Blackbird Ventures has announced it has raised a record $1 billion fund to invest in “generational companies” born in Australia and New Zealand.
The long-awaited announcement came only a week after Square Peg Capital had set the record for an Australian venture fund at $861 million.
With the investment market cooling, co-founder and partner Niki Scevak said the firm “wholeheartedly believed the coming era for Australian and New Zealand start-ups will be our greatest yet”.
Announcing closure of the fund – the firm’s fifth and twice the size of the prior fund raised in 2020 – the Blackbird team predicted that within ten years Australia and New Zealand’s five most valuable businesses will be technology companies and one fifth of the GDP of the two countries will come from technology.
Blackbird said that over its first decade it had become clear that the future of venture capital would depend on a few “generational companies” and its mission should continue believing in companies at the very beginning and investing in them throughout their life, generally starting with hundreds of thousands of dollars and progressing through to hundreds of millions of dollars for the most promising.
“The atomic unit of Blackbird is great relationships, not picking morsels from an alphabet soup of funding rounds. And so, we have designed our funds, team and culture around building relationships we hope will last decades.
“As we have always done, we strive to start those relationships right at the beginning − before product and revenue. No member of our investment team will ever say ‘it’s too early’ to a founder,” the team said.
They acknowledged that 2022 had been a tumultuous year to date, with listed stocks moving emotionally up and down from one day to the next. The financial world was trying to make sense of what was happening but ultimately progress would be measured in decades not days, they said.
The team thanked investors who had continued their belief in Blackbird by committing to this fund, including some who had significantly upgraded their commitments. They also welcomed new investors.
The firm said most of the capital committed to the new fund would come from seven superannuation funds including AustralianSuper, Aware Super, HESTA, Hostplus, Telstra Super and NGS Super. Other investors include The Future Fund the New Zealand government-funded Elevate Fund − which is managed by New Zealand Growth Capital Partners and overseen by the New Zealand Super Fund − and the Accident Compensation Corporation of New Zealand. More than 200 private investors, including many successful technology entrepreneurs, had also committed to the fund.
The fund will be split into three pools: $NZ75 million specifically for investing in New Zealand-based businesses, a $284 million core fund and a $668 million follow-on fund.
Image: Blackbird Partners Robyn Denholm (operating partner), Nick Croker, Alex Apoifis (chief operating officer), Rick Baker (co-founder), Niki Scevak (co-founder) and Samantha Wong.