Superannuation fund investment boosts Uniseed

Western Australia's biggest private sector superannuation fund, Westscheme, has signed a AUD$15 million partnership with university based pre-seed venture fund Uniseed.

The partnership will provide Uniseed with significant capital for further investment and Westscheme with an equity position in both Uniseed's existing portfolio and all of its new investee companies.

"Originally Uniseed had funding for four to five years. Now we have sufficient capital for another four years and by that stage we anticipate capital coming back from the investments we've made," said Uniseed CEO Gareth Dando. By then the model will also hopefully have proved itself, he said.

Uniseed was established in September 2000 as a $20 million joint venture pre-seed and seed fund between the commercial arms of the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne.

According to Dando, the Westscheme partnership is one of the first times that a superannuation fund has invested in a university pre-seed fund. He said that other examples include a 10 year $12.5 million partnership between Westscheme and Murdoch University for direct investment into the University's technology signed in October 2003 and an investment by the MTAA Superannuation Fund and the ACT government into the Australian National University announced at the beginning of this year.

"There is a good trend of private investment getting involved at an early stage," said Dando.

Dando does not see the partnership with Westscheme as a move into the space normally occupied by the venture capital market. Instead he said that Uniseed's role has been to bridge the gap between private investment markets and venture capital markets. "I don't think they'll ever get to the early investment stage that Uniseed does," said Dando.