviors as they go. Plus, the platforms built-in assessments and reporting mean our customers can meet compliance requirements with ease. SafeStack creates a sustainable cyber security culture based on empowerment, not fear, helping teams build the confidence and peace of mind to innovate, grow, and go faster, safe in the knowledge theyre building security into their ways of working.
Investor
Sep 2021
If Open Banking is electricity, then Skript is the one providing the lightbulbs. Skript’s purpose is to create simple and accessible solutions that connect businesses to the world of Open Banking. Our infrastructure capabilities will go far beyond data and make it possible to deliver banking services outside of the banking environment. Our infrastructure is redefining information collection, Internet Banking and payment services. Businesses will be able to bring banking services to their customers, and not confine them to today’s closed world of banking. A new era of finance is visibly emerging. Our mission is to provide businesses with the tools and data to get them ready.
Investor
Jun 2021
Cascade is the world's #1 strategy execution platform helping thousands of organizations make their visions happen, through building their business and departmental plans, right through to tracking and execution of initiatives, team performance and more. Our customers are redefining the world as we know it - from battling the AIDS epidemic and establishing a supply chain for COVID-19 vaccines, to building the world’s fastest Formula One car. We are a team of 100+ people, building the future of strategy. We are scaling up fast and aim to have Cascade in the hands of millions of people, driving alignment and focus. We are not a good fit for companies who believe that: 1- creating a perfect plan is more important than its execution 2- your strategic plan should not be exposed to your organization 3- a presentation is a good way to communicate your strategy 4- aligning your teams to the overall strategy is just a nice-to-have 5- commitment to your plan comes naturally 6- trusting and giving authority to your people is a mistake 7- transparency is the enemy of execution 8- accountability means pointing fingers 9- measuring and reviewing performance are not habits 10- adjusting and adapting your strategy should be done once per year If you don't fall into any of these categories, book a demo with us: https://www.cascade.app/book-demo
Investor
Mar 2021
Josef is a global no-code and AI legaltech company. Our mission is to make legal services more accessible for everyone. Josef empowers legal teams and professionals with legal automation to save time, scale services and delight their clients and people. With Josef, anyone can easily create powerful legal bots. Request a demo: https://joseflegal.com/demo Email us: info@joseflegal.com Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/joseflegal
Investor
Mar 2021
Driva helps customers fight back against the car financing process - providing options and transparency to empower customer choice
Investor
Jan 2021
Paytron was founded to transform spend management, with sophisticated workflows seamlessly integrated with payments, cards and currencies. Through the use of workflows, Paytron simplifies the way accountants and businesses manage transactions like accounts payable, international transfers, and payroll. Features include automated invoice capture, batch payments, and corporate cards with built-in expense management, all through a single platform.
Investor
Dec 2020
Hi there, nice to meet you. We are Qsic. We create smart environments that respond and learn with every customer by connecting everything; innovation, ideas, people, devices and technology. We believe that we all deserve better in-store experiences. We dream of a world where services are seamless, data driven, connected and just well... magic. We do this by delivering the platform that contextually optimises and automates in-store infrastructure and audio content to create unique data driven experiences for bricks and mortar customers. We help innovators to transform quick service restaurants, petrol & convenience, retail, banking and grocery stores front of house; to provide better insights back-of-house. In doing so, we bring together a community who like us… Love physical spaces. Love data. Love experiences. Love people. Discover Qsic - what innovation has in-store. https://getqsic.com/
Investor
Oct 2020
We believe in affordable compute solutions. Salad is a comprehensive cloud infrastructure platform offering containers-as-a-service (CaaS) for virtually any use case—whether it's bootstrapping VPN services, spinning up P2P gaming ecosystems, or securely distributing batch jobs to globally geodistributed nodes. Thanks to voluntary contributions from hundreds of thousands of real-life webizens, Salad's container solutions are equally performant, GPU-enabled, and up to 10x more affordable than the leading spot instances. Our recipe? We built the web’s most trusted computesharing network on a principle of mutual exchange. The Salad desktop application securely applies latent consumer compute resources like GPU VRAM, CPU L3 cache, and bandwith to enterprise-scale container workloads, and rewards our users—the mighty Salad Chefs—with meaningful rewards, like video games, gift cards, streaming subscriptions, PayPal credits, and more epic loot. Salad Chefs redeem over 3,000,000 digital and real-world items from the Salad Storefront every year! Learn more about the Salad Container Engine (SCE) at https://salad.com.
