2025 Year in Review

Every year, we set out with the same north star: find the most ambitious Australian and Kiwi founders, and back them from the very beginning. How did we do in 2025?

We invested $357M into 20 new and 31 follow-on rounds. This was a 55% increase in terms of $ deployed from 2024.

These investments spanned from a $149k pre-seed cheque to a $60M Series F cheque.

And we stayed laser focused on backing founders right at the very beginning, with 80% of new investments into pre-seed or seed stage companies. This is in stark contrast to Australia-wide trends, where 2025 saw a 56% decrease in early-stage funding and an increase in late-stage funding. 

Sometimes wiring an investment at Blackbird gets held up because a company hasn’t set up a bank account yet! It’s never too early to pitch us for investment.

In 2025 more than 1900 Wild Hearts came across our desk. We met with 423 of them and invested in 51 of them. 

AI, of course, was a huge theme. But it varied in how it showed up. From contract review, to data monitoring of robotics, an AI-native entertainment studio and implantables to monitor disease progression.

This year we returned $728M to our investors, bringing the total we have returned to over $2.3B. We are proud to reward the early faith in Blackbird with these cash returns, especially knowing that many of the beneficiaries of these returns are ordinary Aussies via their superannuation funds.

The Blackbird way

Even as our funds and the ANZ ecosystem grows bigger, we remain a singular, obsessive focus on meeting every great founder, as early as possible. 

We are constantly innovating on ways to identify and develop relationships with the best founders, earlier, through programs that elevate the entire ecosystem.

Giants, our flagship mentoring program, brought together 144 startups, 220 early stage founders and 74 mentors from all across the ANZ ecosystem for a whopping 782 mentoring sessions.

Foundry is our deep-tech and biotech founder program to surface the best untapped talent in ANZ’s universities. Nearly 100 scientist-founders have participated over five cohorts, and we’ve invested in 4 - including 2 in 2025!

Something New ✨ dinners, birthed in our Auckland office, and now also running bi-monthly in Australia. This is an invite-only event series and community designed for awesome operators who are 'tinkering' on something, have an interesting side project, or who are simply stewing on what's next. We run goal-oriented sessions that give people the best chance for serendipity to strike! Register your interest here.

And of course Sunrise, our annual love letter to the startup ecosystem in ANZ, brought thousands together in Sydney this year. 

In addition to Sunrise, we also hosted 63 events with 1461 founders and operators across Australia, New Zealand, San Francisco, London, New York, and Boston, including our inaugural event Collisions in Auckland, New Zealand.

Blackbird Foundation continues to deploy grants both directly and indirectly to supercharge creativity in young people. In 2025, the foundation granted a total of A$240K, across 107 Protostars through their microgrants and Follow-on-Fund, and 6 organisations through Believers. In May, the Foundation also sponsored 260 high-school students from Sydney to attend Sunrise 2025.

And to top it all off, we grew our flock

In 2025, we added Jessica to our investing team.

Jessica Tulp is a Kiwi who has just returned from 2 years in Amsterdam. Prior to that, Jessica had worked with some of the most exciting founders in New Zealand. We were instantly drawn to Jessica’s deep founder empathy and she’s already hit the ground running. 

We feel so lucky to spend our days backing the most ambitious Australian and Kiwi founders, and can’t wait to see what 2026 has in store. 

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