We invest early.
And with conviction.

We’re a venture capital firm that helps founders from our corners of the world shape the future. Founded in 2012 in Australia, Square Peg combines the best of a local partner with a global network of companies and now backs founders early and repeatedly from three of technology’s most exciting regions: Australia, Israel, and Southeast Asia. Five funds in with more than US$2.9 billion in assets across our venture capital and public equities funds, Square Peg is the only investor that backed Canva, Airwallex, and Rokt, three of Australia’s highest-valued private tech companies, and is honoured to partner with Fiverr, Aidoc, and Tomorrow.io in Israel and Doctor Anywhere and Kredivo out of Singapore. 

Our sweet spot for new investments is Seed-Series A. We have always been early-stage investors and were seed investors in companies such as Canva, Zeller, and Tomorrow.io.

If you’re wondering if you’re too early for us to consider, 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.

Our 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, reaching an investment decision can take just a few meetings. If you’re raising a large round and we haven’t met before, it can take a few more conversations, and in this context, three to four weeks is typical.

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 are likely well-spent. While speaking to us, we encourage you to do your own research on how we like to work, and we can introduce you to other founders in our portfolio to help with this.

Here’s an overview of our investment process: 

1. We’re often introduced to founders via an email, which hopefully includes a compelling pitch deck. When reviewing your materials, 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 assess whether your business fits our investment philosophy and fund mandate, and ensure it’s not directly competing with our existing investments.

2. The first meeting may be online or in person. We encourage founders to do most of the talking and aim to spend the time exploring your team's insights and the specifics of your business. You’ll notice we like to keep meetings as more a conversation, and less a pitch, so expect us to jump in with questions.

3. If we leave our first meeting excited by your team and vision, we’ll organise follow up time with you and more members of our investment team. Over a handful of conversations, we’ll dive deeper into our core questions. In the background, we’ll do our own market research and, depending on the stage of your business, ask to speak to customers. For pre-product businesses, we’ll typically conduct our own research in the background with people in our network who understand the problem the business is solving. We’ll never share details of your business in these conversations unless you ask us to.

4. To receive a term sheet, you’ll meet our global investment team for a one-hour conversation. Our team will have read a detailed briefing note on your business and be prepared with questions for you to answer. This meeting is friendly and conversational. Once it ends, our  team will vote on whether to approve the investment, which requires three ‘yes’ votes.

5. The investors you’ve worked closely with will be in touch 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 it has  helped them deepen their understanding of their business. We aim to ensure this is the experience of all founders who meet our investment team.

We started Square Peg more than 10 years ago in Australia. At that time, 90% of tech unicorns came from the US and China. Today, that figure is 50%. We now back founders early and repeatedly from three of technology’s most exciting regions: Australia and New Zealand, Israel, and Southeast Asia.

First and foremost, we invest in people. We believe 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. 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 AI infrastructure and applications, B2B SaaS, and fintech. We’re also excited by edtech and climate tech, with significant and notable exceptions outside of our main themes.

Take a look at our portfolio to see the kinds of companies we invest in.

As a general rule, somewhere between 10-20% ownership is the most common outcome of a venture investment partnership with us. 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.

We are grateful for our investors, including a number of leading superannuation and pension funds, university endowments, family offices, wealth advisors, founders, and our team, who have continued to back us over many years.   

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. We have also invested in founders who emailed us cold. You can get in touch with us here or reach out to one of the investors in our team directly.