New Zealand employee experience design startup Excellent has raised NZ$2 million in a pre-Seed round. ANZ VC Blackbird Ventures led the round, supported by Icehouse Ventures, Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 ), and several other founders, including Sharesies founders Brooke and Leighton Roberts, Phase One Ventures CEO Mahesh Muralidhar, Joyous cofounder Mike Carden, Groov CEO Adam… Read more »
Last week we completed our end of financial year valuations for the Blackbird portfolio and communicated them to our investors. They’re down as you would expect in light of the public markets but with this blog post, we wanted to share in greater detail the process that we used to come to the valuations. The… Read more »
Sydney startup Sitemate has raised $5.2 million for its no code software tools for companies in the construction sector. The round was led by Blackbird, with participation from existing investors Shearwater Capital and angels including local tech founders Tim Doyle of Eucalyptus and Rory San Miguel of Propeller. Coincidentally, Blackbird general partner Nick Crocker was… Read more »
‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ is a saying popularised US President John F. Kennedy. It’s a reference to everyone winning when the economy is strong. For many investors, 2021 has been a king tide. And this month, the good ship Blackbird, the Australian venture capital firm, revealed just how rising valuations in the companies… Read more »
New Zealand digital metal casting startup Foundry Lab has raises US$8 million (A$11.2m) in a Series A. The round was led by Blackbird, supported by Kiwi VCs GD1, Icehouse and K1W1 as new investors, as well as Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, Motional CEO Karl Iagnemma and former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass plus existing backers the Founders… Read more »
Anti-money laundering regtech startup First AML has raised A$28.7 million (NZ$30m) in a series B. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures, with support from new investors Headline Ventures, and existing backers Pushpay founder Eliot Crowther, US firm Bedrock Capital and Kiwi VC Icehouse Ventures. Blackbird partner Samantha Wong will join the board. The funds… Read more »
Working for a venture capital firm, I’m lucky to meet and support hundreds of startups in our portfolio and beyond. Many of these startups are at the earliest stages – they might not have a product yet, or perhaps their startup is just an idea. At Blackbird, our mission is to invest in wild hearts, with… Read more »
A medtech startup that helps aspiring doctors practice their clinical reasoning skills with AI-powered virtual patients has raised a $5 million seed round. The investment in Oscer was led by Blackbird, joined by January Capital, Inventures, Archangel Ventures and angel investors Brendan Hill, and Jeff Bargman and values the business at $20 million. The University… Read more »
Work skills retraining startup EntryLevel is gearing up for a seed raise after pre-seed funding from Blackbird Ventures saw the virtual trainer reskill more than 30,000 people in just six months. Blackbird tipped $350,000 into the cohort-based edutech startup, which has an ambition to help one billion jobseekers around the world launch their careers through… Read more »
Skills training startup Forage has raised US$25 million (A$35m) in a series B. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Telstra Ventures, Citi Ventures, Gaingels, Cap Table Coalition, ETF@JFFLabs and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and FundersClub. The raise comes less than 12 months after the four-year-old Y Combinator graduate, previously known as InsideSherpa, landed a US$9.3 million series A. Forage… Read more »
Sydney startup FL0 has raised $5.1 million in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures. The venture (pronounced Flow), co-founded by serial entrepreneur Dale Brett, is looking to speed up coding with a low-code format, pioneering what it calls “dev acceleration” in a Canva-style democratisation of software engineering While still in beta mode, early customer… Read more »
Multitudes, a software platform to manage and improve culture and performance, has raised NZ$2.4 million (AU$2.2m) in a seed round to build their beta product. Blackbird Ventures led the oversubscribed round alongside former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, and Culture Amp co-founder Jon Williams. Multitudes uses workplace data to give managers insights and coaching to create… Read more »
Venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures has landed support from some of the countries biggest superannuation funds as well as the Commonwealth’s Australia’s sovereign wealth fund to build a record $500 million investment fund – its fourth. The Sydney-headquartered VC last raised $261 million in 2018 and has now placed $1.3 billion in the startup sector… Read more »
Becoming Australia’s most successful Kickstarter project in 2016, nura has closed a $21 million Series A round led by existing backer Blackbird Ventures to push the rollout of its flagship product, the nuraphone.
Having invested $900 million into venture capital so far, Hostplus CIO Sam Sicilia believes the fund is helping to build a prosperous future for Australia.
The lessons from Uber, Ola and rideshare’s disruption is that in the end, the consumer still pays 
Unicorn dehorned: Nasdaq-listed Brisbane EV charging venture Tritium collapses into receivership 
Here are the finalists in Fintech Australia’s 2024 Finnies awards 
Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar steps down as co-CEO 
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