Right now, there’s a fantastic “Startup Spring” festival going on across Australia, organised by StartupAUS, with hundreds of great events across 3 weeks. I noticed that veteran US investor Bill Tai did a tour of several major cities last week. Wondering whether he had any Australian connection, I looked up Bill’s credentials and found that he is in fact an investor in high-profile Aussie startups Shoes of Prey and Canva.
That got me wondering: Who else is investing in Australian startups? This would be useful information for some people to know, especially if they’re planning on raising venture capital funding but would prefer to keep the company local. If only there was a database of startup investments that could be queried programmatically…
Why, hello there, Crunchbase API! 🙂
So, without further ado, here is the…
List of Startup Investors (as recorded on Crunchbase) in Companies That Only Have Offices in Australia:
(Note: there is some discussion at the end about why the list is incomplete)
- Austhink Software
- BugHerd
- DesignCrowd
- Distra
- Engana Pty
- MetaCDN
- Monitoring Division
- Ofidium
- Protagonist Therapeutics
- StyleTread
- Broccol-e-games
- CoinJar
- Dragonfly List
- Lexim
- Tablo Publishing
- Vinspi
- BT Imaging
- Hatchtech
- Manjrasoft
- OPAL Therapeutics
- Spinifex Pharmaceuticals
- Agworld Pty Ltd
- Dealised
- Filter Squad
- PolyActiva
- BuyReply
- Canva
- biNu
- goCatch
- Hatchtech
- OPAL Therapeutics
- Spinifex Pharmaceuticals
- Xenome
- CriticalArc Pty
- Liquid State
- Senath Pty Ltd
- Tapestry
- App.io
- Canva
- Ninja Blocks
- biNu
- Ninja Blocks
- Shoes of Prey
- Tyro Payments
Southern Cross Venture Partners
- Brisbane Materials Technology
- Shoes of Prey
- Wooboard.com
- 121cast
- Dealised
- Venuemob
- Hatchtech
- Protagonist Therapeutics
- Xenome
- Catapult Genetics
- SigNav Pty Ltd
- TGR BioSciences
- BT Imaging
- Enikos
- Hitwise
- Canva
- Posse
- Wooboard.com
- Pygg
- Canva
- Shoes of Prey
- BuyReply
- biNu
- Scoopon
- The Catch Group
Blackbird Ventures (Australia)
- Canva
- Ninja Blocks
- 121cast
- MetaCDN
- Posse
- Zookal
- Elastagen
- Endoluminal Sciences
- Wooboard.com
- biNu
- DesignCrowd
- Pygg
- Ninja Blocks
- Tapestry
- Canva
- Ninja Blocks
- Pygg
- Shoes of Prey
- The Naked Song
- Shoes of Prey
- Shoes of Prey
- biNu
- Locatrix Communications
- App.io
- DesignCrowd
- Flippa
- Canva
- Shoes of Prey
- DesignCrowd
- Canva
- Lexim
- The Catch Group
- DesignCrowd
- biNu
- Tapestry
- Tapestry
- Lexim
- biNu
- App.io
- Jayride.com
- Canva
- Hatchtech
- THE ICONIC
- BuyReply
University of Melbourne Endowment fund
- MetaCDN
- biNu
- Locatrix Communications
- Engana Pty
- Immune System Therapeutics
- CriticalArc Pty
- THE ICONIC
- Ninja Blocks
- Paymate
- App.io
- biNu
- Panviva
- App.io
- biNu
- App.io
- Venuemob
- Brisbane Materials Technology
- Oceanlinx
- SigNav Pty Ltd
- Monitoring Division
Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF)
- PolyActiva
- Paymate
- Canva
- Protagonist Therapeutics
- StyleTread
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
- Paymate
- THE ICONIC
Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation
- Protagonist Therapeutics
- Canva
- Engana Pty
- Ozsale
- Xenome
- CriticalArc Pty
- The Catch Group
- 99dresses
EspÃÂrito Santo Tech Ventures
- Oceanlinx
- Oceanlinx
- Shoes of Prey
- Webspy
- Spinifex Pharmaceuticals
Brandon Biosciences Fund 1 (BBF1)
- PolyActiva
- Hatchtech
- BT Imaging
- OPAL Therapeutics
- OPAL Therapeutics
- cookdinner
- 121cast
- StyleTread
- Engana Pty
- EnviroMission
- Internet Marketing Academy Australia
- HealthEngine
- ShedWorx
- IRL Gaming
- HealthEngine
- SEE Forge
- Protagonist Therapeutics
- ArriveBefore
- StyleTread
- Storyz
- Shoes of Prey
- Quickflix
- Jump On It
- iconDial
- Coridon
Filtro Private Equity ( Silicon Valley )
- Zookal
- 4Less
- Wooboard.com
Consolidated Press Holdings (CPH)
- The Catch Group
- Xenome
Not the Full Picture
I know this list is incomplete – probably very incomplete – but this is for a couple of reasons out of my control.
