The ANZ climate tech sector is booming, and with good reason. The world’s leading scientists are telling us – or getting arrested to warn us – that we only have until the end of the decade to secure a safe climate future. Our mission? To limit global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. To put that into… Read more »
Venture capital can be a solo, transactional game: meeting founders, building conviction, and making a case to an investment committee before allocating capital. Some firms learn how to exploit the aggregated super-power of their whole group to discover unique investments and unlock value. What we don’t talk about enough is how the firms themselves collaborate… Read more »
The growing wealth of the top end of town has seen an explosion in the creation of family offices over the last decade, according to new analysis. That boom is good news for anyone looking to work in the space, since it’s a lucrative role according to the KPMG Australian Family Office Compensation Benchmark Report… Read more »
As a woman founder and investor, I’ve thought a lot about how best to increase the number of women founders who raise capital and scale businesses. Antler is uniquely positioned to impact the gender mix of founders by virtue of our investment volume and stage at the very top of the funnel as a day… Read more »
The annual CapTech2023 conference will return to Sydney in October, bringing together innovators, investors, and industry leaders together over four days. Raman Bhalla, President of Sydney Investors, Professionals and Business Networking Group Incorporated (SIPBN), and founder of CapTech, said last year’s gathering resulted in four companies successfully raising major deals with more than $180 million… Read more »
There’s been a changing of the guard at Australia’s first angel investor network for women-led startups, Scale Investors, with the founding team selling the business to the current management team Scale was created a decade ago by Susan Oliver, Carol Schwartz, Annette Kimmitt and Laura McKenzie. Over that period the angel investors backed 47 women-led… Read more »
Jessy Wu, investment principal at AfterWork Ventures, is an unlikely venture capitalist. She happily admits it was “the furtherest thing from my mind” when she emerged with a ANU with a philosophy degree, also majoring in English literature. Next thing she knew, she was working at NAB Ventures. Within 18 months, Wu became part of… Read more »
Concerns about the cryptocurrency, including pending Australian regulation, have not deterred cricketer Steve Smith from wading into sector, taking a minority equity stake in Perth crypto app Bamboo, and also becoming its brand ambassador. The move by Smith comes as US sports stars including NFL legend Tom Brady, NBA star Stephen Curry and tennis champion… Read more »
Atlassian cofounder and renewables advocate Mike Cannon-Brookes has backed a new fund to finance grid-scale battery projects via his family fund, Grok Ventures. Canberra-based specialist fund manager Infradebt announced that Grok, JANA Diversified Infrastructure Trust and several existing family office clients had participated in the first close of its Infradebt Energy Transition Fund (ETF). The… Read more »
Early-stage venture capital firm Investible has named Asia-Pacific investment expert Charlie Ill as the group’s first Chief Investment Officer as the fund ramps up its global presence. The Sydney-headquartered VC, which also has an office in Singapore, has also promoted Jayden Basha to principal and Ben Lindsay to investment manager. Ill has been charged with… Read more »
Ethic Adviser, a sustainable investing solution for financial advisers, investment brokers and accountants, is looking to raise $1 million in Seed funding to expand the globally. The fintech was developed by Tom Culver last year, before launching in March, to give advisers a SAAS solution offering specialist sustainable investing tools and information. “With the acceleration… Read more »
A convergence of tailwinds and current market conditions make this an unparalleled time for climate technology. Climate tailwinds are coming in the form of new government policy and public dollars to support climate solutions are being announced (and now deployed) at unprecedented levels. Also, corporations now see decarbonisation as an imperative and being a leader… Read more »
Venture capital firm Blackbird has raised Australia’s first $1 billion VC fund, with superannuation funds once again cornerstone investors. The announcement comes just a week after Square Peg announced it had raised $860 million for its fifth generation of funds. Combined with another $700 million raised earlier this year by Airtree. that means the country’s… Read more »
Early stage VC firm Sprint Ventures has raised $8 million in the first close of its $50 million second fund. Managing Partner and entrepreneur Llew Jury said the second fund, called the Expansion Capital Fund, follows the success of their first $5 million Vintage Sovereign Seed fund in 2020, which has delivered a return on… 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 »
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