Superfunds top-up Series B for Australia's Morse Micro
Five Australian superannuation funds have backed a AUD 30m (USD 20.4m) investment in local Wi-Fi chipmaker Morse Micro, extending a recent Series B round to AUD 170m.
They include TelstraSuper, Hesta, Hostplus, UniSuper, and NGS Super. UniSuper’s contribution was managed by Uniseed, which received a AUD 75m LP commitment from the superfund earlier this year. Likewise, NGS participated in partnership with Blackbird Ventures.
Uniseed has ties to several local universities and to Australian science agency CSIRO, the inventor of Wi-Fi technology and an early backer of Morse Micro. Blackbird raised Australia’s largest-ever VC fund last month with AUD 1bn in commitments from NGS, Hostplus, Hesta, and TelstraSuper, among others.
Australian superannuation funds have become increasingly active in technology and have ramped up their participation in the local VC space during the pandemic as many family offices held fire. This activity has included a mix of fund commitments and direct investing.
Hostplus is generally recognised as the most aggressive investor in the trend. In addition to Blackbird, it has supported funds from Square Peg Capital, Artesian Venture Partners, Brandon Capital, SproutX, and Main Sequence Ventures, a CSIRO spinout that seeded Morse Micro.
Morse Micro’s initial Series B investment of AUD 140m came last September with support from Main Sequence, Blackbird, Uniseed, Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), Skip Capital, Spring Capital, and Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister. Japan-listed semiconductor company MegaChips led the round.
Morse Micro was founded in 2016 to produce chips and modules using HaLow technology. HaLow essentially increases the range of Wi-Fi connections by more than 10x and allows the radio signals to penetrate more solid obstructions with lower power usage.
The company raised a AUD 24m Series A featuring Blackbird, Uniseed, CEFC, Skip, and Right Click Capital in 2019. Blackbird, Skip, CEFC, and Main Sequence added another AUD 18m the following year.
The capital will be used to scale manufacturing and advance R&D with a view to serving a growing internet-of-things (IoT) market. UK-based IT research firm Transforma Insights estimates that there are currently 7.7bn IoT devices in circulation globally, and that that number will grow to 25.4bn in the next seven years.
“Don’t underestimate this market,” Mike Nicholls, a partner at Main Sequence, told AVCJ in September. “People say IoT didn’t really have the impact we thought it would, but they’re not thinking about it the right way. All these sensors out there in the world – we’re not thinking of them like IoT devices, but they are. There are literally hundreds of millions of products shipping a year.”
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