AI is driving one of the most significant technology investment cycles of our generation, attracting extraordinary levels of capital. As investment concentrates around perceived winners, distinguishing AI exposure from durable value is increasingly important.
For growth equity investors, we believe value will accrue to businesses combining deep domain expertise, proprietary data and IP, embedded customer relationships and product depth, serving global markets where these create defensible advantages and clear pathways to monetisation. We also consider where Australia has a structural advantage as a foundation for global scale.
How this is shaping our growth equity investment approach
1. Access to AI itself is becoming less of a moat
As intelligence becomes cheaper, durable value shifts from the model towards the orchestration, data, workflow and infrastructure layers of the agentic stack.
Buildkite is a strong example in our portfolio, providing critical infrastructure for AI-native development. As agent-led coding scales, demand for speed, concurrency, governance, security, policy controls, audit trails and reliability is growing.
2. Agentic AI is expanding the opportunity for software
Software is increasingly executing critical customer workflows rather than simply enabling them, creating opportunities beyond traditional per-seat economics. Agentic AI offers new economic drivers for technology companies, with the potential to scale more rapidly than pure SaaS and drive the next wave of growth through AI-attributable revenue streams.
We are seeing this in Employment Hero, where they have developed a series of agents that execute mission-critical workflows on behalf of customers. For example, Employment Hero has already developed agents across recruitment, HR advice, rostering and payroll, further embedding agentic operations within their platform and creating incremental revenue streams.
3. Data and workflow ownership matter more
Across our pipeline, proprietary data, regulated workflow ownership and embedded distribution are emerging as foundations for AI-enabled revenue.
We see opportunities in AI-native solutions and decision intelligence serving deep verticals across, for example, cybersecurity, healthcare, natural resources, construction and insurance. The common thread is high-growth businesses with multi-layered durability and strong AI tailwinds.
4. Valuation discipline matters
The scale of capital flowing into AI makes valuation discipline increasingly important as markets distinguish durable growth from broader AI exposure.
Australia presents a compelling opportunity. Technology businesses can build locally and scale globally, benefiting from lower operating costs and deep pockets of early-stage capital. Investors also typically benefit from lower entry valuations. For example, Australian Series A median valuations have been approximately 25% below comparable US rounds over the past decade, with relatively limited domestic competition at the growth stage.
5. Where Australia has a structural advantage
Australia has a strong track record of innovation solving global problems and we are witnessing the rapid shift to a new wave of companies embracing AI-native backbones. The structural advantage is strongest where these combine deep expertise with embedded systems of record and regulated, operationally complex markets and networks.
For OneVentures
The infrastructure being built today is the foundation for the innovations we expect to define this cycle. Across our portfolio and pipeline, we see opportunities where AI is addressing new problems that were previously unable to be solved, or can now be solved better than before, strengthening existing competitive advantages, expanding addressable markets and creating new revenue streams.
In a market characterised by rapid innovation and abundant capital, we believe patience, valuation discipline and rigorous assessment of competitive advantage will be critical to identifying where durable value ultimately sits.
