‘There’s no such thing as the right investor’: Goterra’s Olympia Yarger on why she turned to crowdfunding for her new raise

The hardest lesson I’ve learned about raising capital is that there’s no such thing as the right investor — only the right capital stack.

Every time we started raising for Goterra’s next phase, the advice was the same: find your lead investor, fill the round, move fast. 

That playbook hasn’t changed much, even as the conversation about the mucky middle and valleys of death have become louder

For First Of A Kind (FOAK) companies — the ones building things that have never been built before — the idea of a single, clean capital round isn’t just outdated, it’s not suited to what we’re building.

Scaling FOAK companies anywhere, and especially in Australia, means accepting you need different capital for different jobs.

And each of those capital types will come with different expectations.

• VCs want moonshots and exits.
• Impact funds want measurable change and patient timelines.
• Family offices want stable returns.
• Government grants want job creation, regional development, and proof of national benefit.

They’re all right. But they’re all wrong if you treat any one of them as “the answer.”

The paradox is this: every FOAK company needs believers before it can prove belief is justified — and yet the very structures of capital are designed to invest after belief is validated.

Investors say they want innovation, but their frameworks are optimised for pattern recognition — and by definition, a FOAK company has no pattern to recognise. That’s where the dissonance lives and it’s where the challenge lies. 

FOAK founders are building something the world hasn’t seen before, while capital markets are calibrated to fund what’s been proven to work.   You  need to show traction to secure funding, but that requires trust. 

So belief becomes the most valuable — and most fragile — currency in the early stages.

What I’ve learned is that raising for FOAK companies isn’t just about convincing investors that what we’ve built will work. It’s about designing a capital stack that allows belief to grow in stages — giving each type of investor the proof they actually need to come on board and defining a relationship of trust together.

Here’s how we’re doing it at Goterra:

• Institutional investors for growth capital and strategic discipline.
• Crowd-sourced investors for brand amplification and public mandate.
• Government co-investment for regional deployment and risk-sharing.
• Strategic corporates for offtake agreements and market validation.

Each layer serves a purpose beyond just the balance sheet — it signals belief in a different way.

When Melbourne Airport chooses you, it’s strategic validation.
When 1,000 Australians choose you, it’s market validation.
When the government co-invests, it’s institutional validation.

That’s how you build conviction in stages. That’s how you build belief that scales.  Belief  is not something you can ask for — it’s something you have to architect.

The  infrastructure opportunity in Australia is ginormous , but the capital challenge is just as real. No single cheque writes your future.   No single investor sees your vision from every angle. The job now — for founders in climate, waste, Agtech, or any infrastructure-heavy frontier — is to stop optimising for the perfect round and start building the right capital architecture.

FOAK companies live in the space between what’s proven and what’s possible.   In that space, the only sustainable way forward is a capital stack designed not around one believer, but around a whole ecosystem learning to believe, together.

That’s what we’re doing at Goterra — and that’s what we believe the next generation of industrial tech companies will need to do to win.

• Olympia Yarger is the founder and CEO of Goterra. A CSF campaign via OnMarket is currently open for Expressions of Interest. You can also  hregister for an Investor Webinar and Q&A on Friday, 14 November, at 12:30pm AEDT