G’day and welcome to your weekly edition of Overnight Success - your download on all the important things that have happened in the Aussie startup ecosystem. 🚀
👀 Headlines 👀
🎨 Canva has acquired Simtheory (an agentic AI platform) and Ortto (marketing automation tooling with 11,000+ customers across 190 countries) ahead of its Canva Create event in LA next week (AFR)
Both companies were founded by Australian brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously founded and sold Stayz to Fairfax Media
Ortto had raised $35M from Salesforce Ventures, Rembrandt, and Blackbird before the deal. The financial terms of the acquisition are not disclosed at this stage, but according to the AFR, it’s Canva’s largest since the $US250 million purchase of Leonardo.ai in 2024.
The acquisitions are central to what COO Cliff Obrecht is calling "the biggest transformation in Canva's history". Cliff's post was quite funny, with both acquisitions announced in the same post.
Both products will continue as standalone offerings, and the Sharkeys will take leadership roles across Canva's AI and marketing tech teams
This brings Canva's two-year acquisition tally to at least eight companies, including Leonardo.ai (~$320M), MagicBrief ($22.5M), Affinity, Cavalry, MangoAI, and Doohly.
🚁 💰 Praetorian Aeronautics, an Adelaide-based maker of AI-powered autonomous aerial defence systems, is raising $30 million+ Series A at a $100 million+ pre-money valuation, led by existing backer and co-investor Paspalis Innovation Investment Fund. (AFR)
The company, founded in 2022 by former Boeing engineer Brett Hill, manufactures autonomous drone interceptors and owns the AI software stack behind them, with a live testing and deployment arrangement with the Ukrainian government and active discussions with European buyers.
Funds will be used to scale headcount from 50 to 140, primarily in advanced manufacturing, across Adelaide, Melbourne and Darwin. The Paspalis coinvestment fund is specifically focused on creating jobs in the NT.
💰 Firmus, the Tasmanian-founded AI infrastructure startup, is closing the final tranche of its $1 billion+ pre-IPO raising at a ~$6.9 billion valuation. $900M up from $6 billion in November — with Nvidia doubling down as a strategic investor at $144 per share. (AFR)
The company is developing energy-efficient AI data centres using liquid immersion cooling, with its first Melbourne facility opening in weeks under a $600 million contract widely attributed to Meta, and a $73.3 billion "Project Southgate" pipeline planned with CDC and Nvidia.
Firmus is now eyeing what could be Australia's largest IPO this decade, targeting up to $3 billion in capital, with Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Morgans running a non-deal roadshow across Asia this week. A non-deal roadshow (NDR) is a series of meetings where company executives and Investor Relations (IR) teams engage with investors without selling securities or offering a deal. Typically, these focus on providing corporate updates, strengthening relationships, and communicating the long-term investment story.
The Australian is reporting that the target valuation at IPO will be between $8-12bn.
🥄 Spoony, an Australian social media app for the disabled and neurodivergent community, is shutting down by the end of May after its planned October 2025 funding round fell through. (SmartCompany)
Founded in 2024, the app raised $1M and grew to 65,000+ users following a "grow first, monetise later" model that has fallen out of favour with investors, according to the founder.
Co-founder Nicholas Carlton took to LinkedIn to share how the funding environment and building environment have shifted dramatically due to AI coding tools, with investors now expecting much earlier monetisation
Spoony explored a digital therapist AI feature. It proved popular, but Carlton killed it, concerned about users forming relationships with humanised AI, calling it "antithetical" to Spoony's mission of connecting people to each other
👏 Two new ANZ venture funds are making moves: one betting on defence, one on fintech, with Beaten Zone and Tripple Bubble hitting funding milestones.
Beaten Zone Venture Partners raised $2.6M in March alone (nearly 16% of total capital in a single month).
BZV backs sovereign Australian defence and national security companies across autonomous systems, cyber resilience, and advanced hardware.
Triple Bubble hit a $10M first close on a $50M fintech fund after nine months, with CBA's x15ventures as the cornerstone investor. The stage-agnostic fund covers private markets, secondary equities, and pre-IPO fintechs. Already deploying; final close targeted Easter 2028.
