Macdoch Ventures
104 Queen Street, Woollahra, New South Wales, 2025, Australia
Overview
Our mission is to support Australia & New Zealand’s late seed stage founders. Since 2011, we have partnered with extraordinary founders building companies using technology to build a better future. We are looking for late seed stage founders who have a product and paying customers, in businesses across Australia & New Zealand. Our current thesis surrounds networked businesses (like platforms and marketplaces) and select SaaS, but we do engage more broadly. We have been active seed investors since 2011. We invested in Cliff, Mel and Cameron when Canva was just starting to offer paid subscription plans. We partnered with Dylan and Mark at Qwilr based on their first public beta. Peter and Tony at Mable had 350 carers on their Sydney-based marketplace when we first partnered with them.
- Total investments
- 16
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 2
- Active investors
- 3
Sector focus
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Ranchbot
Participated · Series B · Aug 2026
Ranchbot combines field-installed hardware with recurring software to allow producers to remotely monitor water infrastructure and other assets across large agricultural properties. Water management remains the company's foundation, but it is developing broader capabilities that are expected to encompass livestock, wildlife and natural capital such as soil, pasture and biodiversity, plus other ranch and farm infrastructure. The company serves more than 12,000 customers responsible for roughly 10 million cattle and 15 million sheep across Australia, North America and other markets. With the Series B financing and a new global holding structure based in Fort Worth, Ranchbot is investing in additional staff, hardware and software development and pursuing partnerships to expand its platform. It is positioning its data infrastructure for potential value beyond individual farms, including use cases for insurers, lenders and supply-chain companies.
- Farmbot
Participated · Series B · Aug 2026
Founded in 2014, Farmbot builds satellite-connected sensors and a software platform that lets farmers monitor tanks, troughs, dams, pumps and rainfall remotely. The company serves more than 12,000 customers across Australia, North America and other markets and reports management of about 10 million cattle and 15 million sheep. It operates as Ranchbot in the U.S. and is now headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. With the recent $22 million Series B, Farmbot plans a corporate reorganization to establish Ranchbot Technology Holdings Inc. as the global parent, hire additional staff, and continue improving its hardware and software. Leadership has indicated plans to evolve the product offering into broader agricultural and water management solutions for the farm sector.
- Brainfish
Participated · Series A · Jul 2025
Brainfish is an AI customer-experience platform that embeds Ambient AI agents with computer vision to provide proactive, contextual help inside digital products. Its system observes real user behavior and delivers sub-second responses; early adopters report 70%–90% fewer support tickets and 30%–40% increases in customer satisfaction. Since launching in 2023, the company says it serves more than 5 million users and has delivered 400% year-over-year growth, with active users across Australia, Asia, the UK and the U.S. Founded in Australia in 2022, Brainfish has offices in the U.S. and India and customers that include Relevance AI and ASX-listed Mad Paws. The new funding will be used to scale engineering, accelerate product development, and expand AI and machine-learning deployments while building a U.S.-based team to accelerate go-to-market. Brainfish positions itself to address a $22.6 billion serviceable opportunity within the $350 billion global customer experience market. Brainfish offers an AI-powered customer support platform that combines a business's knowledge with contextual understanding of the customer to deliver personalized answers in real time. Founded in April 2023 by Daniel Kimber and Ajain Vivek Thankaswamy and based in Sydney, Australia, the platform is operational in Australia, the US, and Singapore. The company has served over 300,000 users globally and counts clients including ASX-listed Mad Paws and Airtasker. In May 2024 Brainfish raised $3.85M in a seed round, bringing total funding to $5M. The company plans to use the proceeds for product innovation and further international expansion. Brainfish focuses on helping online businesses answer and resolve customer queries faster through AI-driven contextual responses.
- Flagship
Participated · Seed · Apr 2025
Flagship offers a global digital visual merchandising platform that connects store design with data analysis, creating digital twins for each location and automated revenue mapping. The platform provides store-specific money mapping, analytics, localized merchandising guides, and tools to improve operational efficiency and communication between retail management and in-store teams. Customers include major brands such as Mejuri, Peter Alexander, R.M. Williams, and Mad Happy, and Flagship has signed a leading U.S. performance apparel brand as it expands into the US market. The company reported 357% growth in the last 12 months, has a team of 12 employees across Australia and the US, and plans to grow headcount by 35% by year end. Flagship cites measurable customer impact—one partner saved 7,000 casual hours annually and another expanded store count by 700% without adding visual merchandising headcount. Recent funding will support US expansion and continued product development.
- Reask
Participated · Seed · Jun 2023
Reask applies data science and AI to natural hazard modeling and high-resolution weather risk analytics and forecasting. It delivers proprietary weather modeling algorithms that learn climate physics to produce dynamic, forward-looking representations of atmospheric risk across multiple data sources. The company calculates the severity and frequency of extreme weather events to provide insights for insurers and asset managers seeking more accurate catastrophe forecasting. Early adopters include AXA, Swiss Re and a Big 4 accounting firm. Reask intends to use the new funding to add more hazard coverage and to grow its team internationally. The company is led by CEO Jamie Rodney and is based in Sydney, Australia.