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. 🚀
Ps. LinkedIn was down when I was writing this, which was both emotionally and commercially. Most things for the week got covered, I think; it sure was a massive week for both fundraising and ecosystem news after a few quieter weeks.
On another note, I’m heading to Sydney this week for a Stripe tour; reach out if you’re around!
👀 Headlines 👀
🧠 Heidi Health is raising more than $100 million at a valuation above $1 billion, making the Melbourne medical AI company Australia's newest unicorn. (AFR)
Founded seven years ago, Heidi uses AI to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients and automate clinical documentation. It was valued at $711 million AUD in its last round, when Point72 Ventures bought in.
Annualised recurring revenue has now passed US$60 million, up from US$50 million (A$70.1 million) in April and US$1 million in 2024. The software is used more than a million times a week across 190 countries, including some of the largest hospitals in Australia, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Blackbird Ventures has been calling Heidi the fastest-growing startup ever on its books and has previously told investors it is growing faster than Canva at the same stage. Heidi is pursuing enterprise deals with major hospitals and has begun selling clip-on microphones called Heidi Remote, its first move into hardware.
The round is not yet completed or guaranteed to close. If it lands, Heidi joins Advanced Navigation, Gilmour Space, Firmus and Eucalyptus (with its exit) on the list of Australian companies to cross $1 billion in the past year.
📉 An investor is trying to offload Canva shares at a 28.5 per cent discount to its $60 billion valuation as local VC funds rerate its valuation. (AFR)
North American broker Hiive offered fund managers a parcel of Canva shares this week at a US$30 billion (A$42.5 billion) valuation, against the US$42 billion price tag from the company-arranged selldown this time last year. The seller was not disclosed, and only a small number of shares are expected to change hands.
A Canva spokesperson was clear that transactions through these platforms are not recognised by Canva and do not result in an official transfer of Canva shares.
This follows last week’s reports that Canva’s growth has slowed. Revenue grew 45 per cent in 2024 to US$2.1 billion, then 38 per cent last year, and the company has now guided investors to 20 per cent for 2026, down from the 30 per cent it had signalled. Monthly active users were flat year-on-year in July.
Blackbird and Airtree have reduced Canva's valuation by 17% to $US34.9 billion, down from $US42 billion last year, following independent reviews.
Canva has been buying AI companies (Simtheory, Ortto, Leonardo.Ai and MangoAI) and positioning itself as an AI company that happens to do design rather than a design company at risk of an AI wipeout.
Fears for the ecosystem health have been slightly overdone too. Canva’s earliest backers have already taken money off the table. Blackbird's stake fell from around 15 per cent in 2023 to 9.37 per cent across five funds by November 2025, and AirTree sold around the 2021 peak and took further liquidity in 2024.
🏛️ 👀 South Australia has signed an MoU with OpenAI, then announced a Royal Commission into AI days later. (Startup Daily, Startup Daily)
Premier Peter Malinauskas signed with OpenAI president Greg Brockman in San Francisco, covering AI skills, local research and attracting investment. It is believed to be the first MoU between an Australian state government and a major AI company.
The Royal Commission starts on 1 October 2026, with a final report due on 1 July 2027 and a $3 million budget, covering jobs, education, public services, regulation, energy, water, and AI infrastructure. The commissioner and terms of reference are not yet finalised.
📊 SafetyCulture has rebranded as Mitti after 22 years since its founding, leaning further into AI-powered operations and insurance. (The Australian, Startup Daily, SmartCompany)
The $2.5 billion unicorn is used by 80,000 organisations and more than two million frontline workers. In February this year, Founder Luke Anear returned as CEO. Mitti apparently takes its name from the Hindi word for soil, and middle in Old Norse.
The name also comes from the SafetyCulture and QBE insurance joint venture, which it took full control of in 2023, and which has written nearly $200 million in cumulative gross written premiums in Australia and is now licensed across 51 US states and jurisdictions. That joint venture was created to challenge the traditional insurance model for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), focusing on reducing the likelihood of needing to make a claim.
🏛️ Independent MP Allegra Spender has warned Labor's proposed startup CGT carve-out would hit Australia's most active startup investors, arguing for a per-person, per-venture cap instead of the proposed $10 million lifetime limit in her own submission to Treasury. (SmartCompany)
The carve-out Treasury is consulting on would let founders, employees holding share options and investors keep the existing 50 per cent CGT discount on small "innovative" startups, up to a $10 million lifetime cap on eligible gains per person, rather than move to the indexation model announced in the 2026-27 budget.
