This Week in Australian Startups #78, 28th July 2024
This Week in Australian Startups #78, 28th July 2024
My highlights for this week;
me&u founder Stevan Premutico has decided to step down from the board to take a sabbatical before coming back with startup #3 (Stevan Premutico)
Always exciting when a seasoned founder is announcing they’re going to go again. These are strong signals of a maturing ecosystem, and that this knowledge and experience is being retained in Australia.
Square Peg is raising for a sixth fund, as well as a new “Opportunities Fund 3”, seeking a combined $840M (Startup Daily)
VCs are continuing to raise new funds, will be interesting to see if any investment thesis change/evolve and if there’s any focus on increasing DEI at the founder level. Certainly with more capital from exits/secondaries there’s opportunity for the LP pool to be more diverse which is what is more likely to make real impact from a DEI lens.
Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, shares her insights into the the current landscape of female VC’s in Australia (LinkedIn)
Out of 169 partners in Australian VCs, only 17% are female yet 43% of all non-partner investment professionals are female.
Certainly a lack of diversity of at the top, but the pipeline is looking healthy - as Melissa puts it in her article “Will this lead to greater gender equity at the partner level.. in five years, will women make up at least 43% of VC Partners?
UQVentures introduces Ventures Hustle, an entrepreneurship challenge spearheaded by Luke Anear, founder of SafetyCulture, where students will have the chance to build and launch real businesses (UQVentures)
This is awesome.
Universities, in particular the Group of 8 in Australia, can be very research and theory heavy. It’s great to see a more embedded approach to industry led curriculum, especially when it’s legitimate entrepreneurs like Luke.
Top News
4 space projects at UniSA have received $18M as part of the $230m iLAuNCH program (Startup Daily)
The NSW government has launched the NSW Space+ Program with up to $500K in grants for space tech (Startup Daily)
Gilmour Space Technologies will kick off a new flight test service in Australia next year for commercial and defence customers with speeds above Mach 5 (Startup Daily | BNA)
me&u founder Stevan Premutico has decided to step down from the board to take a sabbatical before coming back with startup #3 (Stevan Premutico)
Square Peg is raising for a sixth fund, as well as a new “Opportunities Fund 3”, seeking a combined $840M (Startup Daily)
Birchal cuts staff as part of 30% expense reduction (SmartCompany)
Blossom has reached $75M in funds under management, targeting $100M by the end of 2024 (Startup Daily)
JET Charge rolls out Australia's largest EV dealer charging network with Toyota (BNA)
Medtech EMVision unveils first responder device, which would allow paramedics to scan and send images to experts from the site of a suspected stroke (BNA)
Birchal has released its latest crowd-sourced funding (CSF) report which estimated the combined market cap of all successful CSF is $5.8B (BNA)
Australian VC funding up 12% to $1.8B according to KMPG’s VC Pulse Report (The Australian)
Synchron is incorporating ChatGPT into human brains to help those with paralysis communicate with others more freely (The Australian)
Up, the digital bank, is on track to hit 1 million customers in October (Capital Brief)
Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, shares her insights into the the current landscape of female VC’s in Australia (LinkedIn)
Square Peg Investor Letter Half Year Report 30 June 2024 (Square Peg)
AFR Analysis on Square Peg’s returns (AFR)
Asseti wins Most Innovative PropTech of the year at the Proptech Association Australia Awards (Asseti)
Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer of Adobe, will join the Atlassian Board of Directors from 1st August (Mike Cannon-Brookes)
UQVentures introduces Ventures Hustle, an entrepreneurship challenge spearheaded by Luke Anear, founder of SafetyCulture, where students will have the chance to build and launch real businesses (UQVentures)
Stables, the stablecoin payments startup, has announced its expansion to Europe in partnership with Mastercard (Cointelegraph)
Funding Rounds
Fundabl, the fintech which offers debt funding to startups, has raised $3.2M (Startup Daily | BNA | Capital Brief)
Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind automated digital advertising agency, has raised a $5.5M Seed round led by Square Peg with participation from Rampersand (SmartCompany | AFR | Jake White)
Order Editing, a Shopify app which lets customers make changes to their orders without emailing support, has raised an undisclosed amount from its customers in its first funding round (Hamish McKay)
PREVE, a pre-product startup looking to improve patient clinical outcomes, quality of life and healthspan through automation and AI, has raised a $550K pre-Seed round (Adam Beaupeurt)