Firstly, the Crunchbase API search doesn’t seem to search in office addresses. So, for example, if you search for ‘Sydney’, you won’t get Shoes of Prey, because the word Sydney only appears in their address and nowhere else in their profile.
Secondly, the Crunchbase geo-search doesn’t seem to work. I don’t know what it tries to do when you search for Sydney (does it search Sydney, Australia or Sydney, Nova Scotia?), but you get less results for ‘within 100 miles of Sydney’ than you do for just ‘Sydney’. It also says there are 20 pages of results for Sydney, but any request to get page 8 or higher results in a 500 HTTP response.
Lastly, the Crunchbase data is just not complete. Many companies have either not listed their funding rounds or they’ve listed the funding but not the people and companies who contributed. When that Startup -> Investor link isn’t in Crunchbase, I obviously can’t get it into this list.
Notice also that I’ve excluded any companies that have an office that’s not in Australia. Why would I do that? Well, that’s the best definition I could come up with for an “Australian Startup” given the data that’s available in Crunchbase. Unfortunately, that means there’s probably quite a few successful ventures left out of the list because they have expanded globally or moved their HQ, for example ScriptRock and Grabble. What’s really missing from Crunchbase that would make this query a whole lot easier is a record of “Founded in: City, Country”.
Think You or Your Startup Should be Listed?
If you think you or your startup should be on this list, I’d be happy to update it. First thing you need to do is update your Crunchbase profile so that the relationships are there, then get in touch with me @evolvable and let me know what you added.
Image credit: ‘Socialized Energy (AKA Smart Grid)‘ by Zachary Veach
Hey Graham, Nice summary.
While I’m a (long time ago) ex-programmer, as a Virtual CFO these days my extraction / analysis tool of choice these days is Excel. I’m interested in whether we could put together a “heat map” kinda view – something to do with Investors, $, time so wanted to extract / have a play with the data.
Gonna register as a developer etc but wondered whether you’d share the code you used to extract this so we can maybe keep this evolving.
Thanks
Remco
Hi Remco. I’m glad you found it useful. I’d love to be able to share my code but unfortunately it’s just a bunch of shell commands in my bash history. I originally thought, “I should be able to grep this stuff out in a couple of lines,” and then three nights later I had the info I wanted but no repeatable process.
I’ve since found that I think angellist.co has a lot of info that’s not on CrunchBase, so I’ll probably do a redux at some point and will be able to share the code I use for that.
Cheers,
Graham.
PS What’s a “*Virtual* CFO”?
Graham, another problem is that a lot of these deals are very old and washed up already. There also is lot more private investment than this list. Tough problem but thanks for the effort. Ian
Thanks for the feedback, Ian. You make a good point on the historical front, and in retrospect including the date of the deals would be pretty useful. Re. private investments – yep, the list is incomplete. However, with the purpose of the list partly being to inform those people who might be looking for investment in the future, I’m assuming those who’ve put their startup investments on CrunchBase are more likely to be interested in being getting involved in future funding rounds than those who are keeping their investing habits to themselves.
Cheers,
Graham.
This is an impressive list.
It’s great to see so many startup’s getting attention from abroad.
Being active in the startup space with our Project Management SaaS – Trigger, we get really positive responses when users see we’re Australian based. It’s definitely an advantage in the competitive field we’re in!