Steve Torso: Founder of Wholesale Investor & CapitalHQ

Steve Torso is the Founder and CEO of Wholesale Investor, Australia’s leading private capital marketplace, and CapitalHQ, the AI-powered Capital Engagement Agent platform transforming how companies raise capital and manage investor relationships.

Steve co-founded Wholesale Investor in 2008 with a clear thesis: the gap between companies seeking private capital and investors looking to deploy into high-growth opportunities was not a discovery problem but an engagement problem. The traditional model of relying on investment banks, brokers, and word-of-mouth introductions was inefficient, expensive, and inaccessible to the majority of companies raising capital.

Over more than 14 years, Steve has built Wholesale Investor into the largest platform of its kind in Australasia, with a registered network of over 45,000 qualified investors, fund managers, family offices, and institutional participants. The platform has facilitated introductions across venture capital, private equity, pre-IPO, private credit, deep tech, health tech, fintech, and alternative assets.

In 2024, Steve launched CapitalHQ, an AI-powered Capital Engagement Agent designed to replace the fragmented, manual, and emotionally draining process of managing investor relationships during a capital raise. CapitalHQ provides founders with an always-on system that drafts communications in their voice, tracks investor engagement through warmth signals, automates follow-ups, and provides the confidence and clarity that founders typically lack during the fundraising process.

For the advisory community, CapitalHQ operates as an operating system that scales their practice without scaling their team. The Certified Partner Programme allows advisors to earn recurring revenue from every client they serve while delivering institutional-quality investor relations powered by AI.

Steve is a recognised authority on private capital markets, capital raising strategy, and investor engagement. He is a regular contributor to the Australian Financial Review, Ausbiz, the Sydney Morning Herald, SmartCompany, and Switzer, and has delivered keynote presentations for the Australian Securities Exchange, Macquarie University, UTS, the Queensland Government, AusBiotech, Thomson Reuters, DLA Piper, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

His annual Investor Survey, now in its latest edition with respondents across the wholesale investor community, provides one of the most detailed public datasets on private investor sentiment, sector preferences, deal structure preferences, and frustrations in the Australian market.

Steve is available for speaking engagements, partnership discussions, and media commentary on private capital markets, AI in financial services, and the future of capital raising.

LinkedIn: Steve Torso

Platform: wholesaleinvestor.com.au | capitalhq.com