Venture, Reimagined: A Community of Investors at a Historical Moment in VC – July 2026

What a stretch it has been. There is real positivity in the air right now, and there is also a healthy dose of mystery about what happens next. There has never been a better time for a community like ours to lean on each other and figure it out together, and we are seeing exactly that happen in real time. Here is a little of what we have been up to and where we are headed.

Take a moment, meet our Advisory Board!

Before anything else, an introduction. You may not be aware, but we have a genuinely robust and amazing group of people helping us shape and build this community behind the scenes. We want to make sure you know who they are.

Beyond myself and Ian, if you ever need anything, or would like an introduction, please reach out and let us know.

● Craig Blair – Airtree

● Rick Baker – Blackbird

● Kate Bennett Eriksson – CoAct Capital

● Nick Gainsley – OneVentures

● Karen Chan – Perennial Partners

● Paul Naphtali – Rampersand

● Dan Krasnostein – Square Peg

● Grant McCarthy – Tidal Ventures

● Priya Saiprasad – Touring Capital

● Kara Frederick – Jekara Group

And please join me in welcoming our newest Advisory Board member, Dom Pym – Euphemia and Triple Bubble. Delighted to have you with us, Dom.

A growing, thriving community

We have welcomed a wonderful wave of new members over the past few months, and the quality of the people joining us continues to define what this community is about. You may have seen some of our posts on LinkedIn celebrating them, and you will keep seeing more as we continue to grow.

Please join me in welcoming our newest members:

● Stefan Skorut & Michelle Troup- RFC Ambrian

● Jason Atkins & Sean Diljore- TORUS Capital

● Silvana Williams – Goldman Sachs

● Kate de Ridder & Darja Nelson- Bridgewest Ventures NZ

● James Pinner- NZ Growth Capital Partners

● Jason Cheong & Pierre de Villecourt- ICM

● Dom Pym – Euphemia & Triple Bubble

● Poppy Trewhella- Euphemia

● Nick Carter- Triple Bubble

● Simon Pound – Previously Unavailable

● Mason Bleakley – Icehouse Ventures

● Leigh Ford – UniQuest

● Amir Paluch – Navon Advisory

● Caitlin Iles – Navon Advisory

● Fiona Foster – Movac

● Steve Burnell – TenMile

● Sachin Bhanot & Jayme Kwek- Sitara Capital

● James Alexander – Galileo Venture

● Nadine Hill & Cormac McCullough- 2040 Ventures

Please join me in welcoming all of our amazing new members. This community only continues to get stronger, and will contribute to our largest VDU yet!

Our community continues to show up. The energy has been impossible to miss:

● Our VC at Sea retreat brought 122 GPs together on the water in Sydney, and we are expecting 150 GPs at Venture Down Under in August.

● Our dinners continue to have no empty seats, and our lunches are oversubscribed. We have had 100% subscribed in person events since June of 2025.

● Our virtual sessions keep filling to maximum capacity.

We have also been lucky to host some incredible voices in our Virtual Series, including Chris Fralic of First Round Capital and Laura Mesa formerly of Sequoia Capital, with Varun Anand, Co-Founder of Clay, coming up next in July!We will keep bringing an international roster of speakers to complement the wonderful in-person events we run across Australia and New Zealand.

Venture Down Under

VDU 2026 has officially SOLD OUT. In our 9th year, we will host GPs from across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the US, including visiting speakers from a16z and Wisdom Ventures in the United States. We are now in full planning mode to make the three days on the Gold Coast (August 4 to 6) absolutely seamless. Thank you to everyone who registered so quickly. If you missed out, we have a waitlist running, so let us know.

What we are hearing from the VCs

Before VDU, we wanted to know what you truly think is going to happen over the next few years. The signal was loud and clear.

● AI is the defining force. Around two thirds of you named it as the single most significant thing ahead, not as a passing theme but as the new operating reality for the industry.

● Liquidity is coming back. The most consistent note was optimism that a wave of major exits and IPOs (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic among the most cited, alongside a long-anticipated Canva listing) will finally restart the flywheel and recycle capital and talent into the next generation of founders. As one of you put it, “the conveyor belt that drives venture starts turning again.”

● The repricing question. Many of you are watching closely as the market separates genuine AI platform winners from companies that are really just an application layer, and

what that means for SaaS valuations.

