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. 🚀
Some personal news! I started working with Glitch Capital, Australia’s first venture fund built by founders, for founders. I’ll be building out the platform and content, so stay tuned for some updates.
Sponsor shoutout!
Super pleased to be working with Carta for the next few months. I’m teaming up with the Carta team on Wednesday, the 18th (the second morning of Southstart), to host a coffee catch-up between investors and founders. Register here! This week, Carta is sharing why Dovetail moved to Carta to centralise their cap table, improve audit readiness, and model future fundraising scenarios.
👀 Headlines 👀
💉 Novo Nordisk drops its lawsuit against Hims & Hers as part of a broader partnership to distribute GLP-1 medication through Hims & Hers, quelling any nerves about the $1.6B acquisition of Eucalyptus. (Hims & Hers Announcement)
Hims & Hers pivots away from compounded semaglutide, shifting its US weight loss offering to FDA-approved GLP-1 medications. New Novo Nordisk partnership brings Ozempic and Wegovy (pills + injections) to the platform later this month
Hims & Hers positions itself as the largest global consumer health platform for affordable, approved GLP-1 access. The market loved the result, with Hims surging over 50% in before the market opened.
🐨 Anthropic has confirmed it will open a Sydney office in the coming weeks as Australian AI usage surges. This office will be its fourth in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Seoul. (Capital Brief)
Australia ranks fourth globally for Claude usage per capita (more than 3x what the population would predict), and New Zealand ranks eighth. Claude also hit number one on both Australian app stores last week, up from number 27 on the Apple App Store the week prior.
A16z also released its The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report, which listed Canva as the 3rd most-used AI application among mainstream customers, just behind ChatGPT and Gemini.
🧠 Melbourne biotech startup Cortical Labs has opened a biological data centre powered by human brain cells, with a second facility underway in Singapore (in partnership with DayOne Data Centers) that will eventually house up to 1,000 units. (Bloomberg)
The company's CL1 units use lab-grown neurons, converted from human blood cells, mounted on silicon chips that send and receive electrical signals. Each unit uses less power than a handheld calculator, a fraction of conventional AI processors.
Cortical Labs has been teaching its brain cells to play increasingly complex computer games, first Pong, then Doom last month, as a benchmark for computational capability. The technology is years or decades from challenging mainstream chips, but positions the company at the frontier of biological computing as AI drives surging global demand for energy-efficient compute.
👀 Atlassian is cutting ~1,600 employees (10% of its global workforce), with around 480 roles (30%) based in Australia. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes framed the decision as necessary to "self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales." (TechCrunch, ABC)
59% of cuts fall in R&D (engineering, product and design), with the remainder split across go-to-market, G&A, and customer support. CTO Rajeev Rajan is also stepping down, effective March 31, to be replaced by two internal "next generation AI talent" promotions.
Atlassian's shares have fallen more than 50% since the start of the year, making it one of the hardest-hit large tech companies in the SaaSpocalypse. Staff described morale as dire, with even managers unaware of which teammates had been let go until the morning announcement.
Atlassian is now reportedly looking to lease out 1/3 of its new tower in Sydney, which is slated for completion sometime this year.
🎯 Sydney fintech Pay.com.au is targeting an ASX listing by April 22 at an $850 million pre-money valuation, with shares offered at $193 each and an $85 million primary raise led by Morgans. (AFR)
Founded in 2020 by Point Hacks co-founders Ed Alder and Damien Waller, the company posted $73 million in revenue for FY25 and is forecasting $130 million-plus this financial year. The platform lets businesses earn frequent flyer points on expenses, including things like ATO payments,
Existing shareholders won't be able to sell down at IPO — all proceeds go to growth capital.
Backers include the Gandel family, Luxury Escapes co-founder Adam Schwab, and Wilson Asset Management. Bids close March 17.
Why Dovetail moved from Excel to Carta
As startups grow, managing equity in spreadsheets can quickly become complex and error-prone. For Dovetail, Excel was no longer enough as the team scaled.
In this customer story, see how they moved to Carta to centralise their cap table, improve audit readiness, model future fundraising scenarios, and manage 409A valuations more confidently.
⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
MGA Thermal raises $17M Series C to accelerate industrial heat storage rollout
CEO: Mark Croudace
Hunter Valley-based MGA Thermal, an energy storage company developing thermal technology for industrial decarbonisation, has raised $17 million in its latest round. IP Group Australia led the raise, with support from existing investor Main Sequence. IP Group's Shane Meaney will join the board.
The company has not named a series for the raise — its prior round was a $14.15 million pre-Series B completed in 2024, bringing its total capital raised to $50 million. Additional backers include Melt Ventures, JEKARA, Varley Holdings, Electrifi Ventures, Climate Salad, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), New Zealand's Climate Venture Capital Fund, Pollination Group, and Understorey Ventures.
Industrial heat is one of the hardest problems in the energy transition. High-temperature processes like steel smelting, cement kilns, and chemical manufacturing can't be easily electrified the way passenger vehicles or commercial buildings can. The challenge isn't generating renewable energy; it's storing and dispatching it reliably as heat, on demand, at the temperatures industry actually needs.
MGA Thermal's answer is its Miscibility Gaps Alloy (MGA) Block, a proprietary thermal storage medium engineered to absorb energy from renewable power sources and release it as industrial-grade heat around the clock. The blocks are designed to sit within existing industrial infrastructure, acting as a dispatchable heat source that runs on stored renewable electricity rather than gas or coal.
The fresh capital will accelerate MGA Thermal's move from pilot deployments into full commercial rollout. Plans include expanding headcount, fast-tracking customer projects, and scaling manufacturing capacity over the next two years.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
TestBox raises $17 million to help software companies sell in the age of AI scepticism
Founder: Sam Senior
Airtree Ventures has led a $17 million raise into TestBox, an AI-powered sales demo platform that lets software companies show prospects how their product would function inside their own live systems — not a sanitised mock environment. Skip Capital (the family office of Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar and Kim Jackson) and Glitch Capital also joined the round, alongside existing backers Felicis (an early Canva investor) and SignalFire. The raise values TestBox above $70 million. Airtree partner Elicia McDonald will join the board.
Sam Senior, a former Bain consultant from Hervey Bay, Queensland, who has spent the past decade in San Francisco, founded TestBox in 2020 as a marketplace for buyers to test and compare software side-by-side. The supply side worked. The demand side didn't.
In late 2023, he pivoted to target sales teams directly — using AI to generate synthetic data that mirrors a prospect's real systems, letting salespeople run personalised, live-feeling demos without touching actual customer data. An AI solutions engineer guides buyers through the product in real time.
TestBox counts Quickbooks, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Gong, and Apollo.io among its customers. Its largest customer runs roughly 7,000 demos a month on the platform. Senior's view is that the SaaSpocalypse makes TestBox more valuable, not less — as AI makes generic software easier to replicate, the companies that survive will be those with enterprise-grade compliance and governance, and those are precisely the ones that need a tool like TestBox to prove it.
Due Diligence: AFR
Mary Technology raises $7 million to take its litigation fact management platform to the US
Founders: Rowan McNamee, Harry Raworth, Daniel Lord-Doyle, and Luke Abagi
Sydney-based Mary Technology, a legal tech startup building what it describes as the world's first Fact Management System for litigation and disputes, has closed a $7 million round led by OIF Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sydney Angels and Empress Capital. The funding will finance the opening of a San Francisco office and the launch of a self-serve product tier targeting small-to-mid-sized law firms in the US market.
Litigation is fundamentally a facts business. Cases are won and lost on whether legal teams can find, verify, and deploy the right information at the right moment. But the infrastructure for managing that information hasn't kept pace — facts still get extracted manually from discovery documents, emails, transcripts, and handwritten notes, then stitched together across spreadsheets and shared drives. The result is what Mary Technology calls "fact chaos": fragmented, unsearchable, and expensive.
Founded in 2023 by Rowan McNamee, Harry Raworth, Daniel Lord-Doyle, and Luke Abagi, Mary Technology's platform automatically converts unstructured and messy source documents into a structured, verified fact record that integrates with existing practice and document management systems. Facts are linked directly to their source materials, allowing legal teams to identify gaps and inefficiencies in minutes rather than weeks. Firms using the platform report time savings of between 50 and 90 per cent. The platform is now used by more than 2,000 lawyers globally, including at Shine Lawyers, Maurice Blackburn, Hall & Wilcox, and Zaparas Lawyers. The company grew ARR 10x in 2025.
Due Diligence: Press Release, SmartCompany
Scopey Onsite raises $850,000 pre-Seed to reduce construction disputes with AI-powered site recordkeeping
Founders: Gillian Laging, Lydia Rogers
Melbourne-founded Scopey Onsite, an agentic software platform that helps construction teams capture and manage critical project information, has raised €523,000 ($850,000 AUD) in pre-Seed funding. The round was led by a UK-based Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) fund by SFC Capital, with support from Enterprise Ireland. The company is now operating across Australia, Ireland, and the UK.
Construction disputes are expensive, slow, and often avoidable. When something goes wrong on a building site like a scheduling conflict, a variation claim, a safety incident, the resolution almost always comes down to documentation. Who recorded what, when, and how accurately.
The problem is that site crews are busy, apps are clunky, and the information that matters most tends to live in WhatsApp threads and voice notes rather than structured records. By the time a dispute escalates, the evidence is scattered or missing entirely.
Scopey Onsite was cofounded in 2022 by CEO Jenna Farrell and COO Gillian Laging. The platform meets crews where they already are — using chat-based workflows and agentic AI to convert WhatsApp messages and voice notes into structured, searchable records that feed directly to the office. The goal is to reduce the gap between what happens on site and what gets properly documented, without forcing crews to learn new tools or interrupt the flow of work.
The startup relocated its HQ to Ireland when Farrell moved with her family. Enterprise Ireland backed the company through that transition. Laging remains based in Melbourne. The round will support continued platform development and expansion across the three markets the company already operates in.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
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🤑 New Fund, Who’s This? 🤑
🚀 CoVentures has almost closed it’s $15M fund 2. Maxine Minter, who is now joined by Alexey Mitko (ex-Euc co-founder), has raised their second fund at 3x the size of Fund I. (AFR)
More than 65 per cent of its 31 portfolio companies from its first $5 million fund have raised more capital after the CoVentures investment. According to Carta data, this is above the pre-seed benchmark of 45-55 per cent.
The new fund is backed by Brad Feld and Blackbird co-founders Niki Scevak and Rick Baker.
🚀 Wins 🚀
🌊 Brisbane deep-tech startup Xefco has partnered with global footwear textile manufacturer Shinta Woo Sung for the first commercial deployment of Ausora, its water-free textile dyeing and finishing system, with a purpose-built facility planned for Vietnam. (Forbes)
Ausora uses atmospheric plasma technology to colour and finish fabrics without water — eliminating 100% of water use, ~97% of chemicals, and up to 90% of energy compared to conventional dyeing. Textile dyeing currently accounts for around 20% of global water pollution and 3% of global carbon emissions.
Founded by Tom Hussey and Brian Conolly (co-founders of marine apparel brand Zhik), Xefco raised $10.5 million in a 2024 seed round led by Main Sequence Ventures.
👭 Stone & Chalk has awarded 12 female founders with six-month residency scholarships for International Women's Day, doubling its original target after applications surged 60% year-on-year. Recipients span health tech, defence tech, AI, and cyber security across Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.
Helena Ngo - Raffy Allergy: A mobile app helping families manage daily allergen dosing protocols with clinical-grade logic.
Elena Tsalanidis - Deeligence: AI-powered due diligence platform taking law firms from data room to client-ready report.
Ragya Kaul - NoMind Systems: A zero-dependency deployment tool for air-gapped environments across defence, mining and critical infrastructure.
Marissa Bond - Thinking Mode: Locked-down AI assessment platform helping teachers verify genuine student understanding.
Michelle Verco - Flaiver: A RegTech building a federated credit risk platform for banks using modern infrastructure and shared intelligence.
