Leigh Jasper leads a new $50 million fund backed by Australian unicorn founders

A Cloud Guru’s Sam Kroonenburg has teamed up with Go1’s Andrew Barnes and more than a dozen other founders of tech companies that achieved a $1 billion valuation to back a new $50 million venture capital fund to invest in the next wave of potential unicorns.

Glitch Capital also involves two OGs of local tech, Aconex’s Leigh Jasper and Rob Phillpot (they exited the ASX-list construction tech platform for $1.6bn in 2017, pocketing around $90m each).

They’re calling it ANZ’s first ‘Founders Fund’, led by founders who’ve built and exited tech unicorns, with the collective experience of building companies now worth more than $50 billion.

The fund will invest $1-3 million in globally-focused tech startups with product-market fit, generating revenue of around $1m to $10m, and ready to scale. They’ll focus on sectors where the team and limited partners (LPs) have deep operational expertise.

More than 70% of the capital commitments come from people who’ve led unicorns, scale-ups and $100m+ companies, including nearly 50 execs from companies worth $100+ million.

Glitch’s LPs come from prominent tech companies such as Employment Hero, Leonardo AI, Pet Circle, Cover Genius,  Zeller, Neara, Who Gives a Crap, me&u, GROW Inc, and Upguard. The VC’s pitch is that startups they back will also score direct LP engagement to create a practical layer of founder-to-founder support.

Jasper, who also chairs LaunchVic and runs his own VC, Saniel Ventures, as well as the secondaries fund SecondQuarter Ventures said building a company is hard, chaotic and lonely.

“We’ve been there – multiple times – with the scrapes and scars to prove it,” he said.

“As you grow, it only gets harder to find partners who really get it. People who have been in your shoes. People who don’t pretend to have the answers, but share your obsession to build the future, and show up with curiosity, humility, and skin in the game.”

That skin represents around $15 million of the fund coming from the Glitch team, with Jasper, Phillpot, Kroonenburg – who’s back after A Cloud Guru’s $2 billion exit, with a new startup, Cuttable – and Payapps cofounder Geoff Tarrant, all on the investment committee.

The management team is Jo Lanyon, chief of staff at Gravel Road Ventures as investment principal; Saniel head of venture Ryan Fitzpatrick as managing partner; and former MessageMedia boss Paul Perrett as general partner. Fitzpatrick and Perrett have also built B2B database Firmable with Jasper.

Glitch has already made its first investment backing Melbourne edtech Cadmus, a digital assessment platform operating in Australia, the UK, and UAE, with the US in is sights this year.

Cadmus COO Brigitte Elliot said the expertise, networks and empathy of the Glitch team have been invaluable as they’ve tackled different challenges.

“What sets Glitch apart is having founders and operators around the table who genuinely understand our journey – the highs, the lows and the chaos of scaling,” she said.