New VC fund Side Stage Ventures raises $15M

Venture capital fund Side Stage Ventures has announced a $15 million first close of their new founder-led seed fund.

[L-R] Markus Kahlbetzer and Ben Grabiner, co-founders, Side Stage Ventures.

This fund, guided by co-founders Ben Grabiner and Markus Kahlbetzer aims to back entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of building companies.

Leveraging the founding team’s global network and their experiences as founders, Side Stage Ventures said it will write $500k cheques to the very best founders in Australia and provide access to a community to help founders build and scale.

The fund will focus primarily on the Seed stage, offering the first cheque to founders and their teams at the earliest stages of company building.

Ben Grabiner, co-founder and general partner of Side Stage Ventures told Digital Nation they are building the fund they wish they had when they were starting out.

“We’re a founder-led, venture fund backing the top 1 percent of founders in Australia at the earliest stage. Our team are all founders,” he said.

“We’ve built, grown and scaled industry-leading and category-shaping companies, so we have unique insight into the challenges founders face. We bring this experience to give the very best founders unrivalled support."

Both Grabiner and Kahlbetzer have an extensive background in investing.

Grabiner co-founded the UK creator platform, Platoon, which helped launch the career of Billie Eilish, and has since been acquired by Apple.

Kahlbetzer has founded numerous Australian companies including prop-tech innovator BrickX and investment firm BridgeLane, early backers of Airtasker and Amaysim.

They are joined by some of Australia’s luminary founders as venture partners including, Alex and Anthony Zaccaria from Linktree, Matt Allen, co-founder at Tractor Ventures and Jaddan Comerford, CEO and founder at Unified Music.

Grabiner said since moving to Australia, he sees there is entrepreneurial talent in the country but a lack of capital to support them.  

“Especially when you look at the depth and breadth of seed-focused funds overseas in places like the US and Europe. We’re closing this gap to lean in and help the best founders scale to solve some of the biggest and most ambitious problems.”

Several founders and investors from Australia and overseas have backed the fund as limited partners including Go1 co-founder Andrew Barnes, Airtasker co-founder Tim Fung and UK-based venture fund and fund-of-funds, LocalGlobe.

Grabiner explained while it is a challenging market for both funds and startups, in many ways this creates opportunities.

“There are a bunch of ambitious founders with great ideas that need the capital to get off the ground. We’re in a good position where the best-limited partners are going deep on us as a team because they understand our vision to support early-stage founders,” he said.

“We’ve been able to prove this with our syndicate and are continuing to carve out a niche for backing founders at the earliest stages. We’ve already invested in three promising startups across generative AI, health and HR with this new Fund and we’re just getting started.”