Our thesis is simple. Commerce is being rebuilt from scratch, and we want to be there at the start.

Why now

When we started Banksia in 2021, the thesis was straightforward: AI was about to make it cheaper to build commerce infrastructure from scratch than to extend legacy platforms. Every category — personalisation, pricing, fulfilment routing, search, supplier matching — was running on rules-based logic built in a different era. The underlying models were improving fast enough that the right architecture choice was no longer "extend what exists" but "start clean and design for intelligence."

Three years of portfolio building has only sharpened that view. The best AI-native commerce companies are not bolting ML onto existing systems — they are writing pricing engines that respond to demand signals in real time, recommendation layers that understand catalogue relationships at depth, and delivery orchestration systems that optimise carrier selection across thousands of daily shipments. What used to require a specialist team of data scientists now ships as product. The incumbents with legacy codebases are structurally slower to respond. The window for first-mover infrastructure companies is open right now, and it will not stay open indefinitely.

We invest at Seed — the moment when the architecture decisions are still being made, when the founding team is still small enough to redirect, and when a committed investor can have genuine influence on product direction. That is the stage where operator experience from an investor matters most.

Why APAC

APAC accounts for more than 60% of global digital commerce volume, but a fraction of the infrastructure investment that has flowed into the US and European markets. The tooling that powers commerce in developed Western markets — from multi-currency payment rails that handle cross-border settlement cleanly, to carrier-agnostic delivery orchestration that spans postal codes and customs regimes, to retail search that works across non-English catalogues — simply does not exist at equivalent quality and coverage across Southeast Asia, Australia, and the broader region.

That is not a complaint. It is a precise description of where the opportunity lives. The corridors that matter — Sydney to Singapore, Sydney to Jakarta, Sydney to Manila, intra-APAC cross-border — are where merchants are experiencing the most friction and where infrastructure builders have the longest runway. We focus on founders who understand these specific market dynamics and are building systems designed for APAC's payment rails, logistics networks, regulatory environment, and consumer behaviour — not porting Western software and hoping it fits.

Why operator founders

Commerce infrastructure that actually works is built by people who have run commerce operations at scale. Not because operators are smarter, but because the friction they're building software to eliminate is friction they've personally experienced — at 2am, during a peak trading window, when the carrier API returns an unexpected error and the customer is waiting. Sarah built and scaled a Melbourne-based e-commerce logistics business to $40M in GMV before a strategic acquisition in 2020. Daniel built the recommendation and search systems serving eight million monthly active buyers at a high-growth Australian marketplace. Those aren't credentials on a slide. They're the reason we ask different questions in diligence, give more direct product feedback, and can tell the difference between a founding team that's thought hard about their architecture and one that hasn't.

We don't back every operator founder. We back operators building in categories where the operating experience is genuinely load-bearing — where understanding margin structure, fulfilment unit economics, buyer/seller trust dynamics, or catalogue complexity changes what you build. If the domain depth doesn't show up in the product decisions, it's not relevant. When it does, it's irreplaceable.