Raaj Rayat
Board Member at Circular
Raaj Rayat
Board Member at Circular
Sydney, New South Wales
Overview
Work Experience
Investor
2021 - Current
AirTree is a venture capital firm with a mission to back the most ambitious Australian and Kiwi founders, building the iconic technology companies of tomorrow. We’re right by a founder's side, right from the start, often investing pre-product and pre-revenue to support startups from the earliest stages of their journey. AirTree exists to give founders and their teams an unfair advantage by actively partnering with them to work through challenges, see around corners and anticipate what’s to come. With a portfolio of 80+ companies, AirTree has been an early investor in many breakout tech companies, including: Canva, Go1, A Cloud Guru, Pet Circle, Immutable, Employment Hero, and Linktree.
Board Observer
2022
Board Observer
2022
Board Observer
2022
Board Observer
2021
Investments
2019 - 2021
• Early employee at Lendable, a FinTech startup using data science to expand fair access to financial services in emerging markets. Helped scale Lendable from $0 to $200m+ invested across 10+ countries in 4 years. • Drove various aspects of the business through Lendable's growth, including: data science, investments, risk management, and strategic projects. • Executed numerous DD's on growth stage FinTechs across 15+ jurisdictions in Africa and Southeast Asia as part of private debt and securitisation transactions. • Invested across sectors spanning: cross-border payments, PAYG solar, asset finance, consumer lending, and marketplaces.
Data Science
2017 - 2019
• Worked with Lendable's proprietary Bayesian machine learning framework — implemented in R and STAN — to generate accurate portfolio risk estimates and inform investment decisions on some of the first securitisation transactions of microfinance and PAYG solar loans in Africa. • Wrote lots of R, built bespoke reports/dashboards, and used statistical tools to analyse loan portfolios and inform investments. • Helped non-technical people make better decisions with all the cool stuff we built.
Peer Facilitator, COP21 / 9th UNESCO Youth Forum
2015 - 2015
∙ Selected as 1/7 Australian Students to participate in the 9th UNESCO Youth Forum, attended by 500 youth from 159 UN member states. ∙ Led teams and facilitated workshops to formulate youth recommendations which were presented at the 38th UNESCO General Conference and the COP21 Climate Change Conference in Paris.
CSR Intern
2015 - 2015
∙ Designed and delivered a health education project to ~80 Primary School aged children in an extremely low-income area of Ningxia Province, China. ∙ Taught english language at a school for the blind in Inner Shanghai.