6 Most Active Seed Investors in the Banking Industry of Australia and Oceania

Intro

For the Australia and Oceania region countries, the Banking industry seems to show rather positive improvements and, following the global trend, new technologies emerging on the market. In Australia alone, EY reports, the cash earnings of the four central banks increased by 62%, reaching $13.8B by the first half of 2021. The abovementioned modern approaches in the field also enlarge their impact. For example, 20.6% of Australians visited branches in 2019 compared to 45% in 2018. At the same time, a 45% share of the population was already utilizing mobile banking services back in 2019.  Startups in the sphere of Banking are successfully focusing on improving various aspects of the industry, from cash and credit transactions to transaction processing and debit cards operations. Out of about 460 seed rounds held in Australia and Oceania over the last 5 years, 11 rounds (2.4%) were performed in this very field. 6 VCs and corporate investors stand out by their activity and the number of rounds they took part in. In descending order, they can be depicted as follows:

6 Most Active Seed Investors in the Banking Industry of Australia and Oceania
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography - 5 in 6 top Banking industry investors are based in Australia. 4 of the Australian funds come from Sydney, another one is from Melbourne. One of the sampled VCs derives from Auckland, New Zealand. In most cases, the fund's and the startup's country of origin coincide.
• Industry Focus - Mostly attracted by the Finance field, investors on the list also support projects in Information Services, EdTech, and Security. Among the examples of the startups which draw some funding are Finantier, Bibit.id, and Kasada.
• Important Years - The establishment of the oldest fund from the sample dates back to 1911, while the newest one exists only 3 years, starting from 2018. With 2019 and 2017 being quite productive years, the VCs closed the majority of their deals in 2020.
• Investments - Most commonly, the listed funds take part in 2, sometimes in up to 6 rounds annually. Presented by Icehouse Ventures, the maximum of investment rounds is 64; the minimum is only 2. Overall, this figure averages at 27.5 while its median is 24.5. The lead investments differ from the average in a range of -54.33 to 29.0 percentage points. On average, the value of this index is -4.44, and the median equals 4.45. Hence, some firms from the list choose to act as lead investors more frequently than others.
• Typical Rounds - Regarding the number of partakers, it is more characteristic for the sampled companies to participate with 3-4 than 5-6 investors. The startups they invest in are likely to receive less than 100 thousand US dollars at a time; not so often, the round size climbs up to USD 5-10 million. In descending order, the most usual multipliers for portfolio companies are 0.51, 0.36, and 0.24. For the rest, this coefficient equaled 0.0 at the last known valuation.

Overall, the most active investors in Australia and Oceania's Banking sphere tend to invest in Finance, Information Services, EdTech, and Security fields. Most of them come from the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne; some are located in Auckland, New Zealand. Usually, the listed VCs invest less than 100 thousand per round 2 times a year; in some cases, they participate 2-6 times yearly and propose 5-10 million dollars per round.