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 👀
🏛️ CGT Update: The government has scrapped the $10 million lifetime cap on its capital gains tax carve-out for startups, extended eligibility to companies up to 15 years old and cut the minimum investor holding period from five years to three. (SmartCompany)
The exposure draft, released by Treasury on Friday, still keeps the $50 million turnover ceiling that industry and investment bodies had also objected to. Consultation on this round closes 28 September.
The Innovative Business CGT Concession applies to gains accruing from 1 July 2027, with transitional access for investments made before that date, plus relief for takeovers and employee share schemes.
The original carve-out was Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers's response to founder and investor backlash after the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount was abolished, and the redraft follows close to 2,000 submissions to Treasury and the Senate.
Ben Thompson, Founder of Employment Hero, was critical of the new concessions, said on x.com following the news, “they still exclude any startup that grows past $50m revenue. What a massive disincentive to found a startup in Australia!”
🌏 Canva is hiring staff to rehearse earnings calls, manage sell-side analysts, and prepare financial guidance, meaning its US listing preparation has entered an active phase. (Capital Brief)
A San Francisco senior manager of investor relations is expected to run the quarterly earnings process, prepare CFO briefing materials and coordinate mock earnings calls. Applicants need to understand SEC disclosure requirements including Regulation FD, quiet periods, and 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filings. The job ad has since closed.
Other recent ads include a corporate FP&A manager covering non-GAAP-to-GAAP bridges and financial guidance, a head of data inside the finance organisation, and a finance systems engineer owning revenue recognition across NetSuite, Zuora and Snowflake.
Other signals for a listing have popped up too. On 3 September, Themes ETF Trust filed with the SEC for three leveraged Canva ETFs, a 2X long, a 2X short and a 1X short, designed to begin operating around the time Canva starts trading. Themes ran the same play ahead of SpaceX. Tradr lodged its own Canva filings earlier this year.
📉 AMSL Aero, the Hostplus- and Telstra Super-backed maker of the Vertiia hydrogen VTOL aircraft, is up for sale after raising more than $50 million and cutting its headcount from about 70 to 6. (Capital Brief)
Boutique firm Allunga Advisory is running the sale. A $30 million equity raise launched with Allunga in July 2025 appears to have been abandoned.
The Vertiia VTOL business and the small surveillance drone business have been separated. The drone business still services an open Australian Defence Force contract won through Defence's ASCA program.
ARENA continues to administer the funding agreement and says AMSL had received $4.8 million of a headline $6.51 million as at March 2026. Founders Andrew Moore and Siobhan Lyndon both stepped away from executive roles in April 2025.
💸 Melbourne seed fund Skalata has bought out one of its co-founders, billionaire Paul Little, and has completely rebranded as Tall Order Ventures. (Startup Daily)
Chief executive and partner Rohan Workman and partner Maxine Lee led the buyout, which completed about a month before the rebrand. The firm has 85 portfolio companies across three funds. No deal value was disclosed.
It paused investing for five months from March to rebuild its process around AI, automating sourcing, screening and first-pass diligence, which it says frees roughly 70 per cent of partner time. It now positions itself as a first-cheque fund for the AI era, writing up to $1 million into operators using AI to rebuild the industries they came from.
They’re now raising fund three. Fund three is a $50M target fund looking to deploy into AI-native seed-stage companies. It’s CGT exempt as it’s an ESVCLP structure.
Tall order is also what I do at Starbucks.
🧠 Nvidia will work with eight Australian partners on up to a 2 GW buildout of AI factory capacity by 2027, which is more than the combined capacity of every operational data centre in the country. (Nvidia, Capital Brief)
The partners are Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NextDC, and AirTrunk, which host multiple generations of Nvidia's DSX systems. Atlassian and Heidi are local examples already building on Nvidia’s Nemotron open models.
On scale: Australia has 162 operational data centres, and only three of them exceed 100MW. The country's entire pipeline of potential capacity is about 6 GW, which CommBank says is roughly four times the amount operational at the end of 2025.
Put against the grid, 2GW is about double the Tomago aluminium smelter, currently the largest single electricity user in the country. Data centres account for around 2 per cent of grid-supplied electricity today, and at the end of the March quarter just 11 large-scale projects totalling 5.4GW were working through the transmission connection process. (AEMO)
🏛️ NSW has proposed a $150 million fund to co-invest with universities on research commercialisation, though it does not start until FY2028 and depends on Labor winning the March election. (Startup Daily, NSW Government)
Treasurer Daniel Mookhey announced it at the Sydney Investment Summit. Treasury, Investment NSW and Chief Scientist Hugh Durrant-Whyte will design the structure with universities including UNSW, UTS and Western Sydney University, with health innovation, deep tech, biomedical and environmental science flagged as focus areas. There is no detail yet on individual investment sizes, co-investment requirements, or how a startup would actually access it.
If you’re ready to make the bet on expanding to global markets as your next growth lever, you’re probably starting to map out what go-to-market, operations or compliance will look like as you tackle the US or European markets.
This checklist from Vanta is a guide on how to validate demand, build a repeatable GTM engine and meet global compliance requirements early, so you can build trust with customers and unlock new deals from day one.
Use it to spot gaps, reduce risk and nail your expansion to global markets.
⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
First Table raises A$10M to sell the empty tables restaurants cannot fill
Founders: Mat Weir
First Table, the Queenstown-founded platform that sells diners the first table of the night at discounts, has raised A$10 million (NZ$12 million) to push harder into Australia.
New money came from K1W1 and Icehouse Ventures, alongside existing backers Altered Capital, Invest South, Mainland Angels and shareholders from its Snowball Effect raise. Neither the round stage nor a valuation was disclosed.
