2018 — the VC year in review
2018 was a momentous year for Square Peg and our portfolio of outstanding founders.
We grew the Square Peg team to 17 across Israel, Melbourne, Sydney and Boston, welcomed five new companies into the portfolio — 🇦🇺 Athena, 🇦🇺AgriDigital and 🇦🇺 Deputy, 🇮🇩 FinAccel and 🇮🇱 Puresec — and made a further eleven follow-on investments.
In total, we invested US$83.4m into our portfolio in both new and follow-on investments. The smallest cheque size was US$600k, the largest was US$11m. Our strategy has always been to invest as early as possible (Athena Home Loans was pre-product, pre-revenue when we invested) and then support over the long-term.
Here’s how 2018 went down.
Q1
🇺🇸🇮🇱 To kick the year off, we invested again in Vi (LifeBEAM)’s $20m Series B.
🇦🇺 We co-led AgriDigital’s A$5.5m Series A.
🇦🇺 Bugcrowd raised its A$33m Series C.
🌈 We hosted VC Office Hours for Women-led startups in Melbourne and Sydney alongside Blackbird, Airtree, Rampersand, Reinventure, Uniseed, Giant Leap and Bailador.
Q2
🇦🇺 We invested in Athena Home Loans A$15m Series A.
🇦🇺🇨🇳 We invested alongside Tencent and Sequoia China in Airwallex’s US$80m Series B — the third largest VC raise in Australia in 2018 – welcoming new investors from Hillhouse, Horizon Venture and Central Capital Ventura.
🌈 We hosted a mission to explore the Israeli high-tech ecosystem for our Limited Partners. Thank you to the Australian Embassy in Israel and the Israel Australia Chamber of Commerce for their support.
⚡️ We hosted the first of our bi-annual team offsites in Tel Aviv — the first time to Israel for much of the team and a very special moment in the history of Square Peg.
🌈 In Israel, we joined with 37 VC firms to establish an independent ombudsman’s office to handle sexual harassment allegations across the industry.
🌈 In Australia, alongside Blackbird Ventures, Airtree Ventures and Rampersand, we launched a Model Code of Conduct for the Australian Startup Community.
🇦🇺 Greg, Beau and the Prospa team showed outstanding resilience in response to the delay of their planned IPO. The team outperformed their prospectus forecast for the remainder of the year and continue to help small businesses access the capital they need to be successful. 2019 is sure to be an extraordinary year for the team.
Q3
🇮🇩 We led FinAccel’s US$30m Series B round. FinAccel, an Indonesian FinTech startup, provides access to credit for online shoppers through credit scoring and partnerships with >200 online platforms such as Alibaba’s Lazada and Tokopedia.
🇺🇸🇮🇱 We invested in ClimaCell’s US$45m Series B in August. ClimaCell is rapidly becoming the default microweather platform for the emerging technology economy; publicly announced partnerships include Ford, JetBlue, Delta and Gillette Stadium.
🇮🇱 We led a US$7m Series A in Puresec, an end-to-end security solution for serverless applications — riding, what we expect will be, a transformational shift in computing.
🇺🇸 Stripe raised a US$245m Series E.
⚡️ We welcomed Eliza Jackson as an Investment Analyst in Sydney’s team.
🌈 We kicked off a series of private networking dinners in Melbourne and Sydney for our portfolio CEOs and outstanding founders.
⚡️Neva Karni, our Office Manager in Israel, welcomed her beautiful baby into the world. Mazel tov!
🌈 We benchmarked our portfolio companies’ salary data with other Australian VC portfolios to support hiring and retention.
Q4
🇦🇺 We invested in Deputy’s US$81m Series B in November — the second largest VC round in 2018.
🇦🇺 We led Athena Home Loans’ A$25m Series B, welcoming Hostplus and Airtree.
🌈 We hosted our annual Investor Day in Melbourne. Each year, the highlight is unquestionably the portfolio founders who present; thanks to Emma Weston, CEO AgriDigital, Lucy Liu, COO Airwallex, Nathan Walsh, CEO Athena Home Loans and Shimon Elkabetz CEO ClimaCell.
🇸🇬 PropertyGuru raised a US$144m growth round from KKR to build upon its 55% market share in Southeast Asia.
⚡️ We welcomed two new team members in Sydney– Ina Hoxha as our Legal Associate and Camille Ferino as our Fund Accountant.
⚡️We hosted our second bi-annual Team Offsite in Melbourne with a focus on principles, people and process.
🚀 We made a handful of exciting additional investments that have not been announced.
⚡️ Over the year, we sent 52829 messages and uploaded 1015 files to slack. We participated in 000’s of hours of calls for boards and countless hours with our portfolio teams. We made one, really bad, birthday playlist. One of us bet big on bitcoin. We wrote and absorbed 13 x 360 Degree feedback assessments for each other. We celebrated the next career move for three colleagues: two moved into high-growth international startups and one into an international corporate. We also reviewed and refined the majority of our internal processes.
🚀 In short, it was a really magnificent year.
Square Peg’s mission is to back outstanding founders across Israel, ANZ and Southeast Asia. We are humbled to work with founders who are shaping the future. If you’re building something extraordinary and consider yourself a square peg in a world of round holes, we’d love to meet you in 2019.
Looking forward to it…!
