We've built this stuff.

Sarah co-founded a Melbourne-based e-commerce logistics company that scaled to $40M in gross merchandise volume before a strategic acquisition in 2020. Before that, she spent five years at a global management consultancy advising retailers and digital commerce businesses across the Asia-Pacific region — work that gave her a detailed view of exactly where APAC merchants were underserved by the infrastructure tools their counterparts in the US and Europe were starting to take for granted.

That gap was the founding logic for Banksia. In 2021, with AI beginning to shift the cost equation for building category-defining software, Sarah saw the window: companies designing for AI from the ground up would be structurally faster and cheaper to operate than those extending legacy platforms. She founded Banksia to back the founders doing exactly that, specifically for Asia-Pacific markets.

Sarah leads fund strategy, LP relationships, and investment decisions across both Banksia funds. Her operating history shapes every diligence conversation: she asks the questions that only someone who has run a commerce operation under real commercial pressure would think to ask. She is particularly focused on founders who understand their market's structural constraints — payment rails, logistics networks, consumer trust patterns, regulatory environment — and are building systems designed for those constraints rather than around them.

Before joining Banksia, Daniel was Head of Engineering at a high-growth Australian marketplace where he built the recommendation and search systems serving eight million monthly active buyers. He built these systems at genuine scale — not a prototype or a bolt-on, but the production infrastructure that drove a meaningful share of the company's GMV. He knows what commerce AI looks like when it's working and, more importantly, what it looks like when it's not.

Daniel joined Banksia in 2022 to lead technical diligence and portfolio product strategy. His evaluation of a company's AI architecture is substantive: he is assessing whether the underlying modelling approach will hold up as the catalogue and user base scale, whether the data advantage being claimed is real and defensible, whether the engineering team is building the system they'll need at 10x volume or the one that works today and will need rebuilding. That distinction matters more at Seed than at any other stage.

He is particularly focused on the shift of large language model-powered search into production retail environments — a transition that is moving faster than most people in the industry expected, and that he has been tracking through the portfolio companies' real deployment data. He also leads Banksia's thinking on commerce platform architecture: what separates companies that end up as infrastructure from those that end up as features.

Emma joined Banksia in 2023 after four years as a venture investor at a Sydney-based early-stage fund, where she covered consumer internet and marketplace investments. Before venture capital, she worked in investment banking on technology M&A transactions — a combination that gives her an unusual angle on early-stage companies: she can evaluate a company as a standalone investment and think clearly about where it sits in its category's eventual consolidation landscape.

At Banksia, Emma leads origination and seed-stage deal execution. She has built a consistent dealflow network across the APAC founder community — particularly in Singapore, Australia, and the emerging markets of Southeast Asia where commerce infrastructure investment has historically been underweighted relative to market size and growth trajectory. She attends and speaks at commerce and marketplace founder events regularly, and sees most relevant Australian and Singaporean deals before they reach the broader market.

Her investment focus is concentrated in three areas: loyalty and retention infrastructure (where she sees customer acquisition cost pressure driving structural demand for better retention tooling), cross-border commerce (the payment, compliance, and logistics layers that make selling across APAC corridors genuinely viable), and B2B marketplace automation (the wholesale and procurement digitisation wave that B2C observers keep underestimating).