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 👀
🏛️ The Victorian Coalition will abolish Breakthrough Victoria and divest its investments if it wins the November election, saying the state-owned fund has “comprehensively failed”. (AFR)
Opposition finance spokeswoman Bridget Vallence says axing it saves $1.27 billion over the next decade, and that the fund “has spent hundreds of millions on foreign-owned ventures that manufacture goods offshore, or on bailouts for companies that sunk into administration, and has failed its promise to deliver 15,000 jobs”.
Breakthrough Victoria has committed $497 million to 91 investments since Daniel Andrews established it in March 2021, with John Brumby as chairman. The portfolio includes solar company RayGen, diamond-based quantum company Quantum Brilliance, plastic-eating enzyme and circular fashion player Samsara Eco, Amber Electric and electric aircraft motor maker Kite Magnetics.
It was originally promised $2 billion over a decade, then cut last year to $1.68 billion over 15 years. In May, the government folded it and LaunchVic, which had run the early-stage side since 2016, into a single body, Innovation Victoria.
In February this year, Breakthrough Victoria’s first portfolio company listed via a SPAC with Infleqtion delivering an approximate 5x value uplift on Breakthrough Victoria's initial investment on its first day of trading.
The backdrop is the state's balance sheet. Victorian net debt is forecast to reach $200 billion by mid-2030, with interest repayments of $11.8 billion, or 9.5 per cent of total government revenue.
🚀 Gilmour Space is preparing a US$200 million to US$500 million Series E extension ahead of a planned US listing as early as 2028. (Capital Brief)
The rocket company was valued at over US$1 billion in January and is targeting investors across the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East to add global institutions to a cap table already crowded with Australian super and venture funds. Discussions have begun with both Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.
It follows a $217 million Series E in January, jointly led by the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and Hostplus at $75 million each, with Future Fund, Blackbird, Main Sequence, QIC and HESTA also participating. Australian Retirement Trust added $14.2 million in May, taking the round to $231.2 million.
Most of the new money will go into a planned 36-satellite constellation, as well as reusable rockets and additional pads at Bowen.
A first hypersonic test flight is due this year and a second Eris orbital attempt in early 2027, after the July 2025 debut flew about 14 seconds before an in-flight anomaly (it blew up) ended the mission. Renewed investor appetite following SpaceX's June IPO is the tailwind.
📊 Australia's family office market has passed $323 billion in assets, up from $88.6 billion in 2010. (Rainmaker)
In the report, 133 active offices were identified, and 99 reported funds under management, with a median of about $1.2 billion.
Sydney holds 36 per cent of the assets, Perth 30 per cent, Melbourne 23 per cent and Brisbane 11 per cent. Offices with more than $1 billion in assets control 93 per cent of reported assets, and the top ten alone hold 56 per cent.
🏛️ Treasury has consultations open on the Research and Development Tax Incentive and on expanding the tax incentives for venture capital schemes. (Treasury)
On the R&D side, the draft reforms currently aim to:
increase offsets for eligible core R&D activities and remove the eligibility of supporting R&D activities
reduce the intensity threshold for the non-refundable offset to 1.5%
increase the turnover threshold for the refundable offset to $50 million
increase the minimum expenditure threshold to $50,000 and increase the maximum expenditure threshold to $200 million
limit refundability to firms up to 10 years of age, with an extension for up to 15 years for eligible firms undertaking R&D activities related to therapeutic goods.
Regarding VC reforms, the draft proposals specify that starting July 1, 2027, the government will:
increase the asset value thresholds for eligible investee entities from $250 million to $480 million for Venture Capital Limited Partnerships
increase the asset value thresholds for eligible investee entities from $50 million to $80 million for Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships
increase the maximum fund size of an Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships from $200 million to $270 million, and
increase the threshold at which certain Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership investment returns can be fully tax exempt from $250 million to $420 million.
They sit alongside the Innovative Business CGT Concession exposure draft we covered last week, which closes 28 September.
