Defying the carnage: TEN13 doubles investors in 12 months

Early employees at Canva, Atlassian and Airbnb are backing this syndicate, which began as a private investment fund for a Shark Tank star.

The TEN13 team. Source: Supplied.

Withstanding the ongoing local tech rout is TEN13, which describes itself as Australia’s fastest-growing venture syndicate and has doubled its investment proposition to 550 sophisticated investors in 12 months, and says it plans to reach $100m in funds under management within the next year.

Started originally as an extension of Shark Tank star Stephen Baxter’s private investment fund, TEN13 has raised $70m in start-up investments to date and has invested in 32 technology start-ups since its inception in 2010.

Stew Glynn, TEN13’s partner and co-founder, said his company has brought in employees and founders of some of the nation’s biggest success stories including early employees at Atlassian and Canva as well as experienced operators from Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Woolworths and Google, who invest in TEN13’s portfolio start-ups and provide experience and support.

Australian investor and entrepreneur Steve Baxter addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Sydney, Saturday, August 10, 2019. (AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi)

New investors include Zsofi Paterson, chief executive of Loup & Centr, Chris Hemsworth’s fitness app, and TechnologyOne founder Adrian Di Marco.

“It’s been a busy time. Hitting 550 investors proves our network-based model is gaining momentum and will help us reach our goal of raising $100 million in the next year,” Mr Glynn said in an interview.

“Over the last two and a half years we have built what’s become an incredibly successful model, we call it network-based investing, and we’ve added 175 investors just in the last six months.

“With a typical venture fund model you raise into sort of a black box, where you don‘t really get access to seeing the companies and making your own decisions on the companies you want to support, whereas we provide that access and it’s also done on a deal by deal basis, so you can participate in the ones that you want to invest in, and you can kind of build your own unique portfolio.”

TEN13’s portfolio includes successful Aussie start-ups like Clipchamp, acquired by Microsoft last year, as well as unicorn Go1, fast-growing Mr Yum and zero-alcohol brewer Heaps Normal. Mr Glynn said the company is also on the hunt for deals in emerging markets like African and Latin American, and has invested in start-ups such as Treinta and fintech unicorn Chipper Cash.

Tech valuations are falling sharply across the board, with founders facing tougher terms from venture capital investors amid economic uncertainty and a broad sell-off in public tech stocks.

Mr Glynn said while some of TEN13’s portfolio companies won’t be immune from the turbulence, overall there’s still a relatively voracious appetite from investors to take advantage of investing in tech companies at their early stages.

“On the investor side, we survey investor sentiment every time we do a deal, and the market sentiment has taken a hit compared to last year,” Mr Glynn said. “But I believe there‘s still plenty of opportunity, and we’ve been able to continually grow our investor base.

“We’ve deployed a similar amount of capital this year compared to last year, so the growth in our investor base has sort of offset the general market sentiment. We’ve also done a survey of investors which found that despite the market outlook, two-thirds want to invest the same or more as they did last year, and a lot of them say that early-stage investing is not correlated to the broader markets anyway.”

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