Led · Series A · Nov 2022

Sapia.ai is a Melbourne, Australia-based provider of an AI solution delivering diversity and inclusion in hiring. Founded by CEO Barb Hyman, the company offers a platform to help companies engage talent at scale. Its core technology centers on a blind, untimed and asynchronous chat interview designed to transform the speed and quality of hire while removing bias from the hiring process. The company raised $17M in a Series A round and plans to use the funds to continue overseas expansion. Management intends to make the product available in multiple languages as part of that expansion. PredictiveHire is a Melbourne-based recruitment automation company that automates candidate screening with an AI interview bot called Phai. Phai asks five text-message questions and can indicate whether a candidate is right for a job immediately, with the company saying the bot "interviews" a candidate every 30 seconds. PredictiveHire has conducted more than 1.2 million candidate interviews and built a dataset of 500,000-plus million words to analyze the contextual meaning of written interview responses. The startup counts customers including Qantas, AfterPay, Telefonica, and Woolworths. In March 2022 the company raised $7.0M in a pre-Series A round. PredictiveHire operates in 47 countries and will use the funds to ramp up global plans with a big focus on the US market.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2022

Samsara Eco develops and sells fossil-free polymer resins and enzyme-based recycling technology (EosEco) intended to replace fossil fuel–derived plastics in packaging, textiles and other products. The company has built an enzyme library that can recycle polyester, nylon 6 and the more difficult nylon 6,6, and it launched its first product made from enzymatically recycled polyester in partnership with Lululemon. Samsara is constructing facilities in Jerrabomberra, New South Wales to provide partner testing and creation services, and plans additional facilities in Southeast Asia and its first North American facility. It was founded in 2020 in collaboration with the Australian National University, Woolworths and Main Sequence and currently employs about 60 staff across Australia and North America, with plans to expand headcount to 90 by the end of 2025. The company says its EosEco process operates at lower temperature and pressure than conventional recycling and achieves a life-cycle assessment well below the carbon footprint of virgin plastics. Samsara aims to scale to recycling 1.5 million tonnes of plastic per year by 2030 and is targeting expansion into apparel, consumer packaged goods, automotive and electronics sectors. Samsara Eco develops enzyme-based technology that rapidly depolymerizes plastics into their core molecules, enabling repeated recycling. The company launched last year in partnership with the Australian National University and has expanded an enzyme library now capable of depolymerizing several plastic types. It plans to build its first commercial recycling facility in Melbourne later this year, targeting full-scale production by 2023 and claiming the facility will infinitely recycle 20,000 tons of plastic starting in 2024. Initial processing will focus on PET and polyester, and the technology is described as tolerant of contamination and able to handle colored, mixed and multi-layered plastics. Samsara says the new funding will be used to expand its enzyme library, fund the commercial facility, grow its engineering team and expand operations into Europe and North America. The company is preparing to launch enzymatically recycled packaging with Woolworths next year and aims to recycle 1.5 million tons of plastic per year by 2030, with Woolworths committed to turning the first 5,000 tons into branded packaging. Samsara Eco has developed an enzyme-based process that breaks plastics into their molecular building blocks (monomers) for infinite recycling or upcycling. The company says its process achieves full depolymerization in about an hour at room temperature and can be run in a carbon-neutral way, saving an estimated three tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of plastic recycled. Launched in 2021, Samsara has a 13-person team of scientists, engineers and researchers, including collaborators from the Australian National University. It has commercial partnerships with Woolworths Group, which committed to using the first 5,000 tonnes of recycled Samsara plastic in own-brand packaging, and with Tennis Australia to recycle 5,000 bottles. Samsara raised $6 million to build its first recycling plant later this year and expects full-scale production to start in 2023; it is targeting an additional roughly $50 million raise later this year to fund a first commercial-scale facility to recycle 20,000 tonnes per annum. Investors named in the current raise include the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), W23 and Main Sequence.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2020

FutureFeed is commercialising a livestock feed additive made from the seaweed Asparagopsis that research trials in Australia and the USA have shown can reduce methane emissions in beef and dairy cattle by more than 80 percent. The company plans to develop a full value chain for the supplement, from seaweed cultivation and production through processing and feed manufacture to supply beef and dairy industries globally. FutureFeed expects commercial volumes to be supplied into the Australian beef and dairy market by mid-2021, with international markets to follow. The supplement has been developed and trialled over more than five years by CSIRO in collaboration with Meat & Livestock Australia and James Cook University. CSIRO scientists estimate that if the additive were adopted by 10 percent of beef feedlots and dairy industries globally, it could cut livestock greenhouse gas emissions by around 120 megatonnes per year — roughly equivalent to taking 50 million cars off the road for a year. The company also notes the supplement supports productivity in addition to reducing emissions.

Participated · Series A · May 2020

Eucalyptus sells medical products online across multiple demographic-focused consumer brands, operating through online and text-based consultations that can result in prescribed treatments. Its core brands are Pilot (men’s health), Juniper (women’s weight loss and menopause), Kin (fertility) and Software (prescription skincare); it previously launched and later offloaded a sex-toy brand called Normal. The company emphasizes moving from transactional care toward more comprehensive chronic-disease management, and CEO Tim Doyle says some programs (for example Juniper) include many patient touch points—20 in the first month. Eucalyptus was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and Charlie Gearside. The business has faced media and medical-community scrutiny over marketing and telehealth prescribing practices, and rivals such as Mosh operate a similar online consultation model. Financially, it has completed multiple funding rounds and most recently raised capital at a reported $520 million valuation. Eucalyptus is a fast-growing Sydney-based online health start-up that provides digital health services. The company has recently attracted significant external capital, raising $60 million in a funding round. Management is evaluating the potential to bring new obesity-management and weight-loss drugs to the Australian market. The raise signals investor confidence in Eucalyptus’s growth trajectory and strategy to expand its clinical offerings. Beyond the new drug plans, the company continues to operate as a digital health platform serving patients online. Eucalyptus operates a vertically integrated telehealth platform that runs four demographic-focused brands, each with its own providers, patient data repository, remote monitoring tools and partner integrations. The company serves more than 200,000 patients and positions itself as a private-pay, direct-to-consumer option in Australia, sometimes charging lower copays than the average $25 doctor visit. Founded in 2019, Eucalyptus has grown rapidly—more than tripling last year—and expects similar growth this year while expanding headcount. The new funding will support product development and the creation of a digital-health portfolio for primary care, with plans to push deeper into chronic care areas such as diabetes, heart conditions and mental health. Over the next year the company intends to introduce new brands around behavioral health, weight management and diabetes to build a hub for ongoing chronic-care touch points. Eucalyptus operates as a consumer brand builder and platform that launches digital products, with two active telehealth brands: Pilot (targeted at young men) and Kin (a subscription contraceptive service for women). The founders—Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko, and Charlie Gearside—moved into telehealth after personal negative healthcare experiences and prior work together at mattress startup Koala. The company is exploring additional consumer verticals and is currently investigating skincare and elderly healthcare with the aim to launch two new brands by the end of the year. Eucalyptus expects to leverage Woolworths' product development and consumer data capabilities to accelerate future brand launches. The business has raised multiple funding rounds to date and counts repeat backer Blackbird among its investors.