There are longer write-ups for both funds below, but it is clear how challenging the fundraising environment is for emerging fund managers.
🥼 Mighty Partners has launched an R&D financing product in partnership with Paddington St Finance, allowing Australian tech companies to advance $500K–$5M+ (up to 85%) of their expected R&D Tax Incentive rebate before the ATO pays it out
Mighty is targeting the government's R&D rebate, which offers meaningful support for Australian tech companies, but the 9–12-month delay between spending and receiving the refund creates a real funding gap.
The product is non-dilutive. It's structured against the expected government receivable rather than equity, and repaid automatically once the ATO refund lands, leaving ownership and control unchanged.
Mighty offers three facility structures: a prior-year facility for expenditures already incurred, a current-year facility that lets companies draw down as they spend, and a hybrid that combines both under a single loan agreement.
The target market is established, revenue-generating tech businesses with R&D budgets of roughly $1.5–15M that are actively reinvesting that spending into growth.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Haast raises $17.2M Series A to automate the compliance bottleneck stalling enterprise AI
Founders: Kunal Vankadara and Liam King
Haast, an AI-powered enterprise compliance engine founded in Sydney in 2023, has raised $17.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from DST Global Partners, Airtree, Aura Ventures, and Black Sheep Capital. The raise brings Haast's total capital raised to $24.4 million.
Haast's own research found that 70% of legal and compliance teams' time is spent on manual, repetitive, or automatable tasks. As AI tools have driven an 8x–10x increase in enterprise content volume, those teams haven't scaled accordingly, creating a bottleneck that slows marketing, product, and go-to-market functions across large organisations.
Rather than adding another AI point solution to a crowded market, Haast positions itself as a compliance infrastructure. The platform embeds organisational policy, risk appetite, and approval logic directly into day-to-day workflows via AI agents, providing enterprise teams with an automated, auditable path through high-volume compliance work. The system maintains a strict, unalterable audit trail and is designed to satisfy governance requirements at a global, federal, and state level.
Haast has built a customer base among Fortune 500 companies and reports 4.5x revenue growth over the past 12 months with zero customer churn… a combination that carries weight in a market where enterprise compliance software is notorious for implementation friction.
Proceeds will fund the expansion of Haast's agentic compliance flows, accelerate product development, and support its push into global enterprise markets. The company is headquartered in New York, with offices in San Francisco and Sydney.
Due Diligence: AFR
Kimia raises $7M Seed to stop chemical expertise from walking out the door at retirement
Founders: Farid Mirmohseni and Sajjad Azami
Kimia, a Sydney-based chemical intelligence platform that converts institutional expertise into real-time commercial workflows, has raised $7 million AUD in seed funding led by Airtree Ventures, with participation from Blackbird Ventures and Skip Capital.
Founded in Sydney by CEO Farid Mirmohseni and CTO Sajjad Azami. Kimia applies domain-specific chemical reasoning to a company's existing documentation, product data, and institutional knowledge, then captures and structures that information around commercial workflows to deliver accurate answers and support real-time execution. Every output is traceable to the original source, which is what the bar technical teams require before they trust AI in customer-facing contexts.
Industry veterans, chemists, formulators, and domain experts collaborate directly with the system to write instructions, encode decision logic, and define what constitutes good. The result is a system that combines company knowledge, AI reasoning, and proprietary expert intelligence into something that actually knows how to behave in a technical commercial context.
The platform is already live with enterprise customers, including Bostik, Univar Solutions, and Stahl, spanning workflows from supplier data structuring and website search to instant answers for sales teams.
The round will accelerate enterprise onboarding, deepen platform capabilities, and expand go-to-market reach across the global chemical sector.
Due Diligence: PR WEB, Capital Brief
Chime Labs banks $900K pre-seed to stop tradies missing calls and jobs
Founders: Alexis Griveau & Mathew Pretel
Australian tradies miss an average of one in three inbound calls during working hours. For a solo operator, that can translate to $12,000 a month in lost revenue. Chime Labs, a Sydney-based AI-powered receptionist platform for trades and services businesses, has raised $900,000 in pre-seed funding led by 500 Global, with support from angel investors.
