2009 Australian VC Industry Report Is In, And It’s Bad.

AVCAL, the peak industry body for the Australian VC and PE industries has released its 2009 Yearbook and things look grim, at best.

Katherine Woodhope, AVCAL CEO , says that while the PE sector is powering along and now rivals that of Europe and North America, she’s hoping the yearbook:

“acts as a wake-up call to the risk of near extinction of our VC sector”

Ouch.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• $0 raised in FY2009 for seed stage investment
• $180M in total VC investment in FY2009
• 44% decrease in average deal size from almost $2M in FY2008 to $1M in FY2009

AVCAL doesn’t report on exits specifically for VC but that might just be because there’s nothing really to report on.

I know last year was a tough year for VCs all around the world, but the local VC struggles go beyond that. There are a bunch of smart VC and Tech Angels in Australia who are being held back by structural deficiencies, many of which have been addressed by a recent paper developed from the thoughts of over 30 people involved in the Australian tech startup scene.

That having been said, the start-up scene in Australia has never been stronger and the difficulty in sourcing seed-funding and beyond means that founders are much more effective at creating bootstrappable (is that a word?) businesses, which is a good thing.

Aussie start-ups continue to do well both here and overseas (for those who don’t know many Aussie start-ups , watch this space, you’ll get to know many of them soon :) ). If AVCAL’s report is anything to go by, it looks like Aussie start-ups will be relying on themselves to maintain that success for quite some time to come.