We love to meet ambitious founders as early as possible. When you feel really confident about the problem that you want to solve, how you want to solve it and you have an early MVP that a few people are using and really love then that is the right time to get in touch with us.Roughly 1/4 of our investments are pre-revenue, so we'd love the opportunity to hear from you at the idea phase.

You can learn more about our investment process here and how securing funding works here.

Not at all. We’re often the first institutional investor a team gets on board, but we can partner right across the funding journey. We invest anywhere from $200k pre seed cheques up to $25m growth stage cheques.

We have strong relationships with later stage investors and we’re very happy to make intros at the right time.

For those in the growth stage of a business, here are some tips on how we assess a startup before investing in a Series B and beyond.

We review every single opportunity, whether it’s through a warm or cold intro. We want to open up access to VC funding to everyone. We know that world-changing ideas can come from anywhere and that ambitious founders do things completely differently to what’s been done before.

If possible, reach out to someone in the AirTree team via a warm intro. However, it’s no issue at all if you are unable to and we’d still love to hear from you via the Get Investment form on our website. Alternatively, please feel free to send us an email at community@airtree.vc or DM one of our friendly investors on their socials, linked on their team page.

AirTree invests across sectors. First and foremost, we focus on backing exceptional people going after world-changing market opportunities.

Initially, we start with the founding team:

• Do you have deep domain expertise?
• A visceral connection to the problem?
• Are you making it your life’s work to try and solve it?
• Is your vision changing the game?
• Can you evangelise your vision to attract future capital and exceptional hires?
• Do you have the commercial hustle and resiliency to pivot if needed?
• And the self-awareness to constantly adapt?

Then, we look at the problem being solved:

• Is it a big problem for a large customer market?
• Are your execution processes (growth, distribution) scalable?
• Can you build a category defining business?
• Does your market have near unlimited potential?

Lastly, have you thought about what your unfair advantage is? This is what separates a good business from a great business.

Tobacco, drugs, alcohol, porn, gambling or weapons - they aren’t for us.

Yes, we definitely do! Please get in touch if you’re working on an idea in this space.

We invest in strengths, not the absence of weaknesses. We love meeting founders with:

Deep domain expertise. A visceral connection to the problem. Making it their life’s work to solve. As a student Melanie Perkins was frustrated by how long it took to learn how to use mainstream design software. Canva now has 55 million monthly active users and is valued as $15b.

The ability to evangelise their vision to attract future capital and exceptional hires. Nathan and Michael at Athena started with a vision to give Australians access to more affordable home loans. Before the product had even launched they’d secured $200m in funding to date.

The commercial hustle and resiliency to pivot if needed.

The self-awareness to constantly adapt in a rapidly changing environment.

When the time comes to finally meet, we’ve put together a guide on how to nail your first meeting with an investor.

We invest in strengths, not the absence of weaknesses. We love meeting founders with:

Deep domain expertise. A visceral connection to the problem. Making it their life’s work to solve. As a student Melanie Perkins was frustrated by how long it took to learn how to use mainstream design software. Canva now has 55 million monthly active users and is valued as $15b.

The ability to evangelise their vision to attract future capital and exceptional hires. Nathan and Michael at Athena started with a vision to give Australians access to more affordable home loans. Before the product had even launched they’d secured $200m in funding to date.

The commercial hustle and resiliency to pivot if needed.

The self-awareness to constantly adapt in a rapidly changing environment.

When the time comes to finally meet, we’ve put together a guide on how to nail your first meeting with an investor.

The majority of our partnerships are with Australian and New Zealand entrepreneurs as that’s where we can add the most value - helping build your team, connecting you with other founders, and providing access to expertise.

However, from time to time we come across companies that have proven themselves as market leaders globally and they’re looking for our help to expand into the Australian market.

When those companies are also in a space that’s particularly relevant to Australia  (like DroneDeploy) - then it’s a no-brainer for us to get involved.

For an initial investment in an early stage company we typically invest somewhere between $200k pre seed cheques up to $25m growth stage cheques. We also reserve a large part of our funds to support our companies in subsequent funding rounds.

We are one a small handful of Australian VCs that have the scale to support you through each stage of your business growth journey.

For the right business we can be as flexible as you need us to be. But we need to have enough of an ownership stake to dedicate meaningful time to your business when you need us to the most. All of our investments are minority stakes. We want you to be in control.

No. We’re happy to co-invest with other great investors who can bring value to the table and have a strong track record of doing so.

Further, in September 2020 we announced our Diversity Pledge. In this pledge, we commit that for every investment we lead, we will bring at least one investor from an underrepresented group onto the cap table, provided the founder is ok with it.

If we are writing a large cheque and/or leading your round, it’s likely that we will ask to be involved at the board level. Founders typically want to use our experience and track record to help them anticipate the challenges to come.

Though we don’t leave our impact just for the formal meetings - we’re always available to work through challenges when you need us.

Definitely! We have the largest investment and portfolio services team in Australia and we’re still growing. Check out our AirTree People page or our LinkedIn page to see what roles we have open.

We’re based in Surry Hills in Sydney but we’re just a Zoom call away from anywhere you are.

Of course! If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that here at AirTree we are incredibly passionate about opening up the black box that’s venture capital. We get it, building a successful startup is really hard and we want to make it as easy as possible for founders and startup teams.

Thus, in 2017 we began creating and publishing our collection of Open Source VC resources. Here’s everything we’ve released so far from startup documents & legal templates, lists & databases, guides & how-to’s and industry trends & analysis.