When we closed Banksia Fund I in April 2022, the most common question we got wasn't about our thesis — it was about timing. Why now? The subtext was usually: isn't the opportunity already captured? Hadn't the major Australian platforms already built out their stacks? My answer then is the same as it is now: the problem isn't that commerce infrastructure doesn't exist in APAC. The problem is that almost none of it was built for APAC.
I spent five years as a management consultant covering retail and digital commerce across the region, and then built a logistics business in Melbourne that eventually reached $40M GMV before we were acquired in 2020. In both roles, the same friction points appeared constantly. Payment orchestration that worked in the US required custom engineering to handle bank transfer dominance in Indonesia, QR code payments in China, and e-wallet penetration in the Philippines. Delivery networks that made one-day fulfilment a baseline expectation in Sydney became next-week promises the moment you crossed into regional Victoria, let alone cross-border into Southeast Asia. And the data layer — the customer profiles, the demand signals, the inventory intelligence — was fragmented across a dozen incompatible local systems that nobody had bothered to rationalise.
The tools that power commerce in the US and Europe were designed for those markets. They assume credit card dominance, dense urban last-mile networks, English-language product catalogues, and a certain class of B2B buyer behaviour that simply doesn't map onto APAC at scale. The few tools that tried to serve APAC were either Western products retrofitted with local payment plugins, or hyperlocal solutions that couldn't extend across borders. Neither worked well. What we're saying isn't that Western commerce technology is bad — it's genuinely excellent for its intended context. What we're saying is that APAC's diversity of payment methods, fulfilment corridors, consumer behaviour, and regulatory regimes demands infrastructure that was designed for that complexity from the start, not patched onto it.
There's a ten-year window here, and it's already open. The generation of founders building commerce infrastructure in APAC right now is operating with a structural advantage that their counterparts in the US didn't have: they can see what mature commerce infrastructure looks like, they understand which parts don't work for their markets, and they can build AI-native from day one rather than retrofitting intelligence onto legacy systems. The companies we're backing at Banksia are not trying to replicate what exists in San Francisco for Sydney. They're building the stack that the Sydney-to-Jakarta corridor, the Melbourne-to-Manila supply chain, and the mid-market Australian retailer with regional Asian ambitions actually need. That's the gap. And we're genuinely excited to be here at the start of it being filled.
We named the fund Banksia partly because of what the plant represents — a specifically Australian organism, warm-toned, structural, built for a particular kind of terrain. That felt right. The commerce infrastructure opportunity in APAC is not a generic tech opportunity with geographic flavour added. It's a region-specific structural build, and the founders best positioned to do it are the ones who understand the terrain from the inside. Our job is to find them early and back them with conviction.