We recorded this episode of Wild Hearts with Jekaterina Viktorova a few months ago. At the time, Syenta had just come through one of the hardest periods in the company's short life - six weeks from zero, no term sheets, a top US semiconductor giant telling them they'd never hit the milestones. Today: $26 million raised. The NRF invested. Three governments on the cap table. And former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining the board. None of that is surprising to anyone who listened to this episode. Click on the link in the comments to hear why 👇
Blackbird
Investment Management
Surry Hills, New South Wales 73,867 followers
Giant leaps forward, made by a passionate few 🚀
About us
Blackbird is a venture capital fund based in Australia and New Zealand. We invest in every type of technology from software to space, unified by the biggest of ambitions. We have more than 7 billion dollars under management and a portfolio of over 100 companies including some of the most successful Australian and New Zealand startups such as Canva, SafetyCulture and Culture Amp.
- Website
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http://www.blackbird.vc
External link for Blackbird
- Industry
- Investment Management
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- Surry Hills, New South Wales
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2012
- Specialties
- Venture Capital and startups
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
111 Albion St
Surry Hills, New South Wales 2010, AU
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Get directions
165 Gertrude St
Fitzroy, Victoria 3065, AU
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Get directions
109a Ponsonby Rd
Auckland, 1011, NZ
Employees at Blackbird
Updates
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🌅 Sunrise is next week. Where some of the most magical moments aren't just found on stage. ✨ The Stripe Recharge Space is one of them. Refuel with coffee. Recharge your devices. Stay a little longer in the conversations that matter. 🎟️ Get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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Sunrise is a gathering in motion. Ideas moving. People crossing paths. Futures unfolding across borders. At Sunrise, find your way to the Deel Delights Hub to step into that flow. With free bubble tea, made fresh. Travel gifts, personalised for you. A space to connect and pause in between it all. A small expression of a bigger idea - that the best teams aren’t bound by place, and building them should feel just as fluid. See you there? 🎟️ Get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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In 2013, we wrote Canva a $250,000 cheque. Melanie and Cliff had a mission, no product, and absolute conviction that design should belong to everyone. Today, from LA, we watched them do it again. But this time with AI. Canva's AI tools are already the third most used in the world, behind only OpenAI and Google. What launched today isn't a design tool with AI features. It's an AI platform that does design, built from the ground up on proprietary infrastructure and for the 260 million people who already call Canva home. The mission hasn't changed. The mountain has ⛰️ Read more from Rick Baker in the comments ⬇️
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In 2024, Tom Humphrey saw something shifting in how the best software companies were being built and gave it a name: SaiS. Two years on, it's making headlines. Four stages. One framework. And a question worth asking: where does your company sit? Tom's full piece in the comments 👇
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Two weeks to go. The room is already beginning to take shape - founders, builders, dreamers finding their way toward each other. At Sunrise, connection doesn’t wait for the day. Our Sunrise festival & networking app (Brella) uses AI-powered matchmaking to help you find your people early. See who’s coming. Connect with fellow Travellers. Book 1:1 meetings ahead of time. And when the day arrives, step into the Global Connections Zone, presented by HSBC Innovation Banking, where your dedicated 1:1 meeting tables are waiting for you. A huge thanks to HSBC Innovation Banking for powering connections at Sunrise. Book a meeting through the Brella app or meet the HSBC Innovation Banking team at the Global Connections Zone. This is your moment. Join us? 🎟️ Explore the full program & get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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In just two weeks from now, we’ll gather. To stretch what feels possible - together. At Sunrise, the Visions Stage is a window into the horizon - where big ideas and bold visions of the future are shared by those building them. Here are the minds shaping that space: ✨ Tim Doyle | CEO & Co-founder at Eucalyptus ✨ Angela Jiang | Head of Product, Platform at Anthropic ✨ Katelyn Lesse | Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic ✨ Dr. Thomas Kelly | Co-founder & CEO at Heidi ✨ Jacky Koh | Founder at Relevance AI ✨ Guillaume Princen | International Head of Startups, Digital Natives & Mid-Market at Anthropic ✨ Lucy Yueting Liu | President & Co-founder at Airwallex ✨ Ben Woodington | Co-founder & CEO at Coherence Neuro ✨ Aaron Blabey | #1 New York Times Bestseller Author ✨ Danielle Strachman | Founder & General Partner at 1517 Fund ✨ Julia Reisser | Co-founder & Co-CEO at Uluu ✨ Michael Kingsbury | Co-founder & Co-CEO at Uluu Final tickets are moving - this is the moment to join us. 