Spender's submission argues the lifetime structure is the problem, not the number. "Australia's startup ecosystem, for all the positive policy interventions over the years, owes a great deal of its success to recycled capital and talent on behalf of a small handful of successful company founders, investors and employees," she wrote, adding that a lifetime limit "discourages repeat investors, employees and entrepreneurs that are important to maintain an onshore innovation sector".
🛰️ Adelaide satellite IoT company Myriota is raising $75 million at a valuation its new CFO expects to top $500 million, with an ASX listing planned within three to five years. (Capital Brief)
The capital is for product development, global sales expansion and M&A. Myriota's low-earth-orbit satellites serve IoT devices across more than 57 countries. It is focused on Australian investors and close to finalising a lead.
In December 2024, Myriota raised $50M, with $25 million of that coming from NRFC, the remainder from venture capital partners Main Sequence, and further support from investors including Inter Valley Ventures.
🩺 Melbourne medtech Atmo Biosciences has raised $12 million at a $25 million valuation, down nearly 64% from $70 million, as it pursues an unexpected new market treating the gut side effects of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. (AFR)
An unnamed family office cornerstoned the new raise and set the terms that reset the valuation. Existing shareholders tipped in behind it, including Breakthrough Victoria (now Innovation Victoria), the Victorian government's investment fund, and former Cochlear chief executive Chris Roberts. Japanese pharmaceutical giant Otsuka is also on the register.
The rerating is off the back of listed life sciences and medtech names. Epiminder and Saluda Medical are down 66.5 per cent and 77.4 per cent respectively since their late-2025 IPOs.
The company began selling its ingestible gut-sensing capsules in the US last year after FDA approval for tracking motility disorders such as gastroparesis.
The ISO 27001 Checklist for Teams Ready to go Global
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Alloy Robotics raises US$8M seed at $80M valuation to work out why robots fail
Founders: Joe Harris
When a robot breaks down in the field, the engineer who has to work out why can lose days, sometimes weeks, to the problem. More often than not, the same fault has already appeared elsewhere in the fleet.
Alloy Robotics, a Sydney-founded startup building AI agents for robotics engineers, has raised US$8 million (A$11.5 million) in seed funding at a US$80 million valuation to fix that, taking total funding to around US$11 million.
The round was led by Square Peg, with Blackbird, AirTree and Skip Capital all returning after backing the company at pre-seed. Angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Waymo, Halter and Carbon Robotics also participated, alongside several of Alloy's own customers.
Alloy's platform pulls telemetry, video, sensor data and engineering context into one place so its agents can diagnose failures across a fleet rather than one machine at a time. It has now ingested data from more than 10,000 robotic runs, and says customer numbers have grown more than 50 per cent month on month since commercial launch. Customers include Advanced Navigation and DroneForge.
Farmbot raises $22M Series B and moves its parent company to Delaware
Founders: Andrew Coppin, Craig Hendricks
Farmbot, a Sydney-born agtech that monitors water and assets on livestock properties, has raised $22 million (US$15 million) in a Series B. The round was led by Lewis & Clark Partners, with Fulcrum Global Capital, Builders VC, Level VC, Meat & Livestock Australia's Cultiv8 Livestock Technology Fund and long-time backer Macdoch Ventures also participating.
Part of the raised funds will be used for a corporate flip-up that will make Ranchbot Technology Holdings Inc., a Delaware corporation, the group's new global parent. Farmbot already trades as Ranchbot in the United States and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas.
The product is satellite-connected sensors mounted on tanks, troughs, dams, pumps, and rain gauges, feeding a phone app so farmers can check water levels without driving to the property. Launched in 2014, Farmbot now has more than 12,000 customers across Australia, North America and other markets, covering around 10 million cattle and 15 million sheep.
Coppin says the money also goes into local headcount. Next on the roadmap is a broader push into agricultural and water management across the farm sector.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Fabulate raises $4.5 million at an $84.5 million valuation to push its creator marketing platform across APAC
Founders: Toby Kennett, Ben Gunn, Nathan Powell and Sachin Singh
Most Australian software companies that talk about going global mean the United States. Fabulate has spent the past two years going the other way.
Fabulate, a Sydney-based creator and influencer marketing platform founded in 2019, has raised $4.5 million at an $84.5 million valuation to fund further expansion across Asia-Pacific. Centerstone Capital and Nightingale Partners are the named investors, though around 90 per cent of the round came from existing shareholders. The founder says the company is already profitable.
