Rachael Neumann
Co-Founder & Partner, Flying Fox Ventures
Turned a personal angel syndicate into one of Australia’s only women-led early-stage funds.
Before co-founding Flying Fox Ventures, Rachael Neumann was Head of Startups for Amazon Web Services ANZ and a Partner at Startmate, and held two Federal Government appointments distributing commercialisation funding to Australian companies. Earlier she worked as an operator at Eventbrite through its high-growth years, and with growth-stage companies including Canva.
She founded the angel syndicate Working Theory Angels, then merged it with Kylie Frazer’s Eleanor Ventures in 2021 to create Flying Fox — a hybrid of syndicate and fund rather than a conventional closed-end vehicle.
Flying Fox invests in early-stage Australian and New Zealand founders, works with a base of more than 450 investors, and runs a dedicated program backed by the Victorian state agency LaunchVic to increase capital reaching female founders.
How she invests
The rolling syndicate-fund hybrid is the structural choice worth noticing. Rather than locking capital for a decade behind a single close, Flying Fox deploys continuously from a large base of individual investors, and cohort participants are given exposure to a minimum number of deals rather than to whichever one they happened to be shown. A share of carried interest is also reserved for portfolio founders, which aligns the people the fund backs with the fund’s own outcome.
What an individual investor can take from it
This is the most directly copyable model on the site for an individual. A syndicate lets small investors reach deals none of them could access alone, and gives whoever leads it working capital without a traditional fund raise. If you want early-stage exposure without picking companies yourself, joining one is the normal entry point — and the two diligence questions that decide whether it is a good one are what the lead charges, and whether they put their own money into the same deals on the same terms.
Where the lesson stops
A syndicate concentrates a different risk: you are underwriting one lead's judgement across everything you hold, without the diversification of manager that a fund-of-funds would give. Fee structures vary widely between syndicates, and carry on a deal-by-deal basis can cost far more than an annual fund fee where a few positions perform and the rest do not. Read the terms per deal, not once at the start.
Co-runs one of Australia’s rare fully women-led VC funds.
Sources
Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with Flying Fox Ventures.