Founded in 2025 by former Googlers Alexis Griveau and Mathew Pretel, Chime Labs' core product answers calls around the clock, qualifies inbound leads, and books jobs directly into a tradie's calendar, removing the administrative load that typically spills into evenings and weekends.
Chime Labs books directly into ServiceM8, which is the dominant job management platform for Australian tradies.
The fresh capital will fund expanded product development with quoting, invoicing, and lead generation tools on the map, as well as headcount growth, with the goal of making Chime Labs a single platform for Australian trades and services operators.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
🤑 New Fund, Who’s This? 🤑
🛡️ Beaten Zone Venture Partners (BZV) raised $2.6M in March alone — nearly 16% of its total capital raised in a single month
Brings the fund's total to ~$17M. The fundraising process goes to show how long a fund’s fundraising can be. BZV closed $10M in the first 18 months, $4.4M over the next 12 months, then $2.6M in March 2026.
Of the capital they’ve secured, $11.95M has come from external investors, while the remaining balance of $5.05M has been invested directly by founder and managing partner Steve Baxter
BZV backs sovereign Australian defence and national security companies across autonomous systems, cyber resilience, and advanced hardware — with a focus on businesses that can sell into the US market
Portfolio includes HEO, Arkeus, and Zendir (formerly Nominal Systems)
🏧 Triple Bubble, a fintech-focused VC founded by Dom Pym (Up Bank, Euphemia), Brian Collins, and Judy Anderson-Firth, has hit a $10M first close on a $50M fund after nine months of raising
X15ventures (Commonwealth Bank) is the cornerstone investor; a string of fintech founders and finance execs have also committed, including WeMoney's Dan Joveski, Tractor Ventures' Matt Allen and Aprill Enright, and Techstars co-founder Brad Feld
The fund is stage-agnostic across three asset classes: private markets (pre-product to late stage), secondary equities, and pre-IPO/public fintechs
The fund is already deploying with announcements expected in the coming months, with final close targeted by Easter 2028
Pym describes it as "one of the toughest capital raising markets in the last decade"
The fund's thesis is underpinned by a market gap: four in five Australian fintechs have no VC on their cap table, and Australian VCs own less than 4% of the local fintech market
🚀 Wins 🚀
🫖 Cheers to that! East Forged, the Aussie cold-brewed iced tea startup, beat out Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to win Best Drink Innovation at the World Food Innovation Awards in London.
Founded in 2020 by Kym Cooper and Tania Stacey, the brand makes nitrogen-infused iced tea with no sugar or additives
Production is up around 140% year on year, with national stocking in Harris Farm and select IGAs
🏦 JustFund, a legal funding provider already partnered with more than 1,300 law firms nationally, has launched an estate funding service designed to bridge the "probate gap", giving executors early access to funds secured against estate assets to cover legal fees, court filing fees, funeral expenses, and other estate costs while probate is underway.
The service addresses a growing structural pressure in Australian estate law: probate is taking longer and costing more, with executors now spending an average of 9–12 months administering an estate across 37 institutions.
Estate lawyers report that around one in three clients cannot pay legal fees upfront, leaving some firms carrying hundreds of thousands in deferred fees at any given time.
Beneficiaries can also use the service to access a portion of their inheritance early, before probate concludes, to cover expenses like mortgage repayments or essential costs. The launch comes as Australia enters an estimated $3.5 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer over the next two decades.
🏥 MedTech Actuator Accelerator Australia Cohort 11 has been revealed! Check out this LinkedIn post for links to the startups' LinkedIn pages. Many are pretty early and don’t have websites yet!
🫁 Aēir — compact, integrated inhaler spacer improving medication delivery for asthma and COPD patients.
🩺 Athera Medical — wearable microneedle patch for continuous troponin monitoring to catch cardiac events early.
