A steady pace of funding for quality companies, venture credit, and merger and acquisition activity could be on the cards, some of the top funds tell Forbes Australia.
Dr Michelle Deaker is the founder and Managing Partner of OneVentures, one of Australia’s largest VC firms. The business has almost $800 million in assets under management and has a focus to support women across all parts of the firm and the venture capital investing landscape.
“When you think about how investors are investing, I think there’s a couple of things that are happening. First of all, we’re sort of keeping capital back to fund our own companies because there could be some capital scarcity, because of the high valuations that happened in 2022. Companies have taken capital at higher valuations than they normally would have. That means they’ve got to grow their businesses to sort of counterbalance that and they need capital to get there. So we’re seeing quite a lot of bridge rounds.”
“We have a venture credit product. We’ve seen increased demand for that because people are using it to extend their capital runways. And we’ve just brought a new fund to market right now. That is really to play into that trend that we’re seeing where investors are wanting to extend the runway as well as putting in maybe some bridge capital. They’re looking for venture credit to help drive their businesses to the next value milestones before they go back out to raise again. Venture credit in the US is generally somewhere around 15% of the market for overall venture financing. In Australia, it’s about 2%.”
Read the full article in Forbes Australia
Posted in — Forbes