Storme Paes - Elemental IV: Australia's first modular, GMP-licensed sterile manufacturing platform for IV saline and essential injectable medicines.
Janine Owen - Grant'd: AI-powered platform matching businesses and organisations with relevant grant opportunities.
Fatima Arifeen - Voltaire Legal: AI software centralising and managing pro bono work and volunteer programs for the legal sector.
Karen Perks - MiKare Health: Patient-controlled digital health platform delivering AI-powered health intelligence and record management.
Laetitia Andrac - Understanding Zoe: AI platform connecting parents, educators and therapists to coordinate neuroaffirming care for neurodivergent children.
Chantelle Ralevska - Psyber: Behaviour-driven cybersecurity awareness and human-risk training for Australian businesses.
Dunya Hassan - BrailleGPT: A portable, AI-powered handheld device converting speech to tactile Braille in real time for blind and deafblind users.
🛩️ For the first time since the pandemic grounded global travel, Startmate is heading back to San Francisco with its accelerator program. (Startup Daily)
The accelerator will take its current cohort to Silicon Valley in May, reviving a tradition that ran from 2011 to 2019.
The trip follows Startmate's flagship Sydney Demo Day on April 30, and will culminate in the first-ever Startmate Demo Day held in San Francisco — introducing the cohort directly to US investors.
The format mirrors what the accelerator built before COVID: structured access to US VCs, dinners with Aussie founders based in the Valley, and the kind of in-person serendipity that tends to move faster than any warm email introduction.
⛵ The Australian government has signed a $176 million contract with Sydney-based Ocius Technology for 40 solar-powered Bluebottle sea drones, bringing the navy's total fleet to at least 55, one of the world's largest uncrewed surface vessel fleets. (Startup Daily)
The solar-powered drones require no fuel, can stay at sea for 180+ days, and are designed for persistent surveillance and reconnaissance across Australia's northern approaches. They can also deploy armed aerial drones and act as a communications gateway for submarines.
Founded in 1999 by CEO Robert Dane (originally as Solar Sailor), Ocius pivoted from solar ferries to defence drones. The Bluebottles are already operational under Operation Resolute, protecting Australia's borders.
📆 Notice Board 📆
South Australia’s premier startup conference, Southstart Resonance 2026, is only 2 weeks away! If you’re heading to the conference or are in Adelaide, here are the fringe events that could be worth checking out!
Day One is community day; I’m on the “Mastering Community-Led Growth with 0 Budget & Time” with Paz Pisarskim, Mark Dombkins, Vinisha Rathod and Desmond John at 1:30 PM. We’re meeting at 1pm at Table on the Terrace Cafe in Lot Fourteen and walking down together.
Come have a knock off at the AFTER DARK: SOUTHSTART Edn from 7 PM onwards is bringing together the tech founders, builders and connectors, often from the spaces not discussed - the taboo, the sub-culture, and the wild frontiers.
Day Two: Community Coffee for Founders & Investors - Overnight Success x Carta. For the founder and investors to connect over some morning caffeine. We’ve almost hit capacity on this one!
🌏 OpenAI's APAC startup team is in Australia this week for Southstart, with Stone & Chalk hosting a curated Builder Lounge across two cities.
The sessions are aimed at founders and technical leads actively building on OpenAI — not a general meetup, with the room kept deliberately small
Attendees can expect product roadmap updates (including Codex), founder demos, technical deep dives, and time working alongside the OpenAI team
Adelaide: Tuesday 17 March at Stone & Chalk's Lot Fourteen Startup Hub — register here
Sydney: Thursday 19 March at Stone & Chalk Tech Central, 477 Pitt Street, Haymarket — builder session followed by drinks from 5.30pm — register 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 💁♂ Paul Graham on investing in Reddit
I didn’t realise, but Steve and Alexis, the founders of Reddit where what inspired Paul to launch Y Combinator with a few other folks. Anyway, this is a nice story on pivoting and growing, making mistakes and creating something apparently unkillable.
p.s. how funny is this post by Kevin Rudd with Andreessens iconic head breaking though.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will