Fundraising for SaaS Startups

Welcome to our second meetup for Enterprise SaaS Australia, a community that fosters relationships between SaaS industry leaders and the next generation of SaaS startup founders.

Our upcoming event will focus on the fundraising process for SaaS startups from both an investor and founder perspective. Our stacked Q&A panel will feature James Cameron (AirTree Venture Capital), Ainslie Williams (Qualie) and Dan Gavel (Black Sheep Capital).

James Cameron is a Partner at AirTree Venture Capital, which invests in early and growth stage startups across Australia and New Zealand. He joined AirTree from Accel Partners, the West Coast headquartered fund behind companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Etsy and Atlassian. Prior to Accel, James founded and ran BipSync, a research management software that enhances investor productivity. He currently leads AirTree’s investments in Prospa, Paxata and 90seconds.

Ainslie Williams has spent the last 17 years honing her craft as a qualitative researcher before jumping into her first startup, Qualie, a video-based online qualitative research company. Qualie combines qualitative techniques with quantitative numbers to deliver the “compelling consensus” on any proposition being tested. Within a year of launching, the startup has signed up some major clients as well as raising $750,000 in funding from former Xero boss Chris Ridd, Unlockd founder Matt Berriman and Catapult Sports Chairman and Playbook Media Director Adir Shiffman.

Dan Gavel started out in financial advisory, growing his own practice before exiting the industry in 2013 and establishing Black Sheep Capital to invest in early-stage tech companies and other assets. Today, Black Sheep Capital is one of Australia’s most active angel and seed investors, investing in 25 companies over the last 3 years, and has funded a wide range of startups including Airtasker, Sendle and Go1.

Some of the topics we will deep dive into are:

• The different options for fundraising
• The fundraising process
• How to do due-diligence on investors
• Determining valuations
• What investors look for

Hope to see you there!