Renate Crollini's Path from Engineering to Backing Female Founders
Renate Crollini's LinkedIn profile maps a career that moves across engineering, infrastructure, sustainability, corporate advisory, not-for-profits and startups, and lands on the work she does now:…
Renate Crollini's LinkedIn profile maps a career that moves across engineering, infrastructure, sustainability, corporate advisory, not-for-profits and startups, and lands on the work she does now: helping early-stage female founders build companies through Tech Ready Women Academy.
Her background includes roughly 12 years working in New York City before returning to Australia, and a combined degree in Sociology and Civil Engineering from the University of Sydney. That mix of the technical and the social runs through much of what she has built since. Before her current roles, Renate co-founded Brownee, a sustainability platform for small and medium enterprises, where she served as Co-Founder and CSO. She is also co-founder of Adaluma, a financial intelligence and ESG data-verification platform built for CFOs, banks, corporates and governments.
At Tech Ready Women, Australia's accelerator and education platform for female founders, Renate joined to lead the Female Founder Startup Program, announced in January 2026. The work centres on idea validation, entrepreneurship and investment readiness for women at the earliest stages of building. Renate has also moderated and MC'd female founder panels and events, including a UTS Startups Female Founder Panel, a Spark Foundation panel and Founder Stories events, putting her in regular contact with the founders the program is designed to support.
The platform she represents has a substantial reach. Tech Ready Women has supported over 6,500 women founders across Australia, and roughly 40% of its program graduates have gone on to raise seed funding, with the accelerator running over eight weeks. It was founded by Christie Whitehill in 2017.
Renate's perspective on building is shaped by having done it herself. She has described walking away from her first startup as a difficult decision, and she speaks candidly about resilience and knowing when to change direction versus persist. Entrepreneurship, she argues, isn't about certainty. Founders, in her words, are essentially "building the plane while we're flying it," and nobody has all the answers. Her message to women with a business idea reflects that same conviction: get off the fence, jump in, believe in themselves and figure it out as they go.