🎟️ Explore the full program & get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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The full Sunrise 2026 program is here. What’s been building is now visible - a gathering of conversations, ideas, and people that don’t just describe the future, but start to shape it. Across stages, sessions, and everything in between, this is the room we’re building: ✨ Tim Doyle | CEO & Co-founder at Eucalyptus ✨ Angela Jiang | Head of Product, Platform at Anthropic ✨ Dr. Thomas Kelly | Co-founder & CEO at Heidi ✨ Lucy Yueting Liu | President & Co-founder at Airwallex ✨ Katelyn Lesse | Head of Platform Engineering at Anthropic ✨ Danielle Strachman | Founder & General Partner at 1517 Fund ✨ Guillaume Princen | International Head of Startups, Digital Natives & Mid-Market at Anthropic ✨ Aaron Blabey | #1 New York Times Bestseller Author ✨ Ben Woodington | Co-founder & CEO at Coherence Neuro ✨ Maxine Minter | General Partner at Co Ventures ✨ Geoff McQueen | Founder at Accelo/@Teamscore.io ✨ Charlie Gearside | Youtuber & Founder at Gearside / Eucalyptus ✨ Jae Lubberink | Growth Manager at Eucalyptus ✨ Julia Reisser | Co-founder & Co-CEO at Uluu ✨ Michael Kingsbury | Co-founder & Co-CEO at Uluu ✨ Geoffrey Huntley | Inventor, Engineer & Investor at Ralph Wiggum Loop ✨ Jacky Koh | Founder at Relevance AI ✨ Arushi Srivastava | Senior Client Success Lead at ADAPT, MC at Debate Club ✨ Orsolya Tóth-Pál | Founder at Debate Club ✨ Hon Weng Chong | Founder at Cortical Labs ✨ Nonny Bell | Head of Startups, APAC at Vercel ✨ Jared Thompson | Senior Technical Sales Engineer at Vercel ✨ Alex Firestone | Solutions Architect at Vercel ✨ Lizzie Hedding | Co-founder & Creative Director at Project Planet ✨ Tegan Lerm | CEO at Project Planet ✨ Sonia Kaurah | Founder & CEO at Tala Thrive ✨ Joe Walker | Host at The Joe Walker Podcast ✨ Alby Churven | Co-founder & CEO at Clovr ✨ Niki Scevak | Co-founder at Blackbird ✨ Niel Reitmann | Growth at Eucalyptus ✨ Luca Milne | Co-founder at Lucky Sauna Hats ✨ Cameron Ensor | Co-Founder at Lucky Sauna Hats 3 weeks to go. 🎟️ Explore the full program schedule & get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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Set your alarms. Tomorrow, we unveil what’s been building - the full Sunrise program, ready to be explored. 🎟️ Get your tickets 👉 www.thesunrise.live 🌅 Sunrise Australia 2026 🗓️ Thursday 30 April 📍 Carriageworks, Sydney #SunriseAUS26
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🔬 Farid watched his father - one of the most brilliant chemists in every room - become the bottleneck in his own business. A problem hiding in plain sight across a $5 trillion industry. He and the Kimia team spent two years quietly building the thing that fixes it. Congratulations on your launch 🚀 Proud to have believed from day one. 🖤
For the past two years, we've been quietly building something we weren't ready to talk about. Until now. No website. No PR. No social presence. Just our team, working hard with our customers. Why? Because the chemical industry has seen too many promises and not enough proof. We wanted to earn the right to go public by delivering results first. Today, Kimia is out of stealth. I grew up watching my father be the smartest person in every room at his chemical company. Formulation decisions. Customer specs. Quality tradeoffs. Regulatory calls. Everything flowed through his judgment. He trained under a Nobel Prize winner and built a business on that expertise. He was also the bottleneck. When he wasn't available, everything stopped. Years later, after completing my own PhD in Chemical Engineering, helping scale my father's manufacturing business, and commercialising a waterless technology to clean cars without a drop of water, I saw the same pattern everywhere. A $5 trillion market where every critical decision still depends on a shrinking group of experts, disconnected systems, and software that was never built for chemistry. That's the problem we set out to solve. We call it chemical intelligence. And we built it quietly. And now, we're ready to talk about it. Kimia is an AI-native operating system for the chemical industry. Not a point solution. Not a chatbot on top of PDFs. Chemical intelligence that spans how products are developed, regulated, sold, distributed, and troubleshooted. One system that connects technical, commercial, and regulatory knowledge around a unified product model - built from the ground up to reason about chemistry the way an experienced expert does. Chemical intelligence already powers hundreds of thousands of chemical products across our customers' value chains - from development through to sales & distribution. Industry leaders including Univar Solutions, Stahl, Arkema, tesa trusted us before we had a public presence. Backed by $7M from Airtree, Blackbird, Skip Capital - the investors behind Canva, Airwallex, Culture Amp, and Atlassian - with our first angel cheque from Pedram Afshar. To my father - this started with you. To our customers and partners who believed in us before anyone knew our name - you shaped this product. This launch belongs to you. To my co-founder Sajjad, early founding members Masood and Sadra, and the entire Kimia team - I'm proud to finally show the world what we've been building. We're hiring and just getting started. For more info, visit Kimia.ai Elicia McDonald Sid Kasbekar Niki Scevak Kim Jackson Olivia Sioud (Grivas) @simone Tai