Some of the best people we'll ever back don't yet know what they're building. They have a thesis they keep returning to, a prototype they've half-finished on weekends, three papers they can't stop thinking about, and a growing conviction that the next decade of their life should be spent solving the kind of problem most people wouldn't dare to tackle. What they don't have is a precise idea of the exact product to scale.

Figuring out what's worth a decade tends to happen alone, in spare hours after work, under financial pressure that compresses what feels reasonable to attempt. Most of the great companies that could have started in ANZ never did because the founders didn't have a community of peers that pushed them to raise their ambition.

Frontier is building that community. We think the fastest way for an exceptional founder to find the right thing to work on is to put them in a room with five or six peers of the same calibre who'll raise the ceiling on what they think is reasonable to attempt.

Capital and credits are commodities now. But a small group of exceptional people, at the same stage—people who'll read your draft on a Sunday, push back on the idea you've grown attached to on Monday, and ship their prototype on Tuesday so you feel obliged to ship yours on Wednesday—is not. That's the thing we obsess over the most. We'd rather run a small group and get the composition right than fill seats to hit a number.

What that looks like in practice:

• 01$250K on an uncapped, no-discount MFN SAFE, so you can quit your job and pay yourself for long enough to navigate the idea maze properly.
• 02Credits for the major labs and cloud providers to extend your runway.
• 03A residency out of our offices in Sydney and San Francisco. You can start in either or split your time between both.
• 04A cohort that meets in person every Friday, whether you're at our office in Syd or SF. Small enough that the room remembers what you said last week and holds you to it. Technical enough that nobody needs the AI explainer. Curated tightly enough that the bar of the people sitting next to you becomes the bar you set for yourself.
• 05The Airtree network. Twelve years of founders, operators, and customer connections. Intros to customers, recruiting help, a quick read on a contract: whatever you need.

What we're not promising is that you'll leave with a company. Some of you will. Some of you will kill three ideas in three months before landing on the fourth. Some of you will discover, honestly, that the idea you came in chasing isn't the one, and that's a better outcome than spending two years finding out the hard way. The point is to compress the search.

Who we're looking for.

You have an unfair advantage, whether that’s technical depth or domain specialisation: you can build the thing yourself, or you've gone deep enough in a domain—autonomous systems, AI-native services, computational biology, robotics, devtools, whatever has a hold of you—that you see problems the rest of us don't. On top of that, the founders who tend to thrive in rooms like this share a particular kind of intensity. They read across fields. They're suspicious of consensus. They relentlessly chase the truth.

Beyond that, we're open. Pre-idea is fine. A research prototype with a handful of users is fine. First-time founder, second-time, nineteen or forty-nine years old.

Airtree has spent twelve years backing ANZ founders starting locally and scaling globally—Linktree, Canva, Employment Hero. The talent from this region has never been deeper.

The next decade of ANZ economic growth will be built by founders who started in 2026. We'd like Frontier to be where they began.