Hi there,
A very special edition of the TEN13 Flightpath, as we pass $100,000,000 invested through TEN13 🎉
Plus, our latest investments in iion and Switchboard, team updates, our portfolio in the press, and what we’ve been reading recently.
Read on for more.
In December 2019, TEN13 invested its first cheques into Drawboard, Vervoe, & Clipchamp supported by just ~30 investors.
4.5 years later, following 80 rounds of funding into 50 companies across 6 continents, TEN13 has fuelled founders with over AU$100m invested through our co-investment model.
What started as a collective of early-stage investors based in Brisbane has become one of Australia’s leading early-stage venture firms backing the founders of the future, and well supported by a unique community of well over 500 investors across Australia & New Zealand.
Thank you to all the founders that we have fuelled and our investors who have joined in supporting the next generation of emerging founders.
New to the TEN13 Portfolio
While billions of gamers spending as much time online as social media users and TV watchers, only 5% of global ad spend is funnelled into the category.
iion is building the technology for advertisers to more effectively launch high quality, better targeted and better-tracked ads into the world's leading games. Excited to be supporting Sanjaya, Wout, and Giuseppe and lead their Post-Seed round alongside Archangel Ventures and PixCapital. These founders have been pioneers in the industry, working in digital ads for close to two decades.
Despite being bootstrapped to date, over 4 years the team has grown to serve some of the biggest publishers and advertisers in the world.
Read our full investment notes here and reporting coverage here.
In May we were able to close our second investment in Switchboard and Hugh Dixson on their journey to become the ‘system of record’ for the global supply chain ⛓
Switchboard is building the connective tissue of digital supply chain infrastructure, through a cloud-based platform that seamlessly connects a company's entire supply chain through their API offering 🚛
We are investing in the company's $1.5m Seed round alongside Investible, Skalata, Archangel Ventures, AfterWork Ventures, Startmate and Everywhere Ventures.
Read more here.
If you didn't see it...
Sophie Robertson as Partner
We are thrilled to announce the promotion of Sophie Robertson to become a Partner within the firm, following three high-impact years as Head of Investor Relations. Sophie has played a pivotal role in our growth over the past three years, especially in a challenging market for attracting investor capital to this category. Sophie is currently taking a couple of month's leave with her family to travel South East Asia (and her role is being covered by Brendan as outlined below).
Get to know more about Sophie here.
Joel Pobar as Venture Partner
Joel Pobar has recently joined the TEN13 team as its inaugural Venture Partner, solidifying the firm’s commitment to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a core investment theme of the future.
Joel is currently leading infrastructure and engineering projects at AI company Anthropic, a global leader in foundation large language models last publicly valued at ~US$18bn, and spent more than a decade at Meta as a senior engineering organisational leader.
TEN13 has been diving deeply into AI making early investments in companies such as Rockfish Data (synthetic data), Arintra (Healthcare AI), Qsic (AI Audio), and more to be announced soon.
Read more on the news here.
Alexander Barrat as Investment Associate
After 2 years at TEN13 as an Analyst, Alex Barrat has been promoted to Associate. Alex has worked closely on deals including iion, Raenest, StartADAM and other, soon to be announced opportunities. Originally starting in Brisbane, Alex has returned to Sydney to make up TEN13’s Sydney team alongside Seamus Crawford.
Portfolio News
AutoGrab Abroad
Source: Business New Australia, CEO & Co-Founder Chris Gardner.
After four years of rapid expansion in Australia and NZ, AI-driven real time vehicle data provider, AutoGrab, is breaking into new foreign markets. Just a few months ago they announced a partnership with JATO. The partnership allows AutoGrab to provide their products to JATO’s customer base, a company that has spent 40 years in operation building a reputation as a leading auto data specialist. Alongside the partnership, AutoGrab has also added boots on the ground, with a new Head of UK and and launch of the UK market.
This move comes shortly after entry into Malaysia, and a successful exit of their New Zealand arm to TradeMe.
You can hear more on the company’s growth, continual product evolution and foreign expansion directly from CEO & Co-Founder Chris Gardner on the Insurtech Australia podcast.
Amplified Intelligence is the next superpower in Adtech, hear from Snapchat and Pinterest on why.
Source: The Australian. Karen Nelson-Field (left)
Dr Karen Nelson-Field is the world’s leading expert in the attention economy. Her company, Amplified Intelligence, is changing the way ads are transacted online.
Snapchat does a tremendous job breaking down the rise of attention aka “the Next Superpower to Unlock Brand Potential”. Their article shares the key insights on how digital consumers pay attention; The Australian also wrote an article on Karen and the increasing necessity for attention metrics in partnership with Pinterest.
How Kim Teo executed a startup mega-merger with her biggest rival
Source: AFR, Kim Teo at the 2024 AFR Entrepreneur Summit
Within 3 weeks in late 2023, Kim Teo had a baby and carried out a merger with her biggest business rival. Now the CEO of Me&U, the combined Mr Yum and Me&U entity, Kim is beginning to share insights from one of the more intense periods of their journey.
Following a panel the Australian Financial Review’s Entrepreneur Summit, the AFR published more on how Kim Teo “pulled off a mega-merger with her start-up’s biggest rival”; from merging cultures to selecting which staff would remain in the new entity.
