This Week in Australian Startups #55, 18th February 2024
This Week in Australian Startups #55, 18th February 2024
Canva CFO resigns
What started out being reported as succession planning, with Canva looking to bring in an experienced public CFO quickly changed tone when news broke out that an internal investigation into allegations of harassment of female employees was underway.
According to SmartCompany, multiple sources have emerged alleging his departure was indeed due to inappropriate behaviour.
Whilst it’s been widely reported that Singh was already on the way out before news broke of these allegations, but Capital Brief has reported that Singh chose to resign after Canva launched the internal investigation.
I’m sure as Canva continues their investigation an official statement will be made. It’s very common for pre-IPO companies to swap C-Suites for seasoned public executives, but the timeline of events does suggest there may be more to these allegations.
The Australian ecosystem, was rightly in furore as more news broke of the harassment allegations. Unfortunately the second class treatment of women in our ecosystem is a recurring theme, and whilst there have been opinions expressed about how it’s disappointing and even disheartening this happened at a company where one of the founders and CEO is female this post by Erin M on Linkedin is a good reminder that while leaders (including Melanie Perkins) are responsible for their people “the responsibility isn't on women to prevent harassment, abuse and violence against women – it’s on men committing these acts of abuse, violence, harassment against women to stop”.
OneVentures closes its first fund with a 4x return
In The State of Australian Startup Funding 2023 released last week I wrote a piece how we are nearing graduation for the very first class of VCs that raised in the 2010s, in which I stated a 3x return is widely considered the target for VCs to be considered a good investment.
The AFR reported this week that OneVentures has officially closed its first fund - with a 4x return that could rise even higher pending a transaction yet to be finalised.
The article is a great read, but most importantly this is the first complete success story that validates VC and our modern startup ecosystem as a viable and successful investment vehicle. Here’s to the rest of the class of 2010s graduating in a similarly successful fashion!
Australia
Top News
Queensland is backing 5 accelerators, including Farmers2Founders & Energylab, to help 100s of startups get VC-ready (Startup Daily)
Queensland names first five VC firms to get share of $130M fund - Antler, Five V, CSIRO-affiliated Main Sequence, Mandalay and Salus Ventures with $130 million (Startup Daily | BNA | AFR)
Bupa launches $20M VC fund to back Australian healthcare startups (Startup Daily | AFR)
UNSW accelerator receives $1.6M to uncover the best climate tech startups (SmartCompany)
Seven West Media pumps $5.25M into Mad Paws (BNA)
Tyro Payments to receive $10M settlement from Kounta over merchant poaching (BNA)
Brandon BioCatalyst secures $50m grant for new med-tech incubator tackling dementia (BNA)
Japanese semiconductor company Renesas Electronics will acquire Altium for $9.1B in cash, striking one of the largest software deals in Australian history (BNA | AFR | Capital Brief | The Australian)
Afterpay-founded Touch Ventures in the red from investment impairments (BNA)
Temple & Webster defies consumer downturn to post record $254M in sales (BNA)
Dealmaker data solutions group Ansarada to be acquired by rival Datasite for $263M (BNA)
Appen to shut two offices in cost cutting drive as it reels from Google contract fallout (BNA)
Silicon Quantum Computing appoints former Arm Group CEO Simon Segars as chairman (AFR)
Seek cuts dividend on slower job market (AFR)
American HR tech outfit Rippling is coming for Employment Hero (Capital Brief | The Australian | Forbes)
Global Payments eyes Aussie software startup School Bytes (Capital Brief)
Salus Ventures over-subscribed for $40M national resilience fund (Capital Brief)
Telstra taps AI, leaves door open for job cuts, in race to deliver $500M cost savings (The Australian)
Autonomous subsea drone developer C2 Robotics has landed a further $6M contract from Defence (InnovationAus)
The Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) has awarded $51M to co-fund 21 projects with project leads including Q-CTRL, Advanced Navigation and more (InnovationAus)
LX Health and QIC Sign Partnership to Accelerate HealthTech Growth (LX Health)
HotDoc co-founder and CTO Tom Spacek announced Doug Rathbone to take over as CTO, as he steps into a non-operational role (LinkedIn)
Funding Rounds
Diraq, a global leader in quantum computing based on silicon quantum dots, has raised $23M in a Series A-2 round led by Paris based, specialist investor Quantonation (Startup Daily | SmartCompany | Diraq)
Marqo, which is building a vector search engine, has rasied a $19.4M Series A and moves its HQ to San Francisco (Startup Daily | SmartCompany | AFR)
Bugcrowd, the crowdsourced security company, has raised $156.2M (SmartCompany | BNA | AFR)
Fat Zebra, a modern payments platform, has raised an undisclosed sum from Five V Capital (Fat Zebra | LinkedIn)
Around The World
Top News
Nvidia Is Now More Valuable Than Amazon And Google (Forbes)
Arm Holdings jumps over 40%, adds to staggering AI-powered rally (Yahoo Finance)
ContextLogic Nears $173 Million Sale of Wish to Qoo10 (Bloomberg)
Apple iMessage, Microsoft Bing Dodge EU’s Big Tech Crackdown (Bloomberg)
Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds (TechCrunch)
Early Adopters of Microsoft’s AI Bot Wonder if It’s Worth the Money (WSJ)
OpenAI Develops Web Search Product in Challenge to Google (The Information)
OpenAI’s newest model Sora can generate videos — and they look decent (TechCrunch)
No, Sam Altman Isn’t Raising Trillions of Dollars For Chips (The Information)
Masayoshi Son Seeks to Build a $100 Billion AI Chip Venture (Bloomberg)
OpenAI Completes Deal That Values the Company at $80 Billion (The NYT)
Figma’s CEO on life after the company’s failed sale to Adobe (The Verge)
Uber Unveils $7 Billion Buyback Plan in First for Company (Bloomberg)
Funding Rounds
BioAge raises $170M for obesity treatment (Reuters)
Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor raised $110M to bring AI ‘agents’ to business (Fortune)
Evernote and Meetup owner Bending Spoons raises $155M in equity financing (TechCrunch)
AI cloud compute startup Lambda raises $320M at $1.5B valuation (Silicon Angle)