🔬 BioMedika Insights — nanomedicine targeting the root causes of skin inflammation.
🧠 Curalysis — a platform helping neurological patients track their health and contribute data to clinical trials.
⌚ Emva — AI wearable translating female biomarkers into clinical-grade performance insights, tackling gender data bias in health tech.
👁️ Hydromask — scalable emergency ocular irrigation device built for safety and clinical efficiency.
📡 HyperWave — next-generation CT scanners.
🤱 MamaTech — the world's first portable therapeutic ultrasound device for inflammatory conditions of the lactating breast.
🧬 NeuroBase — explainable NeuroAI turning mental health data into clinician-ready insights.
🩸 Oncoparse — a rapid blood-based test for pancreatic cancer delivering actionable treatment and monitoring insights.
🎥 Predictive Intelligence — a universal surgical video segmentation tool turning raw operating data into better patient outcomes.
💪 PULS3 — hardware-agnostic AI coaching platform unifying wearable data into personalised, evidence-based daily actions.
⚡ SeizureSafe — personalised epilepsy platform detecting non-convulsive seizure activity and providing real-world safety support.
🤰 TermWise Medical — a smart wearable device for preterm birth prevention.
💊 ThyX — implantable, long-acting solution to replace daily thyroid hormone treatment.
📆 Notice Board 📆
🍺 Square Peg is partnering with Anthropic to host an AI Founder Salon in Melbourne on Monday, 27 April.
Join to learn from Anthropic's product and engineering leads from the Claude Developer Platform, swap notes with fellow builders, and dig into the real questions around AI development.
Monday 27 April, 2:30 – 6:30 pm, Richmond. Spots are limited: RSVP here
🧑🎓 Plus Eight Sprint, a free, six-week pre-accelerator run by Spacecubed, is now open for applications, exclusively for founders and small business owners operating in Western Sydney's 13 local government areas.
The program runs from 5 May to 30 June at the Western Sydney Startup Hub, with weekly Thursday evening masterclasses covering business model development, customer validation, product prototyping, growth marketing, fundraising, and pitching.
Participants gain access to mentors, investors, and advisors, as well as coworking space, peer learning, and a final pitch showcase. Applications close 24 April: apply here.
🌱 ThincLab and the Adelaide Economic Development Agency (AEDA) are running the ThincSeed Pre-Accelerator. A seven-week program for early-stage founders who have moved past the idea stage and want to pressure-test and validate their venture.
The program runs from 10 June to 22 July, with weekly workshops covering customer validation, business model design, pricing, due diligence, and pitching, as well as founder huddles and access to ThincLab's commercial and investor networks.
Strong performers will have a pathway into the full ThincSeed Accelerator. Applications close 29 April: apply here!
🏛️ The NSW Government has launched the Emerging Technology Commercialisation Fund (ETCF): a competitive grants program offering grants of between $500,000 and $2 million (up to $7 million per round) to help NSW startups move world-class research toward commercial deployment.
The fund targets innovations at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3–7 (from proof of concept through to early commercial deployment), with a focus on NSW priority areas including net zero, housing, and local manufacturing.
Preliminary applications are open now and close on 29 April 2026, with successful applicants notified in October. Apply here.
Would you like to promote an event or an opportunity? Enquire about a Notice Board promotion by replying to this email.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will’s Pick 💁♂ Is there a formula Aussie companies need to follow for success in the US? by Finn Blake
I’ve noticed a growing vibe of Australian founders and operators looking to the US and heading towards the Big Apple over SF. Perhaps it's something to do with Hamish & Andy’s newly launched Old Mates Pub in New York.
Ben argues there are a few reasons why Aussie startups do well in the US.
Australia's startup ecosystem is tiny, so Aussie founders are forced to be capital-efficient and prove their numbers early.
Global mindset from day one. Serious founders always had to think internationally, so by the time they hit the US, the product was actually ready for it.
Aussies have a reputation for being laid back but hard working, humble (Tall Poppy Syndrome does something useful apparently), and genuinely trustworthy… which stands out in a noisy market
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will