Australia's Carthona hits $75m first close on VC fund

Dean Dorrell, a partner at the firm, told The Australian Financial Review that Hostplus would return as an anchor LP, accounting for the bulk of the fund. Discussions are underway with other superannuation funds – in addition to Carthona’s traditional high net worth individual and family office following – but the internal preference is to stay small.

“There are opportunities to take big amounts of capital into venture funds, but we purposely decided to keep it as a relatively small fund so we can be heavily involved with our companies, and then raise quite regularly, about every two years or so,” Dorrell said.

Hostplus committed AUD 50m to Carthona’s AUD 100m second fund in 2017. Prior to that, the firm spent three years as a deal-by-deal shop, with Fund I comprising an aggregation of individual investments. Total assets under management (AUM) are now approximately AUD 400m.

Carthona’s leadership team has expanded to four, with the promotion of Simone Lander and Damian Fox to partner level. They serve alongside incumbents Dorrell and Janes Synge.

The firm positions itself as an early investor, targeting pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds, and then doing follow-on investments as portfolio companies achieve scale. In one instance, it participated in eight different funding rounds for one company.

Past investments include Credible Labs, a consumer lending start-up that was acquired by a unit of Fox Corporation for USD 265m in 2019. Carthona has also backed the likes of payments player Paytron, debt collector Indebted, car financing start-up Driva, property technology business Cherre, and carbon reporting specialist Pathzero.

Last year, Australian lower middle-market private equity firm Advent Partners acquired a majority stake in another portfolio company, Melbourne-based virtual reality gaming business Zero Latency VR. Carthona, which first invested in 2014, retained a meaningful interest.

The firm’s initial forays into Web3 include backing voice artificial intelligence start-up Replica Studios, which creates synthesised speech from written scripts after sampling short audio clips. Dorrell noted that there are huge potential gaming and metaverse applications for the technology.

Last month, Australia-based AirTree Ventures announced a final close of AUD 700m on its latest VC fund. It comprises three vehicles, of which one is an AUD 50m pool earmarked for Web3 plays such as next-generation crypto companies and protocols.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Technology
• GPs
• Australia
• Fundraising
• Carthona Capital
• TMT
• Web 3.0
• metaverse