A few hours changed the way Samantha Wong thinks about venture capital.
When Wong met Craig Piggott, the founder of Halter, he had already entered into a Series A term sheet with a US investor. Blackbird eventually invested in a later round and continued backing the company. But Wong still remembers that first miss for a different reason. It showed her how quickly access can disappear when an exceptional founder is moving fast. Even a short flight can leave an investor too faraway.
That story helps explain Blackbird’s latest fundraise.
The Australian and New Zealand venture firm has raised A$1.05 billion across two funds, an amount Blackbird says is the largest ever raised within the ANZ venture ecosystem. One fund is focused on early-stage companies. The other gives Blackbird capital to continue investing as its strongest portfolio companies grow.
The headline is the billion dollars.
More interesting is what Blackbird appears to be trying to buy with it: the ability to get close to the right founder before the rest of the market does, then stay close for years.
Its new fund structure is designed around both sides of that equation. Blackbird can invest very early while keeping enough capital available to continue backing a company well beyond its first rounds. Founder relationships, in that model, are not limited to the point at which a cheque is written.
The best deal can be the one you are allowed into
Samantha Wong, who became a general partner at Blackbird in 2015, recently gave a fairly direct account of the problem on the Rules of Investing podcast.
Blackbird looks at roughly 2,000 companies each year and invests in only a small number of them. At that scale, identifying promising companies is only part of the work. The harder part is becoming the investor a founder chooses when an early round has limited room and several firms want a place in it.
Samantha Wong describes venture capital from the opposite side of the usual story.
For a startup everybody already wants, money is not necessarily scarce. Access to the startup is.
Much of what Blackbird has built over the years makes more sense when viewed through that constraint.
The firm says that last year it encountered more than 1,900 founders, met with 423 and invested in 20 new companies. 80% of those investments were made at the pre-seed or seed stage. In its previous early-stage fund, 96% of first investments were also made at those stages.
Some conversations begin even earlier. Blackbird says it can meet founders before they have revenue, before the product is finished and, in some cases, before the company itself has fully taken shape.
By then, the relationship has to begin before the financing event.
Blackbird has been building places to meet people before they need money
Sunrise is one part of that infrastructure.
According to Sunrise, Blackbird’s startup festival has attracted more than 13,000 people, hosted over280 sessions and created more than 21,000 connections since 2014. The next Aotearoa event is scheduled for October 29 in Auckland, bringing founders, operators and creatives together for workshops, talks and one-to-one meetings.
Blackbird also runs Giants, Foundry and smaller gatherings aimed at people who may still be testing anidea. The firm says it held 63 events for 1,461 founders and operators through its broader community activity last year.
Read alongside Wong’s comments, those programmes have a fairly clear strategic value.
They give Blackbird repeated contact with ambitious people before every interaction becomes a fundraising conversation.
The firm has also built a physical presence through offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland. Its careers material says the Auckland team travels across Aotearoa to meet founders as well.
Luke Anear’s experience offers another view of what can happen after those introductions.
In a recent Wild Hearts conversation produced by Blackbird, the Mitti founder spoke about the difficulty of building a company alone. Several of the people he later relied on as sounding boards came through Blackbird’s network. These were experienced founders he could speak with about problems that were not always easy to discuss with his own team.
That kind of value is harder to place in a fund-performance spreadsheet. Still, it helps explain Wong’s argument that relationships and judgment matter more as basic information about building companies becomes easier to obtain through search and AI.
There is a tension here.
Blackbird is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Wong says AI has been the main focus of the firm’s investing over the past 3 years. Yet Blackbird’s own competitive position increasingly depends on things an LLM cannot immediately give a founder: trust, reputation, proximity and access to people who have already faced similar decisions.
A bigger fund gives Blackbird more time, not just more money
Blackbird’s second challenge begins when one of those early bets starts working.
The new A$1.05 billion structure separates early-stage capital from growth capital. That means a small first cheque and a much larger later investment do not need to come from the same pool. Last year, Blackbird’s smallest investment was A$149,000. Its largest was A$60 million.
That range says more about the strategy than the headline fund size does.
Blackbird wants to show up when very little has been proven, then remain involved when much morehas.
The firm says it first invested in Halter when the company had three customers and has now invested seven times. It accumulated its position in Heidi Health over six years. It has also continued investing in Canva beyond the company’s first financing round.
Wong explains the logic behind the larger-fund approach in similar terms. When Blackbird has strong conviction, she argues that years of accumulated information and relationships give the firm a basis for continuing to invest rather than handing the opportunity entirely to later-stage investors.
Blackbird’s investment in Elyos AI this January gives the strategy a recent example.
Elyos raised $13 million in a Series A round alongside Y Combinator, Pi Labs and several other investors. The company develops AI agents for trading and field-service businesses, handling tasks such as customer calls, bookings, scheduling and other operational work. Elyos says the round brought its total funding to $16 million.
The investment also connects with another area Wong is watching: AI moving into industries that received less benefit from earlier waves of cloud and mobile software.
The appeal is fairly concrete. A plumber losing jobs because nobody answers the phone has a different relationship with AI than a software company adding another productivity feature. In the first case, the effect can show up directly in bookings, staffing and operating capacity.
Blackbird now has substantially more capital to search for companies like these.
But raising A$1.05 billion creates another question, one that any venture firm eventually has to confrontas it gets larger. Can Blackbird grow significantly without becoming more distant from the founders it wants to reach?
The network it has built suggests that Blackbird has been thinking about that problem long before the latest term sheets were drawn up. Much of the infrastructure is designed to begin relationships before a company needs funding and keep those relationships useful long afterwards.
The billion dollars gives Blackbird more fuel.
Access may still be the scarcer asset.