This Week in Australian Startups #49, 10th December 2023

Dec 09, 2023

Before we jump in a quick update that next week will be the final update of the year, I’ll be taking 2 weeks off to spend time with family and friends and back to weekly updates from 7th Jan 2024.

Investing in More Women and Non-Binary Founders: Part 2 by Blackbird

Last week I wrote about an article from SmartCompany highlighting the last 11 public investments made by Blackbird had all-male founding teams - there was context provided by Blackbird particularly around the investments not made public which meant out of the last 22 investments they made 23% of these companies had at least one female in the founding team - above the industry average of 19%.

This week Blackbird’s Chief of Staff (Investments) Alexandra Gifford published an update on Blackbird’s progress and learnings on their mission to invest in more women and non-binary founders.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexandra-gifford_investing-in-more-women-founders-part-2-activity-7137327956632248320-wwvm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop — LinkedIn post from Alexandra Gifford

The AFR wrote an article to provide some insight and opinion into the data shared by Blackbird. Jessy Wu had a good take on the AFR piece she shared on LinkedIn.

There’s a big shift in journalism and how we consume news. Information is becoming a commodity, whether it’s a funding round or a report that’s been published like this one from Blackbird - it’s accessible from many places and is largely undifferentiated.

Did reading this AFR article add any value, or provide any meaningful insight that I would not have gotten elsewhere? If anything there’s actually some opinions shared that, in my personal opinion, are unqualified and incorrect - and generally that’s why the media landscape is changing very quickly.

Traditional media was relevant when they controlled both the supply and distribution of information. They now have neither of those. With the advent of social media experts in each industry who are highly qualified to have an opinion are sharing that (supply) and places like LinkedIn/Google manage that distribution. We’ve seen this tension at play with traditional media leveraging their relationships with governments to make social media platforms pay for content to be distributed - I’ve wrote about this topic in more detail in June when Canada introduced legislation to this affect following Australia’s lead.

20 years ago business leaders were not writing articles, perhaps they’d write a book and have a guest post from time to time. We were reliant on professional journalists to write this content and interview experts for their opinions. Would you listen to medical advice from someone who has not worked in medical industry? Why would you then take business advice from someone that has not had real business experience. This is the view that’s becoming more popular and making rise to more quality content on LinkedIn than you’ll find in most media companies - get expert opinions directly from these experts, we’ve entered an era of industry-expert led opinions.

There’s still a place for media and professional journalism, particularly in real investigative journalism that experts won’t do. Most expert opinions are formed off the news reported by traditional media.

Takes like this are doing no favours for traditional media though.

Australia’s most prominent VC firm self-reported data that shows funding female-led start-ups is a no-growth sector.

There’s no mention of this anywhere in the data shared by Blackbird, and there’s plenty of data that exists that shows funding females and diverse teams leads to greater returns for investors - the very definition of a growth sector. If anything the data shared by Blackbird highlights how much they believe female-led startups is a growth sector given their activity and investments in their grass roots initiatives to create more female founders.

The Blackbird spokeswoman said the firm didn’t control when a start-up announced its funding round. To be honest, we doubt that.

To be fair it’s an opinion not a fact that’s been written, but anyone who works in tech will know that startups often delay the announcement of fundraising for strategic reasons ie big product launch, geographical expansion, timing etc…

Some other shares on LinkedIn on the topic of female founder funding this week worth reading:

David Smith on the latest Carta equity report “right through to the amount of venture to female only teams dipping under 3%. Everything is worse than a year ago.”
Georgia Vidler on how we can invest more in women

Cut Through Venture’s launches OnePitch VC

In a post on LinkedIn, Cut Through Venture’s announced the launch of OnePitch VC.

OnePitch VC embodies the vision we set in 2021. The platform allows startups to submit their fundraising pitches directly to 25 of Australia’s most active startup investors through a single application. Each application is guaranteed to reach the inboxes of every investment team, creating a competitive environment among investors to swiftly engage with startups they find intriguing.

A single application to reach 25 of Australia’s most active investors is a compelling enough reason, but it goes further with a ‘No Ghosting Guarantee’ with every investor having committed to providing feedback on all startups that apply.

The most interesting, and exciting thing about this is how this can really build “a more open and equitable funding ecosystem for all founders” as Cut Through Ventures has stated.

Having data at this aggregated level is extremely difficult to obtain, let alone getting 25 investors to agree to it. This shows the commitment and unity of each of these VCs towards our ecosystem, and real action towards building our ecosystem together.

Initiatives like this are critical in providing greater access to capital and opportunity in particular for underrepresented founders who don’t have the networks or typically wouldn’t be able to get an audience with these investors.

A big shoutout to the team at Cut Through Ventures and every VC that’s participating

👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Australian Funding Rounds

Leonardo.AI, a GenAI art production platform, has raised a $47M Series A round from Blackbird, Side Stage Ventures, Smash Capital, TIRTA Ventures, Gaorong Capital and Samsung Next (Startup Daily | AFR | TechCrunch) [BIPOC Founder]
Vantari VR, the VR medical training startup, has raised a $7M Series A round from Co:Act Capital, Acova Capital, Significant Early Venture Capital and Sirius Capital (Startup Daily | BNA | AFR) [BIPOC Founder]
Arkeus, a defence tech optical radar startup, has raised a $4.45M Seed round from Main Sequence, Beaten Zone Venture Partners and Salus Ventures (Startup Daily | SmartCompany | AFR) [Female Founder]
Banana, the world's first fashion crowdfunding platform, has raised a $500K Seed round (LinkedIn) [Female & BIPOC Founder]
Planet Protector Packaging, that makes cost effective, thermal cold chain packaging , has raised $12M from Minderoo Foundation (SmartCompany | AFR) [Female Founder]
Nexba, a sugar-free drinks company, has raised a $4M Series B round from notable Angel Investors including David Koch and Pat Cummins (SmartCompany)
Everlab, the preventative health service of the future, has raised a $3M Pre-Seed round from b2venture, Ten13, AfterWork, Flying Fox, Playbook Ventures (SmartCompany | The Australian) [BIPOC Founder]
SourseAI, a forecasting, prediction and scenario planning platform, has raised a $3M Series A round from Centerstone Capital (SmartCompany | The Australian) [Female Founder]
Andisor, a curated B2B digital marketplace, purpose-built for fashion, has raised a $1M Pre-Seed round (SmartCompany | The Australian) [Female & BIPOC Founder]
Dataweavers, an end-to-end automated web operations platform, has raised a $5.5M Series A round from QIC, Five V Capital, OIF Ventures (AFR | LinkedIn)
Pairtree Intelligence, a universal dashboard for Australian Agritech, converging IoT, Satellite and Drone imagery, Hardware, Software and web data, has raised an undisclosed sum from SVG Ventures (Thrive)
Omni Biotech, a world first real-time & non-invasive hydration measurement, has raised an undisclosed sum from Skalata (LinkedIn)

International Funding Highlights

Clothing rental platform HURR raises £7.9m (BusinessCloud)
Octopus EV gets $700M bank funding to expand employee EV scheme (Reuters)
ContactMonkey lands $55M investment to grow its email software for internal comms (TechCrunch)

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