About DQventures

The only startup investor that backs experienced professionals and builds alongside them.

80+business ideas pressure-tested

$3m–$85mexits our team members had

90+startups backed as angel investors

Our story

It started with a pattern.

Three moments took us from angel investors to cofounders.

James and Arjun of DQventures working together

A pattern in our own portfolio

After a decade of angel investing, we noticed most of our returns weren’t coming from the founders the startup world tells you to back. They came from people who had spent fifteen or twenty years inside an industry before they ever started a company.

Look closely and it makes sense. Experienced founders arrive with insight, seniority, the right contacts, and the humility that comes from being wrong a few times and learning from it. Younger founders rarely have all four. And yet this was exactly the group everyone ignored.

We were part of the problem

As advisors, we would regularly talk experienced professionals out of starting a company. Given their stage of life, their lack of startup experience, and an idea nobody had tested, the risk of failure looked too high to encourage.

Then it clicked

Instead of warning these people off, we could lower the risk by becoming their cofounders. Build with them, fill the gaps in their experience, and give them a genuine shot at a business they would love and an exit that could change their life.

That is DQventures.

The thesis

Why experienced professionals.

By the time you’ve got the experience to build something worth building, you usually have a salary, a mortgage and people counting on you. Failure isn’t an option you can take lightly, so most people in this position never start at all.

That’s a waste, because they’re the ones most likely to pull it off. Experienced people are significantly more likely to build a successful company than someone just out of the gate. Our whole model exists to get that group off the sidelines and take the risk out of the leap.

Founders in their 40s outperform

20s×1.0

30s×1.5

40s×2.1

50s×1.8

Odds of founding a top-growth company, relative to a founder in their 20s. Source: Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda, Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, 2018.

How we invest

We invest our team,
and it’s worth more than a cheque.

Most investors back a company by wiring money and waiting. We invest something harder to find. You get a team of exited founders working inside your business, doing the building with you: the validation, the first version, the first customers. You stay in your job while we prove there’s a business worth quitting for.

The businesses we build fund themselves from revenue, so money is rarely the missing ingredient. What experienced professionals need is a cofounding team that knows how to take a company from zero to one. That’s what we bring, and it’s the difference between an idea that fails and a business that succeeds.

Equity

Why we wait on equity.

Most investors hand you cash and disappear. Some take a slice of your company before you’ve proven a thing. We do neither.

No equity changes hands for months, only once we’ve built alongside you and you’ve landed your first paying customer. If you decide then that this is the business you want to build for the long run, we incorporate together and take our 20%. You keep 80% and the CEO seat.

Before then, the monthly fee covers the work we put in while both sides test whether this is the right partnership. You can walk away at any point and take everything with you. Once we’re partners the fee stops for good, and from there we make money only when the business does, usually when it pays dividends or sells.

You own 100% of your IP and idea until incorporation
Equity changes hands only after your first paying customer
The monthly fee stops for good once we’re partners

What we build

The businesses we build.

We partner with people to design, build, launch and scale B2B businesses that are asset-light, automatable, and have a clear path to a $10 million exit. We know how to take a company from zero to one. On your sector, you’ll almost always know more than us, and that’s exactly why the partnership works. Your edge might be a problem you’ve watched go unsolved for years, contacts nobody else can call, or a way into buyers other people can’t reach. That edge is the reason we can win.

We back businesses that fund themselves from revenue over ones that survive on outside money. Companies that turn a profit and pay dividends keep you in control of your own decisions, and they’re far easier to sell if you decide you want a life changing exit later.

Revenue-funded

Customers fund the buildProfit pays dividendsYou stay in controlFar easier to sell

Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs.

Everyone working at DQventures has been an entrepreneur themselves, with at least one successful exit under their belt. You won’t be working with regular “employees”. You’re working with founders who have been in your shoes before and made it through to the other side.

Our team

Here’s who’s on your side.

When you partner with DQ, you get three things at once.

Cofounders

Who have built, scaled and sold companies worth anywhere from $3 million to $85 million, now doing the work with you.

A network

Built over years of raising from and investing alongside some of the world's top angels and venture firms. It becomes yours.

Builders

Who stay in the business week to week, making the thing and getting it live rather than watching from a board seat.

Oliver Palmer

Built TigerSpike from a blank page into a 400-person company across Sydney, Singapore, New York and London, then sold it for $85 million.

Sam Middlehurst

Fifteen years building companies across Southeast Asia. Two exits, the most recent a sports group he ran as CEO and sold in 2024.

Leanne Beesley

Took her own startup from an idea to a multi seven-figure exit, and raised over a million dollars from angels, Jason Calacanis among them.

Arjun Singh

Built a portfolio of fifteen companies worth more than $30 million between them, with two exits.

James Green

Backed more than ninety startups and three venture funds as an angel investor.

Our investors

The people who back us.

We’re backed by entrepreneurs, family offices and venture capital investors who believe the same thing we do: pair patient capital with the insight of experienced founders and you get a better bet than chasing the next twenty-something with a pitch deck.

Our approach

What we believe.

The best businesses get built by people who already understand the problem. Operators, consultants, specialists, senior employees. People who have worked inside an industry long enough to see exactly what’s broken.

We’re not precious about your first idea. Most founders we work with change direction once they start talking to potential buyers, so at the start we care more about the person than the pitch. What matters is that there’s a genuine problem underneath, and someone who feels it badly enough to pay to make it go away.

When we decide what to build, the first question is what gets you to paying customers fastest. Sometimes that’s a service. Sometimes it looks like software to the customer but runs on manual work behind the scenes. Either way, we prove people will pay before you spend months building the finished thing. Once it’s working, we automate the manual parts and add proper tech, so each new customer costs less to win and serve. That’s how you build something valuable without burning investor money to get there.

It also keeps you asset-light, off the investor treadmill, and in control of how much of your own company you own.

Ready to start

Ready to start?

The application takes about twenty minutes. We read every one and reply within a week.

Apply to DQventures