● Capital structure is shifting. The prospect of super fund allocation to venture, secondaries vehicles to manufacture DPI, and US funds writing local cheques all featured heavily.

● Beyond software. A meaningful number of you see a deep-tech and physical-world breakout (space, energy, defence, life sciences) pulling capital well beyond pure SaaS.

What strikes me most is not any single prediction. It is that this community has the trust and the candour to surface its true read on the market in a way few others can. Pulling all of these perspectives together gives us a signal that is more powerful than any one firm could generate alone, and we are genuinely grateful to everyone who shared their thinking.

Our members are making it happen

The best news is what our community is actually doing out in the market. A snapshot of recent wins:
● Blackbird backed Australian-founded AI infrastructure company Baseten in its US$1.5B Series F at a US$13B valuation, reportedly the firm’s largest single investment ever.

● Airtree led the oversubscribed AU$65M Series A into preventative-health company Everlab.

● Icehouse Ventures backed Kiwi founder Jeff Hawke’s Odyssey in a US$310M Series B at a US$1.45B valuation.

● Giant Leap and Antler joined the round that saw women’s-health startup Ovum triple its valuation.

● New Zealand’s Partly raised US$50M at a US$500M valuation to take on the US auto-parts market.

● Dawn Aerospace raised US$25M at a US$195M valuation as it scales its spaceplane ambitions.

● South Australian quantum startup QuantX Labs led a batch of seven ANZ startups raising a combined $17M, with two more headed to Y Combinator.

● Zenobe closed a landmark $400M zero-emission transport financing platform across Australia and New Zealand.

● Canberra medtech Dentroid raised $32M at a $265M valuation for its needle-free dental technology, with a global commercialisation partnership.

This is exactly the work we want to exemplify. Our members are not just keeping pace with the global market, they are leading and backing category-defining companies on both sides of the Tasman and well beyond.

A look ahead to Venture Down Under

We do not want to give too much away, but here is a light preview of the two flagship workshops anchoring the program this year.

The VC playbook for the future:

A first-of-its-kind session where we work through a set of real, highly plausible scenarios that would meaningfully reshape venture. We bring different fund types and perspectives to each one, coming at them from a variety of angles, then synthesise and distil the discussion into something tangible: a field guide, a playbook for what comes next.

The AI Convergence Lab

AI deserves its own category, because it is not a scenario that might happen. It is already our reality. So we are dedicating a full lab to how AI is reshaping VC firms and the industry, across four angles:

● Sourcing – how we find and select the founders and deals worth backing and deploying capital into.

● Investment – how valuations, term sheets and the way deals are won are being rewritten for an AI world.

● Support – what genuinely valuable support looks like now, including helping founders transition from traditional SaaS to fully AI-powered businesses, and which tools and resources are actually worth investing in.

● The VC Firm of the Future – what a firm looks like structurally and in its decision-making when AI is an active participant in the process, not just a note-taker. Could the future be a one-person, solo-GP firm running on tools? All of it is supported by speakers and panels from inside our community and a strong line-up of invited guests.

Thank you to our partners

None of this happens without our incredible partners. Thank you for backing this community and making moments like VDU possible. We are genuinely grateful, and we cannot wait to bring it all to life on the Gold Coast.

A personal note

The month of May was an extraordinarily busy one for me, because we welcomed our second daughter, Theodora Alexandra, to our family. The entire Innovation Bay team, and this community specifically, have been so warm and friendly to my family.

You might know that my wife, Judy, is originally from Taiwan, and I am from the land of the free and home of the brave . We do not have much family here, so even a simple message or a quick note of well wishes is not a small thing to us. It means a great deal, because we genuinely do not take those things for granted.

On behalf of myself, Judy, our two daughters Isabella and Theodora, and our two chow chows Ariella and Stella, thank you for the kindest notes and messages of encouragement. And a big shout out to Kate Eriksson and Craig Blair for gifts to our new baby girl at home. It has been an amazing year, and we could not think of a better place to start and build a family. You are a big part of why I work so hard, so again, thank you.

A special thank you, too, to Phaedon, Ian and Cameron for their unwavering support to our little family!

Come say hello

We have two community lunches coming up next week, in Sydney and Melbourne. If you would like to attend, just reach out to me personally and I will get you on the list.

As always, the door is open. Reach out anytime.

Best,

Ryan Burns.

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