Let’s grow. Together. 🌱
Introducing Rampersand’s new $40m+ early stage fund
By Paul Naphtali
Disruption favours the fast. The world is changing all around us and we face some of the biggest challenges of humankind. Tech startups are best placed to move quickly and build the solutions that create the industries and business models of the future.
Disruption also favours the curious. The ambitious. The thoughtful. Those who win minds and hearts. Those who create movements with great products. Those who think “what if this works” rather than “what if this fails.” Those who think carefully about who they partner with.
It is for these founders that we have created the Rampersand Future Tech Fund, our fourth early stage venture capital fund.
The Rampersand Future Tech Fund 🚀
Our new fund will back founders who are building the breakthrough companies of the next generation. Founders with the insight, ambition and determination to create something that makes a dent in the world.
It is now unquestionable that these companies can be born in Australia and New Zealand. How different things are from when we first started investing in Australia back in 2013, where startups and venture capital were only just starting to get attention. Founders now have much more support and choice on where to seek funding. But it’s still not enough. There’s a chronic funding gap in early stage seed funding, which Rampersand’s Future Tech Fund aims to help fill.
No matter how much funding is available, building the next generation’s great companies is hard. And there is no single right answer for which growth path works best. For some founders, escape velocity is key, and raising several, large rounds of capital will help pave the way. For others, porpoising is more natural and leads to great success.
Over the past decade, we have written some of the earliest cheques into companies like Expert360, Goterra, Sendle, Skedulo and PredictHQ, and have worked with dozens of other startups across the world. We have worked with varied models, founders and company stages — from bootstrapped companies through to the size and market position of Google.
From our experience one thing has always been clear — great founders forge their own path. It is our role to support the founder journey with funding and insight, data, passion and compassion.
Why this fund size?
There is a gap in the Australian and New Zealand funding landscape between the $2b super-backed funds, which do an amazing job driving the overall growth of the ecosystem and can write big cheques for later stage companies, and the smaller angel groups and funds, which do an amazing job writing smaller cheques that help get companies started.
The Rampersand Future Tech Fund is designed to help bridge that gap, where it is small enough to accommodate the various pathways a founder may wish to pursue, but big enough to follow-on where it makes sense. And in that way we maintain a vested interest in the companies throughout their journey, and an ability to support through to later round VC funds that suit best. While we love backing unicorns, with a smaller fund size, we don’t rely upon them to generate the value and returns our investors look for.
Speaking of investors, this is a wonderful time to thank the nearly 100 families and individuals who have backed Rampersand to date, including committing $30m to the Future Tech Fund already (in just a few weeks). Our new fund remains open to investors who would like to join the community — you can get in touch with us here if you’d like to learn more.
We’re called Rampersand for a reason
The name Rampersand comes from our unwavering passion to help companies ramp through the early stages, and more¹. More capital, more support, more value. We have backed 24 teams at seed stage from our first three funds. 80% of our portfolio companies continue to thrive. Two thirds have raised a successful Series A round (double the historical industry average of just more than one third!), and we are proud to have participated in the vast majority. And nearly half (so far) have gone on to raise successful Series B and C rounds. Across Rampersand’s portfolios, the companies have increased in value on average by 800%.
We believe our role is to recognise that no two founding teams will follow the same path, and we can support them regardless. Every pathway is personal and it’s important to bring on partners who match the ambition and values of the founders.
It takes diversity of thought and experience to help companies succeed, not just with funding pathways but also building teams and ecosystem. This new fund will also see us doubling down on our commitment to equalising access to capital with programs like The Giant Warm Intro, continuing investing in a balanced portfolio, and recruiting and promoting a diverse team.
Supporting founders during their early ramp stage
With this fresh new funding pool, we have also expanded our team to broaden our support for founders. We now have our core investment team of Nicole, Taryn, Chris and Hunter, our M&A team of Michael and Martin, comms and community run by Alicia, operations led by Sunday, and Hugh Williams as our Venture Partner.
Whether you want support and guidance on go-to-market strategy, technology, product, finance or general team and company-building, or connections with other founders, potential customers or employees. Or if you just need an investor who knows when to get out the way and support from the sidelines, believing in you even on those days when maybe your own belief is tested. These are the reasons Rampersand exists.
Launching a new fund is exciting, it brings new energy and new opportunity and a re-upping of ambition. We have the opportunity to look a decade into the future and get the ball rolling now, with both patience and a sense of urgency. We are but one part of a fast growing ecosystem, and a global movement where tech will be at the heart of everything we do.
If you share that feeling and excitement for the future — whether as a founder, a team member or an investor/partner in Rampersand — and would like to join our journey, we invite you to please get in touch.
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¹ The ‘&’ character in our logo also talks to our emphasis on collaboration. From wikipedia: The ampersand is used by the Writers Guild of America to denote two writers collaborating on a specific script, rather than one writer rewriting another's work. In screenplays, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all.