Earlier this year we celebrated our first decade in business. Our mission as a venture capital firm has never changed. We identify and partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs. Our 88 investments are in a wide range of companies building cutting edge technology for enterprises, developers, consumers, and service providers. Familiar portfolio companies include CrowdStrike, GitLab, Auth0, BigCommerce, Box, and DocuSign, as well as a new generation of companies like FTX, Airspace, Corvus, Incorta, Certn, SnapCommerce, TSM, and Upbound.
Venture Capital Firm’s Platform of Service
The platform of services we have built over the last decade is what makes us distinctive and different. Our services allow us to drive strategic revenue growth for our portfolio, shortening their time to reach a global scale. Raising capital and attracting top talent is not hard for extraordinary entrepreneurs. The #1 challenge entrepreneurs face at Series A and Series B is meeting growth expectations and attracting top talent to help them scale. Entrepreneurs want to work with partners that can share the accountability of their growth targets and help them grow into new markets – not partners that do not have a direct impact on their efforts.
First, we have built a dedicated team that drives sales and continue to expand our Revenue Bearing Relationships™ (RBR) in the Asia Pacific region, expanding into the USA and Europe. In our early days, we introduced portfolio companies like CrowdStrike, Box, and DocuSign to Telstra’s more than 2,000 enterprise customers. Today more than 50% of our portfolio work with more than Telstra enterprise customers. This past fiscal year, we closed more than US$80M in revenue that originated through our RBR sales pipeline. Since launching our RBR platform, we have closed more than US$450M in revenue and expect to be over US$1B within a few years.
During the past decade technology buyers, System Integrators (SI) and distributors have come to trust our cohesive vision of the future. They come to us to help them identify where the world is heading and how we can help them stay ahead. We’ve expanded our RBR program to include 20+ SIs including Infosys, The NextGen Group and smaller regional SIs including Sparx Solutions and Advent One covering regions across all over the world. For many of our portfolio companies, we help generate and expand their sales in new regions.
Investing Based on Data Science
As our RBR programs continue to grow and expand, so does the impact of data science on our investment decisions. We’ve combined Silicon Valley experience with quantitative Wall Street hedge funds acumen to custom build a data platform that supplements our investment decisions. Data science not only benchmarks every investment opportunity, but more importantly also identifies and sources investments. Companies sourced with data science significantly outperform other sources, both in terms of valuation uplifts and likelihood to raise more capital. We are in the early days of seeing this impact on returns, but the signals are strong that we are entering a new era in investing.
We have recently expanded our data science services to help portfolio companies source talent and identify new sales opportunities. Our early investment in data science gives us a distinct advantage and we continue to invest in expanding our offerings. This leverages the work that we have done in data science over the first five years. First to identify quality pre-growth companies when their digital exhaust trail is still nascent. Then, to enable financial benchmarking which drives diligence and selection. Then, to assist with portfolio management and now lastly to add value to the portfolio with the identification of talent and prospect opportunities.
Our approach to date has served us well with 88 investments resulting in more than 33 liquidity events, with 17 of those achieving unicorn and five decacorn status. More than 70% of our investments are in US companies while less than 30% is investment in leading technology companies from all over the world, particularly Asia. Using our growing global footprint, we’ve built a global sphere of knowledge that drives our investment thesis across all industries and geographies. We see global trends as they are emerging, and we combine this knowledge with data to know where the world is heading during the next seven to ten years.
Closing of our Third Fund
As we begin our second decade, we are announcing the closing of our third fund. The US$350M Telstra Ventures Fund III will be used to invest in pre-growth and early growth companies across all the Cs: Cloud, Cyber, Crypto, Carbon and Climate, Coders, Creators and Consumers as well as other fast-growing software and digital sectors. Series A and Series B are our sweet spots. As part of Fund III, we have already backed 15 extraordinary entrepreneurs and companies ranging from Cequence, ClosedLoop, Enable, Forage, FTX, LambdaTest, Lively, Pandion, Sleeper and Strata.
As a team, we are just getting started. Over the past decade, we’ve returned more than US$600M to our LPs. We are excited to welcome more than 35 new LPs to our family and our humbled with the continued commitment from Telstra Corporation. We will continue to invest in building a platform of services that deliver value beyond our initial investment. Our hustle starts when the ink is dried, and the Series is closed. We become confidants and we deliver real value.
– Mark, Matthew and all the Partners at Telstra Ventures