We are excited to meet you and begin a conversation about building the next commercial giants solving the planetary challenges of today.

We work with inventors who are building something hard from their unique expertise in science. These inventors are building the industries that will thrive for the decades to come.

We have a unique working model in which we collaborate deeply with our portfolio to accelerate a company's pathway to scale. We invest early, and sometimes create from scratch, the companies we invest in.

Our Story

We were formed in 2017 to manage the CSIRO Innovation Fund, which was established with $70 million from the Australian Government and $30 million of WiFi revenue from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO.

CSIRO created the Fund to address the ‘valley of death’ between research and commercialisation – solving the world’s greatest challenges by turning our scientific breakthroughs into next century’s giants. The first CSIRO Innovation Fund managed by Main Sequence has invested in 26 companies since establishment in 2017.  These companies have created 550 jobs by working with partners in industry, CSIRO, and 16 Australian universities.

It attracted $232 million investment in its first year, building on the initial $100 million investment with a further $132 million raised through private investment.

Our origins within CSIRO reflect our commitment to amplifying connections between industry, research and infrastructure to accelerate deep technology development, and reinvesting economic returns from commercialisation back into science.

Everything we do has a connection with Australian publicly funded research. Each of our portfolio companies has some advantage delivered by either one of Australia's 43 universities or an industrial research organisation such as CSIRO. In some cases this exists before we invest, in others we facilitate it as part of the companies pathway to scale and impact.

What Gets Us Excited

Our planet has some pretty big problems to solve. We believe that inventors already have the solutions to solve many of these problems and the mindset, capital and community of venturing can deliver the scale that is required for impact.

We have 6 challenges which form our thinking. Whilst it is not necessary for a company to fit these challenges (sometimes the best opportunities are one's we hadn't thought of!), these are ideas are areas of enquiry that team members spend considerable time within. Understanding trends, meeting partners, building community, hunting for infrastructure and resources, collaborating with thematically aligned investors. It is worthwhile reviewing our Challenges and talking to us about how your work can unlock possibilities.

How We Can Help You

Think of us more like a producer than a financier. Making sure our companies are properly financed is key to what we do, but it is not everything.

We understand inventors. We understand that the timing of your work is probably different. We understand that you need more resources that will be hyper-specialised. Labs, manufacturing, talent. You are probably one of a handful of people in the world that understand what you do. We want to fuel that with everything it needs for impact. We usually start collaborating very early when ideas are rough and scrappy.

In CSIRO, we can collaborate with you and the 3,600 scientists that work here across most scientific fields as well as other research organisations. This might be just advice or could lead to a deeper collaboration with these world-class innovators.  We are constantly scanning and meeting with the best thinkers in the fields that excite us.

We can unlock facilities across CSIRO's 52 sites in Australia, or in any of the 43 universities.

We work closely with industry partners across our Challenges who can get our companies to global markets faster and at scale.

We know what it takes to build a company and we will be by your side to build it. Indeed, we have a very specific model for creating deep tech companies that throws the best research, market access and capital at a market opportunity. We call this Venture Science.

Whether you are a founder, a researcher or an industry partner, if you share the same ambition to solve the greatest challenges, please get in touch.