Brent Watts

Brent Watts has more than 25 years of experience spanning technology, startups and investment. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of 77 Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm he established in 2020 and based in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. The firm partners with Australian founders at the pre-seed and seed stages and is backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firm Bee Partners (a portfolio approaching 100 companies, with exits to Adobe, Autodesk and others), with Watts having served as an Investor-in-Residence there.

Before founding 77 Partners, Watts was a founding team member and Head of Investment & Ventures at QUT bluebox, the commercialisation company for the Queensland University of Technology. Over roughly 12.5 years there he formed and managed the QUT Founders Fund and a range of startup programs — including the QUT bluebox Challenge, Accelerator and Robotics Accelerator — which he describes as supporting some 15,000 founders, 1,500 ventures and 150 investments. QUT bluebox wound down at the end of 2019, after which Watts launched 77 Partners.

Earlier in his career, Watts was a New Ventures & Investment Fellow at Boston University's Office of Technology Development and an Associate in the Private Equity and Venture Capital team at the Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC). He was also a long-standing founding advisor/investor (Dec 2014–Apr 2024) and former board member (2018–2019) at VALD, the Brisbane-founded human-measurement technology company.

On education and credentials, Watts holds an MBA, a Master of Engineering Science and a Bachelor of Engineering. He has completed the Venture Capital Executive Program at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the Startup Investor Program at Y Combinator, and the Venture Deals program run by Kauffman Fellows / Techstars. He is a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and of the International Business Innovation Association (InBIA) Institute.

• Invests at pre-seed and seed, typically as an early/first external cheque into Australian founders.
• Concentrates on "FrontierTech" — AI, IoT/edge computing, robotics and advanced manufacturing, energy and smart infrastructure, quantum and cybersecurity — framed around the "AI super cycle" and "IoT wave."
• Looks for founders with a "combination of technical and commercial insight" and companies already showing signs of being an "early market leader" in a large, globally scalable market.
• Positions 77 Partners as a hands-on partner offering early funding, deep mentorship and global connections, using the Bee Partners relationship as a bridge from Brisbane to Silicon Valley ("from Fortitude Valley to Silicon Valley").
• On the Fleetyr deal he stated his conviction plainly: *"One day, every fleet in the world will be safely optimised, and Fleetyr is the key to unlocking that potential with broad hardware integration and deep software analytics."*