This Week in Australian Startups #31, 4th August 2023 - Meta follows through on news ban, Australian Tech clusters and Threads is not failing
Meta follows through on news ban
Meta announced this week it has started to remove news from Instagram and Facebook in Canada in response to the Online News Act. I wrote about this previously when this story first broke out in June (read more here) and why Meta doesn’t have any incentives to continue providing news with these changes.
As Meta conceded once already in Australia with the News Media Bargaining Code, it’s unlikely they will concede this time and either Canada will or traditional news outlets will see significant drops in traffic coming through, leading to lower revenue for them overall.
Australia’s tech clusters mapped for the first time
In an Australian first, CSIRO and the Tech Council of Australia have put a report together mapping Australia’s technology clusters.
Whilst 96 clusters were identified in total, 4 ‘super clusters’ were identified - the Sydney Arc, the Melbourne Diamond, the Brisbane Corridor, and the Canberra Triangle.
Interesting to note, whilst Sydney is the larger ecosystem by some distance, 20% of all tech workers in Australia, Melbourne’s combined market cap of ASX listed companies is almost 4x that of Sydney.
Despite popular media opinion Threads is doing well
Everyone seems to love highlighting that Threads has lost half of its users since the big launch - all but calling it a failure.
Maybe these people have never actually worked inside a startup, or have first hand experience in building and scale one. It’s easy to look from the outside and report what you can see without actually understanding.
It’s being reported that Meta built Threads somewhere between 5 months and 7 months - even if it’s just a Twitter clone, that’s seriously impressive when you consider they were able to scale it to perform without any real issues at 100 million users.
Threads right now is an MVP. It still lacks a lot of features to be able to say it has parity with Twitter, and whilst they are coming it’s still missing a lot. Despite this they have still have tens of millions of daily active users. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know of any company that has built an MVP and achieved 100 million active users. The drop off they’ve experienced seems pretty standard to me,
Whilst it’s still too early to tell if Threads will be a success or not it’s certainly not ‘bleeding’ users or a failure for now. Some good places to go deeper - the Threads opportunity and John Gruber’s take on Threads ‘failing’.
Top News
Australia
Flying Fox and Jump Start receive $300K each from LaunchVic to focus on pre-accelerator programs to boost female founders and entrepreneurs (SmartCompany)
ATO captures billions of dollars from tax cheats with AI (AFR)
Fred Schebesta’s Finder considers capital raise in a valuation test (AFR)
Nine Aussie VC firms look to raise new funds (AFR)
Brisbane AI tech firm Max Kelsen sells consultancy arm to Bain & Company (Business News Australia)
CSIRO, Tech Council identify Australia's leading digital clusters (Business News Australia | Download Report)
Cicada Innovations granted $7.8 million to run a new biomedical incubator in Western Sydney (Startup Daily)
ASIC sues eToro over ‘volatile’ trading products (Cointelegraph)
Superloop makes $243m bid for founder-led cloud communications pioneer Symbio (Business News Australia)
NSW govt backs diverse founders with new pre-accelerator programs (InnovationAus)
Atlassian shared jump 23% in after better than expected full year results (AFR)
HB11 Energy receives grant from US Department of Energy to develop clean, safe and unlimited fusion energy (HB11)
Fishburners launches Services Hub to remove accessibility barriers to quality service providers (Yahoo Finance)
Airwallex, Afterpay, Hay, Marketlend, OnMarket, Raiz, Tyro and Zip named in CNBC’s top 200 global fintech companies (CNBC)
Annie Liao has created a interactive map for of ANZ Gen AI startups (Clara)
Press Play Ventures received a $300K grant from LaunchVic to launch a 12-week pre-accelerator program for women in employment (LinkedIn)
Still time to participate in the Startup Muster 2023 before the survey closes on 6 August (Startup Muster)
Around the World
Norway Took On Meta’s Surveillance Ads and Won (Wired)
NATO announces $1B fund to back startups supporting ‘safety, freedom and human empowerment’ (TechCrunch)
Arm seeks up to $70bn valuation for September IPO (UKTN)
Hopin, the struggling virtual conference unicorn, sells events and engagement units to RingCentral (TechCrunch)
AI Showed Up in Big Tech Earnings and the Job Market This Week (Bloomberg)
Francisco Partners & TPG to take New Relic private in $6 billion all-cash deal (CNBC)
OpenAI loses its trust and safety leader (The Verge)
Threads is actually doing well (Daring Fireball)
Disney reportedly wants to team up with Apple to expand ESPN distribution (9to5Mac)
Meta loses battle in EU, will ask for consent to show personalized ads (Ars Technica)
Amazon has launched its virtual health clinic across all 50 states (Mashable)
Salesforce debuts Sales Elevate, bringing its cloud into Slack (VentureBeat)
Meta releases AI tools to create music from text prompts (Axios)
Australian Funding Rounds
Plotlogic, a mining tech startup that scans mines using LiDAR, has raised a $43M Series B from Galvanise Climate Solutions, Schneider Electric’s VC firm SE Ventures, supported by Main Sequence (Business News Australia)
Plerion, an all-in-one cloud security platform that supports AWS, Azure and Google Cloud workloads, has raised a $15M Seed round les by Prosus Ventures, Cercano and Atlassian Ventures (Business News Australia)
Goterra, a food waste startup that helps food waste treatment plants deal with leftover produce, has raised a $10M bridge round (Startup Daily)
Global Sisters has received a $736K grant from Google.org to launch a program to help women with disabilities and their carers (SmartCompany)
PMY Group, which provides an international venue, events and infrastructure technology, has raised $45M private equity firm Bluestone Partners (AFR)
Navi Medical Technologies, which develops medical devices for babies, has raised $2.4M from Breakthrough Victoria, Medtech Actuator and Artesian VC (Startup Daily)
MGA Thermal, a clean energy company building a storage system for renewable energy, has raised $8.25M from Main Sequence, Varley Holdings, Melt Ventures, Pollination Group, Understorey Ventures and New Zealand’s Climate Venture Capital Fund (Business News Australia)
Vitable, a personalised vitamin startup, raises $7.5M from Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet, Artesian, Commencer Capital and Brenteca (Business News Australia)
microFleet, the company behind OneDock a universal charging and parking station for electric bikes, scooters and other light electric vehicles, has raised $500K from iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre (iTWire)
International Funding Highlights
GoStudent adds another $95M to its war chest to go after VR and AI-enhanced tutoring (TechCrunch)
Neon raises $46M to advance Serverless Postgres in the Cloud (Neon)
Airalo locks in $60M to expand its eSIM-based global roaming ‘marketplace’ (TechCrunch)
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