Founded in 2014 by Mat Weir, the model is free for restaurants, which give up margin on a quiet table rather than leave it empty, while diners pay a booking fee for the discount. It now operates in more than 65 cities across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, with about 3.9 million diners and 5,000 restaurants.
Despite being founded in NZ, Australia is already the larger market, at 22 cities, more than 1,500 restaurants and over a million users. The raise funds a deeper push into Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as product development and marketing. Chief executive Alex Cappy joined this year from Uber and Deliveroo.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Capital Brief, Scoop
Metacognition raises $10M to build an operating system for AI and robots
Founders: Anton van den Hengel, Stephen Gould, Paul Dalby
Metacognition, an Adelaide company building an operating system for AI agents and robots, has raised $10 million from Main Sequence.
The operating system sits beneath large language models and controls how they interact with machinery and other systems, so a worker can train a machine by talking to it rather than writing code. The company frames the longer goal as persistent memory and lifelong reasoning in always-on multi-agent systems.
The team is stacked. Anton van den Hengel is chief scientist at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, where he built a computer vision group of 130 researchers, and previously held a director role at Amazon's machine learning division. Stephen Gould was a principal research scientist at Amazon and co-founded Sensory Networks, which Intel acquired in 2013. Paul Dalby is a research and innovation strategist.
The team of eight is hiring AI researchers. Their first targeted applications are industrial, with operating simulations already built for open-cut mining and electricity grid management.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Capital Brief
Dela raises just over $1M to remove scams from marketplace sales
Founders: Megan van der Velde
Dela, a payments and shipping layer for second-hand sales on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree, has raised just over $1 million from a single private investor.
The app holds a buyer's payment until delivery is confirmed, verifies the seller's identity, and coordinates shipping. That removes the two points where peer-to-peer deals usually go wrong: paying a stranger up front, and meeting one to hand over cash. Megan van der Velde built the application after being scammed herself.
It is free for sellers. Buyers pay $5 on items up to $100, and $5 plus 3.5 per cent on items above $100. The app launched earlier this year on Apple and Android, and the funds go toward product development.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
🚀 Wins 🚀
🤝 Apate.AI, whose US$8.15 million seed we covered last week, has signed a global distribution deal with US telco analytics vendor Mobileum. (ARN)
Mobileum will sell the Sydney platform to carriers worldwide as Scam Intelligent Defense. Apate's agents engage scammers across voice, SMS, and email and harvest mule accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, and URLs for banks, telcos, and government.
The deal enables Mobileum’s customers to detect emerging threats more quickly, strengthen their network defences, and stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated fraud operations.
🚀 🚨 AUSSIE ROCKET PARTNERSHIP ALERT: Gilmour Space and Hypersonix have signed an agreement to build sovereign hypersonic flight-test capability, combining Gilmour's rockets and Bowen Orbital Spaceport with Hypersonix's scramjets. (Startup Daily, Business News Australia)
The partnership was announced at a National Reconstruction Fund event at Parliament House. Hypersonix raised a $46 million Series A about 12 months ago, with $10 million from the NRF in its first defence-sector investment.
Hypersonic means Mach 5 and above, roughly 6,100km/h.
The deal provides defence customers with more frequent and accessible ways to test super-fast equipment, with AUKUS Pillar II identified as an area to explore.
🧬 ENA Respiratory has secured $2.98 million in non-dilutive funding from the Medical Research Future Fund to take its antiviral nasal spray into an asthma trial. (Startup Daily)
The money comes through the Biointelect Venturer program, part of a $10.48 million distribution across six infectious disease biotechs.
Lead candidate INNA-051 is a first-in-class TLR2/6 agonist dosed weekly as a nasal spray, designed to accelerate viral clearance in the upper airway. The Australian trial in adults with asthma is planned from early 2027. Brandon Capital and Uniseed backed its 2025 Series B.
📆 Notice Board 📆
⏰ Applications for EVP’s new 40x program close this Tuesday, 15 September.
It’s a three-day in-person program for ANZ software founders who already have revenue and plan to raise within the next twelve months. Up to 40 founders per cohort, with sessions on 1 October, 18 November and 28 January.
Each participant gets $25,000 in AWS Activate credits plus access to EVP's investor network. It is run by venture partner Mark Zmarzly. Apply here.
🎉 Spark Festival is running from the 21st to 27th of September across Sydney and regional NSW, and every event is free. (Startup Daily)
Now in its eleventh year, with about 60 events on the program and roughly 5,000 people expected. The main venue is UTS Startups at 3 Broadway, Ultimo, with partner venues including UNSW, the University of Sydney, Stone & Chalk, Newcastle, Parramatta, the Western Sydney Aerotropolis and iAccelerate in the Illawarra.
Most events need registration through the links on the festival site. Investment NSW has also added a run of founder gatherings to the program this week.
🩺 MedTech Actuator's Cohort 11 Demo Day is on Wednesday 14 October in Melbourne.
The demo day kicks off at 5:30 pm and runs till 8:30 pm at the ACMD Building in Fitzroy. Details and registration are on the MedTech Actuator events calendar.
🇳🇿 Auckland Startup Week runs from 12 to 16 October.
The programme is still being added to weekly. Keep an eye on the site if you are heading across the Tasman.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will’s Pick: OpenAI's apparent maths breakthrough raises profound questions by The Economist
OpenAI says a swarm of roughly 10,000 agents solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem in 88 hours, burning 2.7 million messages and at least US$6.5 million of compute to find the singularity that has eluded mathematicians for a century.
The maths is above my pay grade, but the fight around it is the interesting part. OpenAI started the run after hearing that NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge were close to their own answer, the pair published their unfinished proof first, and Buckmaster now wonders whether their work found its way into OpenAI's training data, which OpenAI says it cannot rule out. Weird stuff!
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