About me
Rory Garton-Smith
Rory, from Australia, based in NYC.
I studied Law and Engineering and hold a J.D. and M.D.s.
My DMs and emails are getting bombarded ever since our last capital raise announcement, please reach out if important but unfortunately I cannot respond to all messages.
Co-Founder - Checkmate. 4th most promising consumer startup in the world (2023) [The Information].
Featured in the press:
- Checkmate listed as 4th most promising consumer startup in the world (here).
- Checkmate listed in the Australian companies to reach a $100MM valuation (here).
- Speaking to Forbes about Virality and Wischoff Ventures (here).
- Featured in the Wall Street Journal talking about Cold Plunging and Health (here).
- Google Ventures, Paris Hilton back Aussie startup with $23m (here).
- Shopping app Checkmate raises $15M Series A (here).
- Featured in Times Square as 100 fastest growing companies (here).
- Celebrity investors pile into consumer savings app (here).
- Paris Hilton, The Chainsmokers and Google back savings app (here).
- Podcast: Taking savings to #1 in the app store (here).
- Aussie mates bank millions for Silicon Valley online shopping start-up (here).
- Featured on front page of Techcrunch (here).
- 5 million USD capital raise (here).
Thoughts/opinions/writings on stuff + some of my other projects:
- Insurance Black Swans: What's the equivalent of a palisades fire for a corporate insurer? (2025) (here).
- RorChat: An attempt at building my own LLM in my bedroom (2025) (here).
- Building GlobalView: A Modern Solution for Tariff Tracking (2025) (here).
- Why We Are Heading Towards a 'Two-Tier' Society: Some Thoughts Around UBI and the Potential Collapse of Consumerism (2025) (here).
- Exploiting the Risk Mechanics of Bookmakers to Profit from Football (2024) (here).
- How We Grew our Startup's Socials to Millions of Followers (2023) (here).
- System and Method for Operating an Online Sweepstakes (2022) (here).
- The Problem with Product Managers in Big Tech (2022) (here).
- Why Web3 in its Current Form Won't Go Mainstream (2021) (here).
Investments:
I occasionally invest into health and longevity focused startups:
- Superpower: A health longevity platform (here).
- ExactRx: A precision medicine and distribution platform (here).
Previously:
Engineer at Apple working on the iPhones (iPhone 11 to iPhone 14 era) aka the golden age.
Intellectual Property:
- System and Method for Operating an Online Sweepstakes [USPTO 63/690,483] 2024
- Consolidated Order Status and Tracking [USPTO 11,936,608 B1] 2024
- Method to supply custom content based on sparse merchant data [USPTO Provisional] 2022
- Minimum inhibitory determination using flow cytometry [UWA] 2019
Contact me: