Aura Ventures is seeking to raise $73 million for a new fund to invest in Australian very early-stage technology businesses. Alongside raising Aura Ventures Fund III, which has a hard cap of $100 million, Aura has partnered with crowdfunding platform Venture Crowd to give access to the fund to wholesale investors from as little as $10,000.
Aura Group was co-founded by Eric Chan and Singapore-based Calvin Ng in 2009 to invest in venture capital but, in the tight market of the time, the firm first focused on corporate advisory services and later branched out into wealth management and private credit. Chan says working across the different sectors helped Aura Ventures build experience across the early-stage investing ecosystem as it made initial seed-stage investments on a deal-by-deal basis.
These investments were eventually rolled into Aura Ventures Fund 0 raised in 2013. A first blind-pool fund was raised in 2017, followed by a second in 2022 which raised $26.6 million.
As managing director of Aura Ventures, Chan led the firm’s investments in parcel delivery business Shippit, sports technology company Catapult Sports (ASX: CAT) and digital marketing compliance technology company Haast, among others.
With Fund II now fully deployed, Chan said Aura Ventures has established itself as a global top quartile early-stage venture capital firm; it is currently running at a 3x multiple on invested cash across its venture funds and 85% of all invested capital has been returned to investors.
Chan said he believed the new fund was being raised at an inflexion point for early-stage venture capital investing. The 2021-2022 global venture capital re-set had pulled back valuations to more realistic levels. Now, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in business processes offered potential to generate the strongest growth in valuations since the emergence of cloud computing. That, he noted, had generated relatively flat growth initially until investors saw that it was enabling businesses to grow without adding to their cost bases.
The same now applied to start-ups which were developing AI solutions for real problems and companies that were introducing AI to better serve existing markets.
Aura III, he said, would recognise that generating improved business performance from technology was not a straight-forward process. Multiple iterations of technologies were often required to develop a solution to a problem. Consequently, the fund would focus on backing founders who demonstrated dedication to solving real problems, rather than those that had developed and validated technologies. This would enable the fund to invest early and then gain from steep valuation increases which are generated when locally developed technologies attract overseas interest.
Other members of the Aura Ventures investment team are partner Mark Esterhuizen who joined the firm just over a year ago, and corporate development manager Sabrina Zeng who joined in 2024.
Esterhuizen has experience in scaling-up venture-backed businesses. He was previously chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Peter Manettas Seafood Group where he drove 40x revenue growth over five years.
Zeng was most recently head of ecosystem for tech start-up community Fishburners and has a background including economic research and corporate banking.
Venture Crowd has access to an initial $1 million tranche in Aura Ventures Fund III. This is now open to wholesale investors with a minimum investment of $10,000. Investments will be made up front into the Aura Private Credit Income Fund which has generated returns of 9.45% annually since inception. As the venture fund makes investments, capital will be called from the credit fund.
Image: Aura Venture Capital managing director Eric Chan.