Insights

Thinking on commerce.

Writing from the Banksia team on AI, marketplace infrastructure, commerce unit economics, and what's coming next across the Asia-Pacific region. Essays, analysis, and occasional observations from the portfolio.

All articles

Publishing began in July 2022 following Fund I close. We published less frequently in late 2024 while raising Fund II — the archive below represents four years of thinking on AI, commerce infrastructure, and APAC market dynamics.

Sarah Thornton

The Next Commerce Infrastructure Cycle: What We're Watching in 2026

Agentic commerce, ambient purchasing, and the convergence of AI recommendation with payment rails. The next cycle is closer than it looks — and APAC is positioned to lead it.

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Daniel Nguyen

How LLMs Are Changing Commerce Search: Early Evidence from the Portfolio

LLM-powered search is finally landing in production retail environments. Early data from our portfolio companies shows conversion rate improvements that weren't possible with legacy search stacks.

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Emma Richardson

Cross-Border Commerce in APAC: The Infrastructure Gaps That Still Exist

Selling from Sydney into Jakarta or Manila is still harder than it should be in 2025. The companies solving the payment, compliance, and logistics layers are doing essential work.

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Sarah Thornton

What We're Looking for in 2025: The Banksia Investment Thesis Update

Three years in and the market has validated most of what we believed in 2021. Here's what we've updated, what we've doubled down on, and where we're spending the most time.

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Daniel Nguyen

Platform Thinking vs Product Thinking in Commerce SaaS

The most durable commerce infrastructure companies aren't building products — they're building platforms that let a thousand other products exist. That's a different mental model from the start.

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Sarah Thornton

Seed Stage in 2024: What's Changed, What Hasn't

The funding market reset happened. The quality of seed-stage commerce companies coming out of APAC is quietly the best I've seen since we started Banksia.

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Emma Richardson

Smart Receipts and the Post-Transaction Opportunity

The transaction end is actually the marketing start. Intelligent receipt infrastructure turns paper slips into retention, loyalty, and analytics assets.

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Daniel Nguyen

AI Models in Production: What Commerce Companies Are Actually Shipping

Moving from 'we're testing AI' to 'we have a production ML system' is harder than the demos suggest. A look at what the best commerce AI teams are actually doing.

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Daniel Nguyen

The Commerce Data API Layer: What Developers Keep Getting Wrong

Commerce data is fragmented across dozens of platforms. The companies building clean API abstraction layers for marketplace discovery are playing a long game — and it's the right one.

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Emma Richardson

Why Loyalty Is the Next Battleground in Commerce

Customer acquisition costs are rising. Retention ROI is rising faster. Loyalty infrastructure for commerce platforms isn't a nice-to-have — it's becoming category-defining.

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Sarah Thornton

The APAC Commerce Report: 2023 in Review

Our annual look at the structural shifts reshaping digital commerce across Southeast Asia, Australia, and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

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Emma Richardson

Payments as a Marketplace Strategy, Not Just Infrastructure

The best marketplace payments infrastructure isn't just about moving money — it's about enabling new transaction types, split payments, and cross-border commerce.

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Daniel Nguyen

Customer Data Platforms for Retail: Why the Big Players Haven't Won Yet

Enterprise CRM and marketing cloud vendors have data platforms. Most mid-market retailers don't use them effectively. The opportunity is purpose-built CDP infrastructure for the segment that actually needs it.

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Sarah Thornton

On Being an Operator Investor: What It Changes About the Work

Having built and sold a commerce business changes how I evaluate founders. Not because I know better — because I know what they're about to go through.

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Emma Richardson

Fashion Tech Is Having Its Infrastructure Moment

Return rates in fashion e-commerce are a $1 trillion problem. AI-driven product attribution and fit prediction are finally mature enough to tackle it at scale.

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Daniel Nguyen

Dynamic Pricing in E-Commerce: From Rule-Based to Intelligence-Driven

Price is the most powerful lever in commerce and the least sophisticated one. AI-native pricing systems that respond to real demand signals are still early — which is why we're excited.

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Sarah Thornton

B2B Marketplaces: The Unsexy Sector That's Going to Print Money

B2C gets the headlines. B2B gets the margins. The automation of wholesale and procurement processes in hospitality and food service is a category waiting to happen.

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Emma Richardson

Logistics Orchestration Is Broken. Here's What Fixing It Looks Like.

The last mile is the most expensive mile. AI-native delivery orchestration isn't just about cost — it's about turning fulfilment into a competitive advantage.

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Daniel Nguyen

The Search Problem in Retail: Why Personalisation Still Fails

Most retail search is still keyword matching with a thin ML veneer. The gap between what AI can do and what most retailers have deployed is enormous.

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Sarah Thornton

What We Look for at the Seed Stage in Commerce Tech

Conviction, domain depth, and a willingness to throw away the SaaS playbook. The best commerce founders build differently.

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Daniel Nguyen

Marketplaces as Infrastructure: The Shift Nobody Talks About

When dominant hosted commerce platforms launched, they were products. Now they're plumbing. The same shift is happening with multi-vendor marketplace stacks — faster than most people expect.

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Sarah Thornton

Why We Started Banksia: The APAC Commerce Infrastructure Gap

The tools that power commerce in the US and Europe simply don't exist for APAC at scale. That's not a problem — it's a ten-year opportunity.

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