With OpenAI and Anthropic both barrelling toward public listings that will tower over the sector — arguably the most consequential debuts the technology industry has ever seen — you might expect the venture firms backing the generation beneath them to feel some vertigo.
Yet a pulse check across Australia’s top three VC firms suggests the opposite.
A year ago, the venture world fretted about “AI wrappers,” those thin applications perched atop someone else’s model and waiting to be crushed when the foundation labs rolled downhill. That anxiety has quietly evaporated.
What’s replaced it is a clearer-eyed read on where AI value is being built — and a striking consensus across Blackbird, Square Peg and Airtree about the companies now winning their attention: founders who lead with the workflow they’re killing rather than the model they’re using, business models straining against per-seat pricing, and a decisive turn from software on a screen toward AI in the physical world.
