Today we announced our new funds have raised $1.05 billion. It’s a big number and it’s the largest fund ever raised in the ANZ ecosystem.

The number I'd rather talk about is $149,000.

That was the smallest cheque we wrote last year. The largest was $60 million. Both came out of the same firm, in the same twelve months, and the gap between them is what I want to share with you.

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Small Cheques. Big Conviction.

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When a firm raises a billion dollars, a founder might assume that they have stopped caring about small rounds.

We haven’t.

The $1.05 billion is split across two funds, one for early-stage and one for growth. The early-stage fund has one job: meet every ambitious Aussie and Kiwi founder we can find, and write the first cheque. It’s deliberately sized to write small cheques right at the very beginning of a founder’s journey. The growth fund is for what comes next. 

This means a $149k cheque and a $60 million cheque never compete for the same dollar.

Blackbird was built on investing unreasonably early. We backed Canva before Mel and Cliff had built their product. We backed Halter when Craig had just three customers. We backed Marloo before there was even an idea of a product - just Hardy and Shak, and a conviction about who they were.

We don’t earn the right to go early by just discussing a company at our investment meetings. Being early is a long term act of devotion investing time and energy into the start-up ecosystem. It's why Blackbird has spent years meeting people who aren't founders yet.

Sunrise, now in its eleventh year, is our annual love letter to the ecosystem and has had over 13,000 people attend. Giants, our mentoring program, ran 782 sessions last year for 220 early-stage founders and is free. Foundry is Blackbird’s idea stage program for researchers. Something New dinners, born in our Auckland office, are for operators quietly tinkering on a side project they haven't told anyone about.

We hosted 63 events last year for 1,461 founders and operators. These events were across Australia and New Zealand as well as cities like San Francisco, London, New York and Boston, because we know that the most ambitious Aussies and Kiwis can be anywhere.

The result?  We saw over 1,900 founders last year. We met with 423 of them. We invested in 20 new companies, and backed our conviction again through 31 follow-on rounds in our portfolio.

80% of those new companies we invested in last year were at pre-seed or seed stage. Across our last early-stage fund deployed over the past three years, 96% of first investments went in at pre-seed or seed. 

It is never too early to pitch us. Pre-revenue is fine. Pre-product is fine. Pre-idea is a conversation we have often. We invest so early that sometimes the wire gets held up because the company hasn't even opened a bank account yet.

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So, why raise a billion dollars?

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The early versus growth stage dichotomy in venture capital has never made sense to us. Why would you invest a lot of money before you know whether a company will be successful, and then nothing once you know that it will? 

Since Canva’s Series A in 2015, we have had a growth fund that doubles down in the companies we believe will be generational. Many rounds later, we are still Canva’s largest investor shareholder by a large margin. 

We were the earliest investors in Eucalyptus, buying 15% in the seed round, eventually growing that to 26% when it exited to Hims & Hers earlier this year. 

We were the earliest backers of Heidi and built our ownership to 35% over six years.

We first invested in Halter when they had three customers, and have invested seven times since to become the largest shareholder on the cap table.

Having a billion dollar fund means we have to work hard to earn the right to invest in every round that we want to, even against the best investors in the world. Belief right at the beginning is a great place to start to build a relationship that could last a decade or more.

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Global capital for global companies.

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We're honoured to welcome a number of new international investors to Blackbird this fund, including Adams Street Partners, Schroders, and Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

For most of the last decade, pitching ANZ to a global investor meant explaining why they should care about the region. 

That has changed, and not because we got better at explaining it, but because the ecosystem is now impossible to ignore.

Heidi Health is now processing 11 million patient consults a month across 190 countries. Airwallex reached US$1.3 billion in annualised revenue in March, and is powering over 676,000 businesses worldwide. Halter has more than 1.5 million collars on cattle around the world. Baseten grew its revenue twentyfold over the past year as inference became a critical layer of the AI stack.

These world-class companies fuel world-class returns. Our portfolio is now worth over $12 billion. We have returned more than $2.25 billion in cash to our investors on just over $3 billion invested, at a 32% net IRR over the last 14 years. Nine of our funds sit in the global top quartile for their vintage year. Six are in the top 5%. 

A large share of those returns has gone to Australian superannuation funds. Which means it goes to everyday Australians who may have never even heard of us and helps them retire with dignity. It is genuinely motivating to our team that investing in a graphic design startup in 2013 or investing $1.5M in the seed round of a digital health business, has that potential.

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Wild ideas made possible.

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‍A billion dollars buys us the ability to keep saying yes to great founders. Yes before anyone else will, and yes again and again years later.

So if you’re building something, or even just thinking about building something, pitch us or apply to come to one of our Something New dinners. We've never been better resourced to back wild hearts with wild ideas, right at the very beginning.

When Blackbird was founded almost fifteen years ago, investing pre-product in the region was a pretty wild idea in itself. To every founder who has trusted us to be part of the journey, and every investor who has given us the fuel to back them: thank you. We believe our best days are yet to come!

Samantha Wong, on behalf of Blackbird

All figures in AUD and as at 30 June 2026 unless otherwise stated.