Blackbird, VC kurucularına yakın 740 milyon $ Fund VI rekoru kırdı

Blackbird hits $740M Fund VI record close to back VC founders

Kristie Neo

Thu, August 27, 2026 at 3:28 AM GMT+3 7 min read

Blackbird, one of the longest-running venture capital funds in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), has fully closed its sixth fund at a record A$1.05 billion (about $740 million).

The Sydney-based VC drew re-commitments from Australian sovereign and superannuation investors, including the Future Fund, Aware Super, HESTA and Hostplus. It also received cheques from new LPs from the US and Asia, including Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Adams Street Partners, and Schroders.

This is among the region's largest VC fund closes, as institutional LPs flock to large, established investors amid a flight to quality.

According to Blackbird general partner Samantha Wong, the venture firm has distributed $1.4 billion on a total of $2.1 billion invested across half a dozen transactions since its 2012 inception.

Most of these exits took place in the past few years, with secondaries playing a major role, she added.

"We returned $300 million earlier this year when one of our portfolio companies, Eucalyptus, exited to Nasdaq-listed Hims and Hers. ... They acquired the company for $1.15 billion, and we were at 26% of the company at exit, so that was an amazing outcome. That returned 2x times that fund," said Wong in an interview with PitchBook.

Blackbird was also one of the first funds in ANZ to complete a GP-led secondary transaction back in 2019.

The firm sold a minority position in its first fund to StepStone and HESTA for A$100 million, bringing the fund's return on capital to 3.4x at the time. The process allowed early investors to exit while giving Blackbird extra runway to stay invested in its founders.

Blackbird focuses on writing early-stage cheques in Australasian founders building global businesses. Its Fund VI is split into two vehicles—A$465 million for early-stage cheques and A$581 million for growth-stage follow-ons.

The fund is sector-agnostic, investing across a range of verticals including AI-related sectors such as agentic commerce, infrastructure and chip-enabling technologies.

While it has historically kept a 70:30 ratio between its AI/SaaS and deep-tech portfolio companies, LPs have also been querying Blackbird about its deep-tech exposure in their search for something more "differentiated," shared Wong.

Some of Blackbird's well-known portfolio companies include SaaS unicorns such as Canva, Airwallex, PsiQuantum, Halter and Heidi.

She added that LPs were also looking for the ability to repeat past successes.

"I think what LPs really responded to in this fundraise was evidence of repeatability and that there's quite a differentiated and diverse set of logos in each of our portfolios. That's not what you find in most US and Chinese VC portfolios. We have a very global characterisation from the beginning," Wong said.

Interview transcript with Samantha Wong, general partner, Blackbird

This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Samantha Wong, general partner at Sydney-based VC firm Blackbird

Courtesy of Blackbird

This is Blackbird's largest fund close. Why close such a large fund?

Fund VI is really about repeating the winning formula we had in our last fund and the funds before it. We have two vehicles under Fund VI, an early-stage and a growth fund, but our bread and butter is investing in pre-seed and seed Australasian founders wherever they are in the world. We try to find them as early as possible at the ideas or pre-product stage, put in a small cheque with sizeable ownership of about 15% and double down as they scale to grow our ownership to as much as 25-35% of the cap table. We've done that very successfully over five vintages and returned very meaningful distributions from this strategy. So far, we have distributed $1.4 billion on $2.1 billion invested through half a dozen transactions. I think that is what global allocators have recognised coming into this latest fund.

What is Blackbird's exit strategy like? How much goes into IPOs, M&As and secondaries, and how do you see the exit pipeline look like in the next six to 12 months?

The short answer is all of the above. Obviously, it's on a case-by-case basis, since each company is different, but a lot of our exits have come through secondaries. Not only by selling to growth-stage investors but also GP-led secondaries. We did a continuation vehicle back in 2019 which returned 3x our first fund to investors. M&A is also a big part of it as well. We returned $300 million earlier this year when one of our portfolio companies, Eucalyptus, exited to Nasdaq-listed Hims and Hers, a digital weight loss behemoth. They acquired the company for $1.15 billion, and we were at 26% of the company at exit, so that was an amazing outcome. That returned 2x times that fund.

The fundraising climate has shifted significantly since your last fund in 2022. The global VC market has corrected, LPs want more distributions to paid-in, and AI is still eating up SaaS. Have you seen any new or different concerns arise in your conversations with LPs?

I think what LPs really responded to in this fundraise was evidence of repeatability and that there's quite a differentiated and diverse set of logos in each of our portfolios. That's not what you find in most US and Chinese VC portfolios. We have a very global characterisation from the beginning.

We have also been generalist investors since day one. Our first fund was 70% software, 30% deep tech, and that ratio has held roughly over our five previous funds. LPs have [also] spent a lot of time talking to us about the non-AI and software companies in our portfolio. They're looking for something differentiated, and we definitely have a lot of that.

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Australia's capital gain tax was a big topic among the ANZ VC/startup community this year. There were concerns that the ongoing policy discussions might hurt ANZ venture return expectations and accelerate brain drain from the market. Did you see this come up at all in your discussions?

Surprisingly, it came up little in this fundraise. I would say broadly speaking, from the founder perspective, there are a range of opinions on this subject. There aren't many founders who decide not to found a company for tax reasons, and the benefits of building in ANZ do outweigh the negatives of a CGT change. I think the government has been quite constructive [in] engaging with the VC/startup sector, and we're confident they will make the right carveouts for [employee stock ownership plans] in particular, which are very important to sustaining and growing the startup ecosystem.

Australia has developed a strong reputation for building SaaS unicorns, but that entire sector is being eaten up by AI as we speak. How has that affected Blackbird's SaaS portfolio so far?

There are probably two aspects here.

On the valuation front, we run an external valuation process, so an external agency recommends that price and that is done on a quarterly basis, or an interim basis if required. We have to do that because most of our capital comes from Australian superannuation funds, who require daily pricing. So that's something that's a bit different from US funds, who typically don't do that.

The second aspect is about how companies are responding to AI. I would say this has been a really interesting and energising period because founder-led companies are uniquely equipped to do reinvention.

We had an offsite with some of our growth-stage founders this year in California, between the AI-native companies which are two to three years old and companies which are 10 years old. We wanted to exchange ideas on what's working, what's not, and the kind of strategies to take.

With AI, that could be everything across organisation or structure re-design to very technical stuff, like how do you bring down your token costs and harness them efficiently? How do you use open weight models efficiently?

So there's been a bit of a renaissance within the portfolio for sharing some extremely tactical strategies and taking advantage of the tools that are available. That has been an interesting observation during this period.

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News