Alumni and Supporters

Derek Gerrard

Bachelor of Business, 2000

Winner of the 2025 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Alumni Award

Investor and entrepreneur Derek Gerrard has built a career defined by visionary leadership, high achievement and a deep commitment to social and economic impact.

As Co-Founder and Director of the state’s largest venture capital fund, Purpose Ventures, Derek has an unwavering commitment to supporting early-stage businesses and ensuring that purpose remains at the heart of innovation.

His success has led to being named the winner of Edith Cowan University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Alumni Award 2025. As he reflects on his remarkable career to date since graduating from ECU with a Bachelor of Business in 2000, Derek explains it was his second shot at university that set him on the right path.

“I started a computer science degree at another university straight out of school and didn’t quite have the discipline to fit within the university structure at that point,” Derek says. “I had to get a job and then realised – ‘hang on, I’m not making the most of my life here’. I understood ECU offered a bit more of a practical outcome and did the Business degree with a major in Information Systems.

“I went back as a mature age student and ended up doing my three-year degree in 18 months - it was just head down, work really hard, being dedicated and getting into the workforce.”

Derek’s hard work paid off, awarded for having the highest aggregate score across all units, and was offered a graduate role with PricewaterhouseCoopers upon graduation. After initial software development training in the United States, he settled in Melbourne, consulting on technology projects.

“This was 2000, and at the time it was the dot com era,” Derek explains. “They would put grads like me with software development experience in really young tech businesses, and take equity position in those companies in the hope that they would grow and become the next dot com company that they might then pick up as a larger client.”

Derek and his wife then moved to London, where he worked as an IT project manager with Barclays, helping to launch their online banking.

“What we take for granted now with online banking was just being launched then, so that was a big project I was involved in,” he says. “Back then, people didn't really trust using credit cards online and they didn't trust having their money and account available online.”

Moving home to Perth after London, Derek worked for a boutique IT consulting company and met his co-founders of tech startup Greensense.

“That started with three software guys thinking about how we could use our skills to have a positive impact on climate change,” he says. “The result of that is we built this software product which did real time energy and water monitoring for commercial and industrial buildings.”

A standout example of his entrepreneurial success, Greensense was acquired 10 years ago. Rather than stepping back after that, Derek used it as a launchpad for further impact, supporting Western Australian startups and bringing new energy and structure to the local innovation landscape.

“It was at that point I started looking at the WA startup ecosystem and thinking about how I might be able to contribute. The last 10 years have been taking what I was able to earn and learn through the Greensense journey and apply that to help other entrepreneurs in WA.”

Among many highpoints over the past decade, Derek helped bring investors into WA tech deals through investment group Go Capital, as well as helping with the development of RAC’s innovation function, setting up their venture capital fund Better Labs.

“That all led to us being approached by some investors to set up Purpose Ventures, a private venture capital fund where 70 per cent of our fund is geared towards backing WA founders or operators,” Derek says.

“When you think about venture capital in Western Australia, whilst we are roughly 11 per cent of the population, we contribute about 17 per cent to GDP, and we account for about 45 per cent of the export market - but only two per cent of the venture capital funding finds its way into Western Australia.

“There's been a lack of funding to support our new ideas and entrepreneurs, so our fund was set up to fill that gap.”

Purpose Ventures raised a staggering $55 million – all from Western Australian investors – and has invested in nine companies so far, seven of which are from WA. Derek is also the chairperson of the Malka Foundation, which is geared towards supporting WA startups.

“Through the Malka role I get to help at that earlier, more grassroots stage of the entrepreneurial journey with programs that give people the support and education they need, and at the other end a few of them get to the point of growing and needing capital market, then I back a few of those,” he says.

“I get to spend a lot of time meeting a lot of entrepreneurs, and these are people that care very deeply about a problem they want to solve, and they're taking some kind of risk to figure that out. It’s energising being around people at the start of that journey and have those dreams and problems that they want to solve.

“I love meeting people that are trying to do that, and with the experience we've had with building many successful companies now - to take that knowledge and network that - if there's things I can do that help point them in the right direction, that's what I enjoy doing.”

Well placed to give advice, Derek says don’t die wondering.

“If you think you've got an idea that you want to pursue, and you've got a desire to start a company - you need to give it a go. We're backing people chasing their life cause or their purpose - the whole name of our fund Purpose Ventures is trying to back founders that are chasing after their life purpose.

“If you're going to start a business in this day and age, why not do something that makes the world a better place?

Whether that's sustainability, health or education, we want to look at every founder that we're backing and know that they're trying to make a difference in their field of expertise.”