Techboard is pleased to present this Funding Bulletin for March Quarter 2022. Total investments captured for the quarter come to just shy of $3b, making this quarter the biggest March Quarter ever, almost tripling the March Q result in 2021 ($1.162b) and the second largest quarter ever captured by Techboard, behind the December Q 2021 ($3.494b). View Techboard's previous bulletins and funding reports.
An important point to note about which funding events we capture and how we categorise funding events. Where a company announces a raise and reveals that part of the raise is equity and part is debt we only record the equity component as Private/VC investment and record the rest as debt financing. So for example in February Scalapay announced that it had closed a Series B raise that was reported in some media channels as a $692m series B raise. We only recorded $340m of that as Private/VC investment and recorded the balance of $352m as a separate funding event categorised as Debt funding. We also have not generally be capturing funding events for very mature companies, such as Cyara (founded in 2006) which announced a $600m raise in January 2022.
Techboard Data Capture - How you can help.
Techboard has been collecting funding data on Australian Startups since 2017, with a focus on startup funding and investments. Techboard also collects data on who is funding the companies. Most of our data has come from semi-automatic algorithmic collection, supplemented with manual research. We have also recently been starting to supplement this with data from regulatory filings. Techboard has also been supplementing its data with information obtained from Investors and Companies who can report deals directly.
Techboard has recently partnered with the Tech Council of Australia and is its data provider for information on Startups and Startup Funding. Techboard also supplies its data to Australian Governments. To ensure that we are providing the best and most up to date funding data to inform policies and strategies to support the growth of startups in Australia Techboard is now actively reaching out to Startup and Tech investors to validate, verify and supplement the info we have on their investments.
We will be reaching out but you can also contact us to claim your investor profile on Techboard and check the deals we have collected for you.
Historical cumulative funding by Month
Private investment levels for the March quarter almost equalled year to date funding to 30 June 2021.
Investment by Deal Size
Numbers of deals per size band are up across the board (apart from the sub $m range but that may be due to the usual delays in reporting these amounts), with most size bands already reporting levels well ahead of this time last year, with the $20-$50m band sowing the most growth with over 40% of last years level of deals having been exceeded.
Analysis by State
In our Funding Bulletin for CY2021 we reported that New South Wales Startups had increased their proportion of National investment levels from 48% of national investment in 202 to 56% flowing to New South Wales startups in 2021. The March quarter 2022 saw that proportion increase again, this time to 70% of investment funds, and 52% of deals.
Analysis by Category
Comparing completed and announced raises in the March Quarter highlights two emerging categories, entertainment (dominated by Songtradr's planned multi million Series E raise) and cleantech/energy.
Analysis by Team Gender
We have only undertaken a very brief analysis of gender diversity in investments for this Bulletin and are planning much more extensive analysis once results are in for the full Financial year, but it appears that the decline in the proportion of funding to teams with at least one female founder report in our CY21 Bulletin has continued with the proportion of deals down to 22.8% (from 31% in 2021 and 36% in 2020) and to 5.6% of funds (down from 26% in 2021 and 45% in 2020).
