$10 billion flows to Australian start-ups in banner year

Australia’s start-up and venture capital scene had a banner year in 2021, with more than $10 billion invested in local firms but the number of companies with female founders that received funds remains stuck below 20 per cent.

A report compiled by Folklore Ventures, a fund, and Cut Through Venture, a newsletter that tracks the industry, recorded 682 deals in 12 months at a value more than three times the $3.1 billion of investments noted in 2020.

Tanisha Banaszczyk, a principal at Folklore Ventures.

The figures, compiled from public announcements, private data sets and questions to investors, do not include additional deals that their makers disclosed in general terms but refused to detail.

It shows a start-up ecosystem flourishing in a year of cheap money but also an increasingly large group of funds, investors and founders spurring its value upwards as Australia’s technology sector becomes an increasingly mature part of the economy.

Not long ago $1 billion in deals was seen as a huge year.

However, just 19 per cent of investments went to a company with at least one female founder. That is up only 1 percentage point on the year before. While the value of those deals went up from $860 million in 2020 to $2.2 billion in 2021, that accounted for a smaller percentage of the overall pool of money, falling from 28 per cent to 22 per cent.

Figures from the industry’s peak lobby group Tech Council of Australia, drawing on 2016 census data, peg the overall number of women in the technology sector at 26 per cent.

Tanisha Banaszczyk, a principal at Folklore, which is led by two men and one woman at the partner level, said Australia was doing better than the US on some measures of gender equality and had been improving. “But progress needs to continue,” she said in a statement.

“When considering other measures, such as the lasting impact of COVID on women and the number of deals done that involve female founders, there’s a concern today that too few early-stage, female-founded companies are being funded, or that too few females are founding companies to begin with.”

Sally Metelerkamp, founder of a company called Lived (and formerly known as Arli) that helps people through alcohol issues, said more diversity among venture capital firms would aid the industry. “It’s just really about the women who are leaders now making sure we pay it forward.”

Other women in the industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described a sector that was grappling with its gender problem but faced entrenched societal questions, such as the number of women studying in STEM fields, notions of what a good leader looks like, and gaps in confidence.

Female founders were far more likely to say that their gender impacted on their ability to raise money, at more than 80 per cent, than their male colleagues. About 15 per cent of men saw their gender as a factor.

Some of the largest deals are no longer wholly Australian. It is not common for overseas investors to put funds into Australian companies, but some locally founded firms are now going abroad. The ad technology company Rokt, for example, raised $458 million in a round last year and is counted in the report’s statistics though it is headquartered in New York.

Financial technology and enterprise software firms were the two largest parts of the Australian start-up sector, by deal count.

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