Fabulate was founded by chief executive Toby Kennett, former Nine executives Ben Gunn and Nathan Powell, and Sachin Singh. Its platform helps brands and agencies find creators, run campaigns and measure performance, with AI embedded across the stack through SparQ, its creator marketing product covering discovery, campaign execution and measurement.
The company has moved into nine markets beyond Australia over the past two years: New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Joe Aston's Rampart raises $2.3 million at a $29 million valuation
Founders: Joe Aston
Rampart, the business publication founded 18 months ago by journalist Joe Aston, has raised $2.3 million at a valuation of almost $29 million. The transaction reduces Aston's stake to 92 per cent.
Five investors came in, each in a personal capacity: Ashok Jacob, executive chairman of Ellerston Capital; David Gyngell, the former chief executive of Nine Entertainment; Doug Tynan, investment chief at GCQ Funds Management; retired neurosurgeon Michael Morgan and his wife Elizabeth; and Sam Brougham, a director of Ceres Capital.
Taking money from the people you may one day cover is the obvious problem. Each investor has signed a commitment not to interfere with editorial, enforced through the shareholders' agreement.
Rampart also discloses that it rents office space from GCQ and has received speaking fees from the firm.
The company will not disclose revenue or subscriber numbers, calling them commercial in confidence, though Aston has previously told readers the publication has "thousands" of subscribers. Headcount has gone from one to eight this calendar year, and the money is earmarked for more staff, new editorial verticals, events, podcasts and technology.
That puts Rampart alongside Capital Brief, backed by former WiseTech director Charles Gibbon, in a local cohort testing whether the premium subscription model works at Australian scale. Rampart also has a commercial partnership with the Financial Review, which takes a share of revenue in return for legal services. Aston is a former editor of the paper's Rear Window column and still writes for it.
Due Diligence: AFR, Startup Daily
arcimedes raises $750,000 seed to build compliance AI for the pharmaceutical industry
Founders: Arthur Alston and Alan Alston
arcimedes, an Australian AI platform built for pharmaceutical and regulated healthcare teams, has raised an oversubscribed $750,000 seed round to expand the platform, its customer delivery capability and its commercial team.
Arthur Alston left Novartis, where he was head of cardio-renal and metabolic diseases, in May to work on it full-time, and founded the company with his brother Alan.
The round deliberately skipped institutional money in favour of three senior operators from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. The platform sits on a continually updated knowledge graph of the Australian regulatory record and runs AI agents over it for medical affairs, regulatory affairs, market access and commercial teams, with every answer traced back to the source document and the passage it came from.
arcimedes launched commercially in June and says it now has paying customers and live deployments across originator, generic medicines and medical device companies in Australia.
Due Diligence: Pharma in Focus
Enrola raises $2.1 million after turning its own internal tool into the product
Founders: Jo Thomas and Yvette Quinby
Enrola, a three-year-old Australian startup now selling AI sales agents, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by Purpose Ventures, with existing backers Antler, AfterWork Ventures and Skalata following on. Enrola had raised $800,000 in pre-seed in late 2024, having started out in the Antler program.
Co-founders Jo Thomas, the chief executive, and Yvette Quinby, the chief technology officer, parked the marketplace in September last year. The rebuilt product runs personalised SMS conversations with leads a business has already paid for, qualifying and nurturing them around the clock, then either handing a sales-ready buyer back to the team or closing the sale itself.
Thomas calls the target market "high-consideration B2C": the expensive, researched purchases that are never impulse buys, and where a slow response quietly loses the customer. In under 12 months, Enrola has signed 28 customers across education, insurance, fintech, legal services, utilities and comparison, and has processed more than 250,000 leads since the pivot.
The capital goes towards scaling the agents into more industries. David Johnson, former head of go-to-market automation at UpGuard, has joined as head of growth.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Kantoko raises $3.5 million seed to cut ADHD wait times
Founder: Zac Altman
An estimated 75 per cent of Australian adults with ADHD are undiagnosed, largely because wait times are long and the upfront cost of assessment is high. Zac Altman ran into that himself when he moved back to Australia from the United States and tried to get re-diagnosed.
Kantoko, an online platform for adult ADHD assessment, treatment and ongoing care, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Side Stage Ventures and Tenmile, with angel support including the founders of Go1.
It is Altman's third company. His last one, travel app LoungeBuddy, was acquired by American Express. He launched Kantoko in 2023.
