About
TORUS
Torus is an early-stage investment firm, centered around the main team behind Cake. Led by Jason Atkins and Kane Templeton, TORUS incubates and invests in pre-seed and seed-stage startups at their inception and supports through later rounds.
Our mission is to build the world’s best early-stage community that is focused on raising capital excellence. This includes a series of funds that are growing in funds raised, an active angel syndicate, and our community offering exclusive access, coaching, content, and events.
A new chapter: introducing TORUS
We're excited to announce that Palm Beach Ventures (PBV), our first fund and venture, has evolved into TORUS, a new brand that represents our future funds, community, and vision. Empowering founders with an unfair advantage through community, education, and access.
About us
We exist to help fund more founders and bring their innovations to life, through our:
- Team and network: The core team behind Cake, a next-gen equity management software with 10,000+ customers across 15 countries. We've built a global early-stage partnership network of over 300 accelerators, incubators, VCs, legal and accounting firms, and have personally supported over 5,000 founders with their equity.
- Tools and expertise: We create and share market-leading toolkits, benchmarking guides, and thought leadership resources, recognised globally for our expertise in early-stage equity. Our team members are mentors in top accelerators like Techstars, Startmate, and Founder Institute, and host popular podcasts on the topic.
- Passion for impact and change: We've invested in over 20 startups alongside leading VCs like Blackbird, Airtree, and TEN13. We organise and sponsor events that combine fun and education, covering topics like equity, go-to-market strategies, and wellness activities like yoga, surfing, and tennis. Our community values a healthy work-life balance, empowered by nature, family, and a supportive network.
Our first fund & syndicates was a successful test
In 2020 to 2023 we build what seems to be a quality early-stage portfolio. Off the back of our passion to back founders, and noticing our exceptional network and exposure to founders, we used the Airtree Explorer Program as catalyst for our first fund. The purpose? To learn, build our network, and hopefully prove we could make some money.
- We raised $425k, and invested in 19 companies over 12 months, including Aussie Angels, Aquila Earth, EntryLevel, Hex, Cake, Deployable, GGWP, and Startmate funds.
- The return profile looks great so far, with the portfolio currently 30%+, which compares well with Startmate’s industry leading published returns.
- We were able to co-invest with leading investors (Blackbird, Airtree, TEN13, Startmate, Galileo Ventures, EnergyLab and the Alice Anderson Fund) and leveraged strategic alliances for maximum impact.
- We also ran 3 successful syndicates, raising an additional $500K alongside our original investment.
Torus Fund 2 launching July 2024
Official announcement coming soon 👀.
Join Now
To access upcoming deals, webinars and opportunities to support our growing community and portfolio companies.
Team
Community leadership the key to success
The essence of the community built by the Cake team lives on in Torus, as we expand our impact. The co-founders Jason and Kane, along with the Cake team, have created a leading global startup community that is obviously most prevalent in Australia and now the US. This community is built around having fun and living a healthy and fulfilling life first, with a passion for innovation, a drive to improve the system and educate startups on capital raising and equity.
Educational content, and tools and guides are at the core of Torus, as we work to drastically improve founders ability to better fund their ventures. We already have market-leading content and resources in this space through our Cake partnership, and will invest in our ability to keep our founders at the forefront or leading techniques and practices.
About our co-founders
Jason is Cofounder of industry leading software Cake, which has over 10,000 early stage startup customers in 15 countries, and has developed a global early-stage partnership network including over 300 accelerators, incubators, VCs, legal and accounting firms. Jason is also globally recognised speaker, mentor and podcast host on the subject of early-stage startup equity. He’s raised pre-seed and seed rounds from VCs’ and Angels like Jason Calacanis. He’s got Cake into Australia’s premier accelerator, Startmate. All from the Gold Coast. He’s made almost every mistake possible for a first time founder. But he’s made it through!
Kane Templeton (full time on TORUS): Cake's first hire & investor and startup growth gun. With a laser focus on sales and go-to-market strategies, Kane has been pivotal in closing deals with thousands of Seed and Series A+ companies as Head of Sales. He successfully helped led Cake’s zero to one sales and marketing, including kick-starting Cake’s partner community, and has worked directly with hundreds of startups to assist them with their equity.
Why we started Fund 1
PBV Fund 1 was founded by Jason Atkins and Kane Templeton, with help from Ben Howe (founder of Cohort and LuminaX) and Kim Hansen (co-founder of Cake Equity and tech wizard). The initial fund was established to create a brand new investment group that supported founders and was great to work with. The fund was designed to: Access the best deals, invest with industry leaders, provide leadership to the Gold Coast and QLD Angel communities, focus on investing in B2B SaaS and maybe some other shiny stuff like e-commerce, plant-based meat, renewables, with a closed group of trusted people whilst having fun. Our intention was to keep it small but active for Phase 1 to learn and eventually lead to a larger-scale Phase 2.