Techboard Australian Startup and Young Tech Company Annual Funding Report FY20

Techboard is pleased to be presenting its third Australian Startup and Young Tech Company Annual Funding Report for FY20. During FY20 Techboard captured 895 funding events for 726 Companies from 385 funders. The Techboard Team has been analysing this data, comparing it to our data for previous periods to extract insights, movements and trends. This report is the result of that analysis. Primary author on the report was Rafael Kimberley-Bowen, co-founder of Techboard.

The funding and investor data underlying this report is now available to Techboard's Commercial Subscribers along with all data from the previous two years, fully searchable and interlinked via Techboards all new Funding Event Search Engine.

Some key findings and insights from the Report.

Total startup and tech company funding in FY20 was almost $7bn, in line with FY19 but almost double FY18 (although if the $1.6 billion acquisition of PEXA is omitted from Techboard’s fy19 data, funding in FY20 increased 33% from FY19 levels.)
895 transactions were recorded in FY20, a 7% increase on FY19.
On a per capita basis, Victoria had a strong FY19 ($352) and minimal growth into FY20 ($356) while NSW grew strongly (up 115%) from FY19 ($229) to FY20 ($492), but in both states fintech megadeals drove the high funding levels.
Private investment almost doubled in value (98% increase) from FY19’s $2.26b to $4.48b with the number of private investments captured rising 23% to 377 deals.
Australian startup and tech funding has generally proved resilient to the COVID-19 storm. The third quarter of FY20 saw a drop-off in the number of transactions, but this was concentrated in public markets rather than private deals.
Blackbird was the Australian VC invested in the highest overall value of deals during 2020, being involved in 14 investments totalling $490 million.
US-based Sequoia Capital (including its Asian subsidiary Sequoia Capital China), was the VC investor that invested in the highest value of deals in Australia with six deals totalling $643 million, including Canva, Airwallex, CultureAmp and Q-Ctrl.
The most active Australian VC in terms of number of deals was Artesian who backed 44 eligible companies with a combined disclosed deal value of $36 million (although the majority of Artesian’s investments were for undisclosed amounts).
Angel group activity increased significantly by around 60% in FY20, with $14m invested by the major angel groups.