The platform pairs a national network of ADHD doctors with purpose-built software for assessment, treatment and continuing care, which Kantoko says compresses the process to weeks rather than months and at a lower cost than traditional clinics. The raise will expand that clinical network and accelerate development of the platform,
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
🚀 Wins 🚀
🆕 A few scale-ups had some big product releases this week.
Me&u launched an AI voice, functions and reservations platform.
Blinq released its CRM context within Blinq.
💰 The $540 million Australian Business Growth Fund has doubled its maximum initial investment from $15 million to $30 million, and can now go to $50 million including follow-ons as well as take majority stakes. (SmartCompany)
The new mandate took effect on Tuesday and also allows ABGF to take majority stakes when founders want to reduce their shareholding. CEO Anthony Healy said the old $15 million cap had forced the fund to turn founders away. Set up by the Morrison government with $100 million in seed capital, topped up by the major banks after then treasurer Josh Frydenberg pressed them to contribute, ABGF is modelled on similar funds in the UK and Canada. It is industry-agnostic and targets businesses turning over $10 million to $100 million, those that fall between venture, debt, and private equity.
🛡️ Australian defence startup Millibeam has launched Rakurai, a soldier-carried drone jammer built on sovereign chips and designed to counter UAV swarms, after picking up $4.6 million in government grants. (Startup Daily)
Rakuari is a sub-1kg, one-handed electronic countermeasure device meant to be issued to every soldier at squad level as a secondary.
It works by jamming the three wireless links a small drone depends on — the control link to its operator, its GNSS/satellite navigation, and its video/data downlink. Cut those and the drone can't be flown, can't navigate, and can't send back targeting footage.
🏛️ The Western Australian government has handed out $1.275 million in grants across 26 startups, spanning AI legal aid, artificial kidneys and Indigenous-led tech. (WA Announcement)
🌱 Sydney early-stage climate investor Impact Ventures has passed $10 million under management for the first time and hit first close on its inaugural follow-on fund. (Overnight Success)
The follow-on vehicle is a $1 million annual fund to keep backing portfolio companies beyond seed, lifting total deployment to around $2 million a year. Founded in 2020 by James Tilbury and Piers Grove, with Amber Electric, Allegro and Infravision in the portfolio.
💰️ M&A 💰️
🤝 Seek is selling its stake in HR software unicorn Employment Hero, with bids landing at the same $2 billion valuation Seek got from KKR last year, a flat mark that can arguably read as a win given what the SaaSpocalypse has done to listed comparables. (AFR)
The asset is a roughly 18 per cent holding that has been on the market via Goldman Sachs since February, sitting inside Seek's Growth Fund, the venture arm run by co-founder Andrew Bassat.
Seek announced on Tuesday that it will return capital to shareholders from its startup portfolio in the order of ~$1B. The Employment Hero stake would need to raise $360 million, leaving $640 million still to find. Education technology business OES is already under strategic review and is expected to fetch north of $500 million.
🔎 People Moves 🔍️
☝️ Melbourne healthtech Helfie AI has appointed Patrick Gates and Sunita Parasuraman as non-executive directors. (PR Newswire)
Gates spent 14 years at Apple building iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage and the iTunes Store, and was later CTO at Humane and a VP and Technical Fellow at Airbnb.
Parasuraman spent 12 years at Meta, including as Global Head of Treasury overseeing the Libra and Diem reserve, and sits on the boards of IREN, The Baldwin Insurance Group and BitGo Holdings
📆 Notice Board 📆
📅 💰️ Stripe Tour lands in Sydney on 19 August 2026 at the International Convention Centre (8:30am to 5:45pm AEST), with an optional pre-event training day on 18 August. Free to register here.
AI and agentic commerce headline the agenda, and Canva's Cliff Obrecht does a fireside chat at 1:30 alongside Stripe's ANZ leadership.
🇺🇸 The Australian Innovator Summit runs 27 to 30 September in San Francisco, the week before SF Tech Week. Apply here.
The trip will also include working sessions, with Chatham House roundtables and site visits to Valley funds and growth companies.
It’s capped at 25 companies by application, from pre-revenue to $20 million-plus ARR. Founded by Martin Wells, who co-founded the Aussie Mafia network with Dean McEvoy.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick: How to make people care about your startup by Kristen Lowe
Kristen is a founder ghostwriter and comms advisor. Loved reading this essay on some simple strategies founders can use in their own comms to get people (investors, operators and customers) to care about their startup. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will