Noga Edelstein has seen deals from every side of the table: as the lawyer who documented them, the founder who needed them and the investor who sources and decides them.Today she is CEO of Equity Clear, Operating and Venture Partner at Black Nova and a member of the Climate Tech Partners (CTP) Investment Committee.

Juliette, Senior Investment Analyst at CTP, spoke with Noga about her career, and the lessons from each chapter that shape how she approaches investing today.

What makes a corporate partnership succeed. Noga began her career as a corporate lawyer in Sydney and London, working on telecoms, infrastructure and technology deals. Frustrated at documenting deals once they were done, she joined Yahoo in Australia and rose to General Counsel and Company Secretary.

At that time, Yahoo had just formed its joint venture with Channel 7 to create Yahoo7, giving Noga a close view of what makes a corporate partnership succeed and where it breaks down. The work also taught her to operate where regulation had not caught up with technology. "I call it working in the grey zone," she says. It is a skill that matters more than ever today, as AI moves faster than the rules around it.

For CTP, whose model connects startups with corporate partners, this is definitively key. Startups and corporates achieve more together, but they move at different speeds, have different risk appetites and speak different languages. Noga knows that securing the warm introduction to a potential partner is only the start. The real work is identifying where the strongest synergies lie and making them happen, so the partnership delivers for both sides.

Lessons from the founder's seat. In the early days of on-demand services, Noga left Yahoo to launch UrbanYou, a marketplace for home services. It began as a consumer business, but she quickly learnt that scale depended on channels to market. This time on the startup side of the table, she partnered with corporates such as EY and NAB, which offered the service to staff for special events (e.g. parental leaves).

While competitors invested heavily in their booking technology, UrbanYou focused on verified and rated workers. "What we did far better than any of the others was build trust and deliver on customer service," Noga explains. It was during this time that Noga first crossed paths with our IC Chair, Topaz Conway, who as Chair of SBE invited her onto its board, where she served for four years.

In 2018 she led UrbanYou through its acquisition by Oneflare. Going through that exit as a founder taught her what success really looks like, and what needs to get done to reach it. Having walked that path herself, she is well placed to guide the CTP team and our portfolio founders along the same journey, from first customers through to exit.

Backing the founder over the product. Noga has been a Venture Partner at Black Nova since 2020, backing B2B software companies up to Series A, and now leads its portfolio management and Venture Partner program as an Operating Partner. She has also mentored founders through Startmate, including its first climate tech cohort, UNSW Founders and UTS Startups, and sits on the UNSW Engineering Entrepreneurship Advisory Council.

Across sectors, she sees the same challenges: finding the first customers, pricing the product, going to market and hiring engineers. At the earliest stage, her conviction rests on the founder. "If you invest in a product because you love that product, you're going to be disappointed, because they're going to make a pivot to find product-market fit," she says.

Many climate tech companies win or lose on their software and commercial model. Noga's depth in B2B software brings exactly that lens to our Investment Committee.

From anecdote to evidence. Noga has experienced the gender funding gap first-hand. As a woman and a mum pitching UrbanYou, she often found herself explaining the challenge of balancing personal life and work to investors who did not see it as their problem. And the data confirms the pattern as in 2025, teams made up only of women received just 2%.

After serving on the NSW Government's Women's Entrepreneurship Industry Reference Group, Noga became CEO of Equity Clear in 2025. She has led the development of Australia's first national standard for reporting diversity across the investment pipeline, from first pitch to investment committee, designed with more than 160 organisations across five states. "In addition to the funding gap, we have a data gap," she says. She was also recently appointed Adjunct Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact, UNSW Business School.

Climate Tech Partners is proud to support her incredible initiative and be part of the first reporting pilot. It will show us where women founders fall away in our own pipeline and why, so we can act on that evidence and invest in more women.

Why Climate Tech Partners. For Noga, climate innovation and gender are closely linked. Women are disproportionately affected by climate change, and when women innovators go unfunded, their solutions may never reach the market.

Since joining our Investment Committee 18 months ago, Noga has brought a rare combination to the table: software across B2C and B2B models, corporate experience from both sides of a partnership, a founder's exit, hands-on fundraising and debt expertise, and a sharp lens on gender equity. That dynamic perspective complements the deep hardware and climate expertise around the table. Better decisions come from people with different backgrounds, and Noga's role is to ask the right questions and challenge our thinking. We are proud to have her on our Investment Committee.

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