Square Peg recruits first female investing partner
Nov 24, 2020 – 3.00am
Square Peg Capital has appointed its first female investment partner as part of a suite of recent hires, as the fund makes a bigger push into south-east Asia.
The new partner, Piruze Sabuncu, will be based in Singapore alongside Square Peg partner Tushar Roy who relocated there earlier this year.
New Square Peg Capital partner Piruze Sabancu is based in Singapore.
Ms Sabuncu, who had been working part-time as a partner at Next Billion Ventures while on sabbatical, was Stripe's first hire in south-east Asia and was responsible for the region and Hong Kong.
Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, she said there had been a theme of helping tech companies scale throughout her career and by taking on the role at Square Peg she would be able to do this with more companies.
"What I'm really excited about is there's so much potential in the region ... There's new entrepreneurs coming out of the companies that were started five to six years ago and they're expanding," she said.
"The [other] thing is the way consumers do things – live their lives – and their expectations from the tools and apps are significantly different and I was on the frontier of seeing that [at Stripe].
"Being able to put these things together and identify the founders, trends and what works and doesn't work and then bring coaching, our money and our expertise to those founders as they grow their businesses is what I'll be doing."
As well as Ms Sabuncu, Square Peg has recently added investment associate Casey Flint (ex-Uber) to its team and this year hired Orly Amir in its Israeli office.
Casey Flint was at Uber before joining Square Peg as an investment associate.
One of Australia's top venture capital funds, Square Peg has invested in the likes of Athena Home Loans, Airwallex and Amber Electric.
Before the appointment of Ms Sabuncu, the fund had one female partner, Amanda Hjorring, who was appointed in 2019 but is in charge of operations rather than investing.
Square Peg's Paul Bassat admitted diversity in Square Peg's team had been a weak point for the fund and he was hoping the VC's latest hires would go some way to addressing the imbalance.
"At the end of the day you can't underestimate the role of unconscious bias in investment decisions," he said.
"If your investment team is a bunch of males, or a non-diverse team be it ethnicity, gender or age, founders you back will look a fair bit like the reality of your unconscious bias.
"In a relative sense we've done well in the last year or two in backing female founders. But we don't want it to be in a 'relative sense'. We want to do better full stop."
Ms Flint said she was hopeful that increasing the participation of women in the VC sector would in turn lead to more female founders, as well as more investors.
With women disproportionately affected by redundancies and the economic slowdown triggered by COVID-19, Ms Sabuncu said it was important to try to level the investment playing field, while supporting technologies that promoted different, more flexible working arrangements.
"Each area can be a business in itself and I think there are people trying to solve those problems," she said.
"I'm hoping this will bring in more diverse talent because [women] understand this problem more and [how to create] solutions that make the balance between the work environment and life easier."
Paul Bassat