CEO & Partner
AirTree Ventures (Web3)Check size: Neither Airtree nor Elicia publishes her personal check range or decision authority. Airtree describes itself as seed-first and able to support companies through their journey; a historic Fund III article mentioned a $200k seed entry point, but that is firm- and vintage-specific rather than a current personal range.
Elicia backs highly ambitious, resilient founders from Australia and New Zealand, often beginning at pre-seed or seed and supporting them across later rounds. Her disclosed portfolio spans AI-enabled enterprise software, workforce intelligence, healthcare, agricultural and climate technology, and B2B SaaS. Her writing emphasizes technology's capacity for positive impact, founder ambition, durable relationships, product love, domain depth, and accepting concentrated venture risk in pursuit of outlier outcomes.
Ambitious and resilient founders, a large important problem, deep domain knowledge, evidence of strong product love, teams treating the mission as their life's work, technology with positive real-world impact, and companies capable of building enduring global categories from Australia or New Zealand.
No personal pass list is published. Her articles imply weaker fit for incremental ambitions, teams without authentic domain commitment, products lacking clear user love or differentiated insight, founders unwilling to take informed risk, and opportunities outside Airtree's Australia/New Zealand seed-first mandate. These are inferred filters, not quoted exclusions.
Lead with the scale and importance of the problem, why this team has earned a distinctive insight, and evidence that customers love the product. Show founder resilience, domain depth, an ambitious global outcome, and why now creates a genuine inflection. Make it easy for her to become an internal champion: cover market, product, traction, team, round, and the specific help you want, then offer customer and founder references for mutual diligence.
Assess whether the founders combine a genuinely large ambition, evidence they persist through hard transitions, and earned domain insight that makes the team unusually suited to solve the problem.
Look beyond surface growth for repeated usage, low churn, referenceable users, and qualitative signs that customers would be meaningfully worse off without the product.
Evaluate an investor in order: can they deliver money quickly, offer sensible terms, avoid causing harm, and finally provide the active help and relationships they promise.
Treat risk and opportunity as linked: remain honest about adverse outcomes and learn from them without allowing fear of failure to push the portfolio toward safe, non-outlier bets.
A mature Australian venture ecosystem must remain candid about failures while preserving the ambition and risk tolerance required to produce outlier companies and strong returns.
Founders should reference-check investors, verify mandate and recent activity, understand terms and decision speed, and distinguish passive value from active help before accepting capital.
Personalized, data-driven healthcare becomes investable when a deeply experienced mission-led team attacks a large hard problem with strong values and consumer accessibility.
Workforce intelligence can aggregate fragmented employee data and use AI to understand capabilities by skills rather than job titles, creating strategic value for enterprises and employees.
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Elicia began in technology investment banking, then worked at a B2B SaaS startup and LinkedIn before joining Airtree in 2016. Airtree says those operating and finance experiences shaped her conviction that technology can drive positive impact. She now serves as CEO & Partner and works with companies including Regrow Ag, Abyss Solutions, HotDoc, Reejig, Human, Kismet, Narrato, and TestBox.
A first investor meeting should equip a prospective internal champion with a concise, memorable account of the problem, insight, product, traction, team, ambition, and fundraising need.