Linktree crosses 50m users, adds new product
Source: TechCrunch. Anthony Zaccaria, Alex Zaccaria, and Nick Humphreys.
Transition Level Investment's portfolio company Linktree surpasses 50-million users of it’s ‘link-in-bio’ tool, plus the scale up is expanding it’s product suite. Following trials with Sephora, Revolve and Urban Outfitters, Linktree is rolling out an affiliate marketing product, allowing creators to earn commission on purchases they help generate.
Rebecca Kersch (TANGGApp) featured in Vogue
Source: Vogue PH. The TANGGApp team with Rebecca, centre.
Rebecca Kersch, founder of portfolio company TANGGApp was featured in Vogue Phillipines recently. TANGGApp a global mobile payment app for ‘Overseas Filipinos’. Read the article for a truly fascinating insight into a founder whose life and career includes living in multiple continents, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and now a VC-backed fintech.
Born to a Dutch-Indonesian father and a Filipina-American mother and living across Europe and the United States, Rebecca Kersch was a child of many cultures
“Our vision is that sending money should be as easy as texting, regardless of where you live, what you earn, or how much you want to send”.
Dates for your diary
Over the last month, we have kicked off Flight Club; TEN13’s investor education series where we explore the fundamentals of venture capital, dive deeper into the theory of VC, and share our experiences in building a high-performing venture investment portfolio.
Our first session, Venture 101, covered what makes a venture scale business, based on our learnings from 120+ rounds of funding into 80+ companies at TEN13, and the Baxter Family Office before that.
Watch Venture 101 Recording HERE
If you would like to register for any of the coming sessions, follow the links to do so:
- Navigating Venture Terms (Wed, 14 August)
- The Due Diligence Process (Tue, 3 September)
- The Art and Science of Valuations (Wed, 18 September)
Please note that sessions are for wholesale investors only.
We also put together a Resource Bank with our favourite books, podcasts, reports, sites, events and more to learn more on Venture Investing. You can find the full list here.
Runway 2024 - Brisbane
We’re excited to share a Save The Date for our annual flagship conference in Brisbane: Friday 22 November.
Based on a strong reception last year, we have upsized the venue to The Princess Theatre in Woolloongabba.
More details will be released in coming months, but please reach out if you have suggestions for our speaker line-up. Previous years have included Luke Anear of Safety Culture, Paul Stovell of Octopus Deploy, Kim Teo & Adrian Osman of Mr Yum/Me&U, Daley Pearson of Ludo Studios (Bluey), Joel Pobar of Anthropic, Karen Nelson-Feld of Amplified Intelligence, Holly Cardew of Carted, Dean Boxall (Australian Swimming Coach), and many more.
Register your interest to attend below and we will contact you with speaker news, event updates, and early-bird tickets when live.
What we're talking about
🇿🇼 Stew Glynn on Startup Playbook: Our TEN13 Managing Partner Stew Glynn joined Rohit Bhargava on the Startup Playbook Podcast to chat growing up in Zimbabwe with hyper-inflation, stories of investing early in some great companies such as Clipchamp, Go1, me&u (Mr Yum), and the genesis of the TEN13 network based investing model.
✈️ Steve Baxter on High Flyers Podcast: Also on the podcasting scene, Steve Baxter chatted with Vidit Agarwal on leaving school to join the Army, exiting two businesses, and of course the inside stories from his time on Shark Tank.
What we're consuming
📝 Michael Mauboussin’s Articles: Mauboussin is Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global; a Morgan Stanley Multi-Asset Fund. These articles get deep into the data of how companies should be valued; like what actually leads to valuation multiple expansion?
🤖 Jenson Huang Keynote at Stanford: The most famous CEO in the world right now? Nvidia’s Jensen Huang talks on Nvidia’s 30-year journey to enabling the AI wave.
🦸♂️ Sachin and Adam Show with Max Marchione: TEN13 Scout, Max Marchione, just raised US$4m for his health startup: superpower.com (what a domain). In this episode he chats on building a business to change an industry from the ground up.
Who's hiring in the portfolio
🎮 iion is hiring in Sales Leads right across Europe and Australia, seeking candidates with experience selling AdTech solutions.
🧠 Amplified Intelligence is looking Data Scientists/ML Engineers, SWEs, and sales & marketing staff in Australia and the UK.
💳 Instant is looking for a Head of Growth Marketing, designers and Backend Engineers, all in Sydney.
🚗 AutoGrab is hiring a BE Developer and Customer Success Rep in Melbourne.
💄 Atelier is seeking a Head of Customer Success (Sydney).
🎶 Audience Republic is hiring across all business units in Toronto, Arizona and Sydney.
🔧 Partly is hiring a range of Engineers in NZ.
💻 Streamkap is hiring a Founding Growth Marketer and Senior Streaming Engineer.
A reminder about who we are
We're building out Australia & New Zealand's largest syndicated venture capital platform, with 500+ investors made up of early employees, execs, and founders of some of the world's most exciting companies.
If you are excited about investing in global startup companies alongside us and our investors then you can sign up here (AUS/NZ Sophisticated investors only).
Safe Travels,
The TEN13 Team