We were founded on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world—and that brilliant, ambitious founders would sit at the heart of this change. We're squarely focused on helping these founders succeed.
How we help
- Investment: First and foremost, we invest in people, and focus on building relationships with empathy and alignment. We partner with remarkable founders and work to ensure they've got the strategic insights and help they need across multiple rounds.
- Talent: Our founders tell us that scaling teams is the most challenging part of leading high-growth companies. We have a dedicated team that can help diagnose, design and build the foundations of each startup's talent engine, tailored each time.
- Community: You're not alone in your founder journey. Building a business is made easier with friends and well-connected allies—a resource we have plenty of. Join a peer group who will be kind, honest and interested in your journey.
Frequently asked questions
Whether you're curious about our terms or timeframes, below is a good overview of how we do things.
What's the 101 on Square Peg?
Square Peg is a global investment firm on a mission to empower exceptional founders. With investing teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Singapore, Square Peg invests in emerging technology companies across the internet economy.
Square Peg today manages US$3 billion in assets across its venture capital, opportunities and global listed equities funds and in addition has delivered material realised returns of US$0.6 billion. Since 2012 we have invested in over 50 companies including Fiverr, Canva, Rokt, FinAccel, Tomorrow and Airwallex.
Through our venture, opportunities and listed equity funds, we invest in tech companies from the pre-seed stage to the post-IPO stage.
What stage do you invest in?
Globally, our sweet spot for a new investment is Seed-Series A. We have always been an early-stage investor, and were seed investors in companies such as Canva, Zeller and Tomorrow.
If you’re wondering if you’re ‘too early’ for Square Peg, the answer is you’re not—as an example, we met and invested in Ben and Dom from Zeller just weeks after they founded the company.
What's the investment process?
The investment process is designed to help us understand your business, learn about your vision and give you the time to get to know us.
If we have a long-standing relationship or you’re at the very early stages, it can take just a few meetings to reach an investment decision. If you’re raising a large round and we haven’t met before, it can take longer.
While we like to make swift investment decisions, we encourage founders to take their time getting to know investors—it’s a decade-long decision, so a few additional weeks of diligence is likely well-spent.
This is how you’ll experience an investment process with us:
- We’re often introduced to founders via email. This email hopefully includes a compelling deck that explores their idea. When reviewing the materials the founder sent, we look for a few things: a unique insight about an important problem in a big market, a bright vision, and a world-class team with the ambition to go after it. At this stage, we’ll determine whether the business fits our investment philosophy and ensure it’s not directly competitive with any of our existing investments.
- The first meeting will be 45 minutes to an hour and may happen online or in person. We encourage the founder to do most of the talking and hope we spend the time exploring the insights of their team and specifics of their business.
- We may meet a few more times to explore any remaining concepts and give the founder plenty of time to ask questions about how we partner with founders and ensure they’re comfortable. You may meet other members of the investment team at this stage.
- To receive a term-sheet, you’ll meet the global investment team for a one-hour conversation. The team will have already read a detailed briefing note on your business and be prepared with questions they hope you’ll answer. Though high-stakes, this meeting is friendly and conversational. Once the meeting ends, the investment team will vote whether to approve the investment—this means two ‘yes’ votes from the partnership.
- The Investor you’ve worked closely with will be in touch that evening to discuss next steps.
In anonymous feedback from our founders, we’ve been told we run a quick, transparent and collaborative investment process. Founders have often remarked that the investment process helped them to deepen their understanding of their business. For all founders who meet the team, we aim to ensure this is your experience, too.
Do you invest globally?
We invest in companies founded in Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Israel.
Most of our portfolio companies expand from the regions in which they were founded to grow in markets overseas. Examples from the portfolio which have taken this journey include Canva, Fiverr, Airwallex and Rokt.
Our funds are structured so that we have complete flexibility to invest between these regions.
What do you invest in?
First and foremost, we invest in people.
We believe that founders with a compelling vision who surround themselves with talented and mission-driven people can change the world. We’ve seen founders such as Mel from Canva, Micha from Fiverr and Jack from Airwallex build extraordinary companies, and we could never have predicted that design, digital services or borderless finance would be some of the most important problems to solve this decade.
We founded Square Peg on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world—and that we can’t predict the future of creativity, industry or ingenuity.
So, we’re comfortable being a generalist technology investor, with founders at the centre of our universe. Historically, we have invested heavily into fintech, consumer internet, SaaS, edtech and healthtech, with significant and notable exceptions outside of these themes.
Take a look at our portfolio to learn more about the kinds of companies we invest in.
How much do you invest in a new company?
The smallest first cheque we’ve written was USD$100k, and our largest first cheque was USD$35m. Usually, most first-cheques are $5-$10m, but we’re happy and able to go smaller or bigger.
Do you have strict ownership requirements?
As a general rule, somewhere between 10-20% ownership is the most common outcome of a venture investment partnership. In practice, we approach all fundraises with a long-term mindset, which means we’re willing and able to lead and participate in rounds where the fundraising dynamics are different to this standard. What’s important to us is ensuring that the founders and our team are deeply aligned and that the company is well-positioned to go after the mission that drives their team.
One of our core values is anchor to optimism—optimism that the company and founders will be successful—which means we are far more focused on long-term outcomes and options than short-term percentage holdings.
Who are your Limited Partners?
Our investors, or 'LPs' as we call them, are a diverse group of superannuation funds, high-net-worth individuals, team members and family offices. We’re grateful to include world-leading industry pension funds such as HostPlus and AustralianSuper as long-term investors.
We are fortunate to have investors whose approach to venture capital investing is aligned with our own: ambitious, committed and long-term.
How do I approach the team about an investment?
Most founders who we’ve invested in connected with us via someone in our network: our portfolio founders, angel investors and VCs we've co-invested with, our LPs, and community leaders in each ecosystem.
On occasion, we have also invested in founders who emailed us cold (Mike from ZeroCo, we’re looking at you).