Investor
Sep 2020
Deduce uses a vast identity network to fight back against account takeover and new registration fraud.
Investor
Sep 2020
CoverRight is an insurance technology (‘insurtech’) startup on a mission to make Medicare more accessible to the 60 million Medicare beneficiaries across the country. We help the 10,000 people retiring every day make one the most complex but important decisions as they age into retirement – finding the right health insurance. We're backed by leading venture capital investors including Carthona Capital, Goodwater Capital and Hustle Fund. Our vision is to become the most trusted partner in navigating the early-stages of retirement.
early stageInsurance
Show all 42 investments ↓
Experience · 46 entries
All (46)
Investments (43)
Founder (1)
2022
Investor
Apr 2022
Hubble Network just became the first company in history to connect a Bluetooth chip to a satellite… Founded by a team of experts in wireless communications, space, and industrial IoT applications, Hubble Network is creating a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, regardless of cellular reception. Through this unbelievable technology, Hubble Network is primed to shake up entire industries by finally delivering a global network and platform for actionable real-world data acquisition. The applications of this technology are far-reaching: container & pallet tracking, wildfire detection, energy grid monitoring, heavy equipment, tool tracking, fleet management, logistics, predictive maintenance, safety for children, fall detection for the elderly, agricultural technology, & environmental monitoring to name a few. ------------------------ We have confirmed communication, validating our unbelievable technology and successfully kicking off their global satellite network, after launching satellites on SpaceX T-10 in Q1 2024. Moving forward, any device with a Bluetooth chip can have the ability to connect to our global satellite network. We aim to connect a billion devices, establishing the world’s first global, cost-efficient, and low-power network.
Investor
Apr 2022
Reach Alts provides Australian sophisticated investors and their advisers streamlined access to the world’s leading private market opportunities. We are democratising access to institutional-grade private market opportunities, allowing a wider audience of investors to build better investment portfolios.
2021
Investor
Dec 2021
NayaOne is the Vendor Delivery Infrastructure for financial institutions. We help teams make faster, safer technology decisions and turn external innovation into delivered capability. Banks and insurers face constant pressure to adopt new vendors, AI tools, and payment technologies. Decision bottlenecks, fragmented validation, and slow proof cycles often prevent these initiatives from moving into production. NayaOne provides a repeatable operating system for vendor discovery, validation, and deployment. This allows institutions to move from experimentation to production with speed and confidence. We remove the friction that stalls innovation. Disconnected vendor evaluations, delayed proofs of concept, and misaligned stakeholders create uncertainty and slow delivery. NayaOne replaces this with shared evidence that supports clear decisions across technology, risk, and business teams. Through a curated ecosystem of enterprise ready vendors, realistic synthetic data, and isolated testing environments, teams can validate solutions safely and repeatedly before procurement or deployment begins. This enables parallel reviews, shorter decision cycles, and stronger alignment around what actually works. NayaOne helps financial institutions modernize at the pace the market demands without increasing operational risk. It is the infrastructure that turns external innovation into real outcomes.
Investor
Dec 2021
The IP Licensing marketplace built for games & the interactive entertainment industry.
early stageComputer Games
Investor
Sep 2021
Pathzero helps institutional investors manage climate-related financial risks by enabling transparent, auditable emissions disclosures from private market portfolios. Our network securely connects asset owners, fund managers, and reporting entities, facilitating accurate data sharing aligned with global standards, enhancing risk management and investment decision-making in evolving markets.
Show all 46 entries ↓
Investment activity
2007–2022 · 44 investments
200712009120122201442015620162201742018220197202042021920222
Recent (last 2 years)Earlier