🧠 Anthropic has signed its first Australian data centre lease, a long-term commitment at the Western Downs Digital Park in Queensland. (Capital Brief, InnovationAus)
The site is being built by Zerra DC, owned by Singapore-based investment firm AGP, with capacity expected to start coming online in 2027. Planning documents put total capacity at 1.4 GW-2.16GW, connecting to the grid through the nearby Braemar substation, with an on-site battery. The site is expected to seek long-term power purchase agreements.
The facility is for inference, not training. Training is the bigger prize for the economy, but it is also the part that runs into copyright (see below).
🏛️ AI labs training frontier models in Australia would face legislated safety, security and transparency standards, plus obligations to invest in local capability, under a consultation paper released yesterday. (InnovationAus, Capital Brief)
The paper also addresses the energy, water and land-use impact of large-scale data centres.
Separately, leaked copyright proposals on AI training have set off a fight in Canberra.
Under one option, AI companies would pay a central body or negotiate with collecting societies, and could train only on material they had paid for, with a serious statutory penalty for using content that had been opted out.
Under the other, rights holders could still opt out, but once a company met a quota of content deals it could train on anything not exempted without paying anything further. (Capital Brief)
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 ⚡
Medow Health AI raises $3.5M to put an AI receptionist on the specialist front desk
Founders: Joel Freiberg and Josh Freiberg
Up to half of the calls patients make to specialist clinics go unanswered, as rising demand and staff shortages push receptionists to their limits. Medow Health AI, the Sydney medtech that began as an AI scribe for specialist medical reports, has raised a further $3.5 million to point its technology at the front desk rather than the consulting room.
The money came entirely from existing investors, among them Professor Michael Boyer, the oncologist who runs Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, and orthopaedic surgeon Dr Michael Solomon, both of whom have backed all three of Medow's raises alongside ophthalmic surgeon Dr Johnny Wu. None of the rounds has carried a named institutional lead.
The $2 million taken in January 2025, the $3 million in November and this $3.5 million have been grouped together as an $8.5 million Seed round. Joel Freiberg said at the time of the first raise that more than 50% of the company's investment capital had come from specialist doctors.
The new product, AI Front Desk, answers incoming calls, books and manages appointments through a clinic's existing practice management system, and passes patient messages to clinical staff, redirecting to a human receptionist when needed. It extends a product set that already covers AI scribing and dictation, and marks the company's move from selling to doctors to selling to the whole practice.
The company says its software is now used by more than 1,000 specialist clinics across Australia and New Zealand, and that it expects to process around 3 million specialist consultations this year, up from a run rate of 100,000 consultations per month in November. Revenue grew 300% across 2025, when Freiberg said the business expected to reach profitability within 12 months.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Evatto raises $1.02M pre-seed to get enterprise event programs off spreadsheets
Founders: Hailey Mason, Chris Toward
Evatto, a year-old Sydney startup building what it calls an AI-native operating system for complex events, has raised $1.02 million in pre-Seed funding to replace spreadsheets, emails and text messages.
The round was led by Perth-based Purpose Ventures, with money going to product development, hiring and offshore expansion.
Evatto's platform handles event scoping, stakeholder coordination, approval workflows, documentation and operational readiness, with AI agents taking on the administrative work that sits underneath a large event. It is already working with the Invictus Games and Canada Snowboard on programs including World Cups and the X Games, with pilots under negotiation across several other enterprise accounts.
Co-founder and CEO Hailey Mason spent more than 20 years producing large-scale events for the likes of Red Bull, Casio and FIFA before teaming up with COO Chris Toward in 2025. The company launched as Wiingman, went through Startmate's Summer 26 cohort under that name and has since rebranded.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Australasian Leisure Management
Quillio adds $1.3M for AI-powered legal platform from law firms
Founders: Samuel Junghenn, David Chung
Quillio, a Sydney legal AI platform, has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue and broken even without a cent of institutional equity, after founder Samuel Junghenn spent more than $1 million of his own money building it.
They’ve now taken their first outside capital, with $1.3 million largely coming from happy customers; $775,000 of capital came through a SAFE backed largely by principals at four Australian and New Zealand law firms, plus a $500,000 non-dilutive venture debt facility from Mighty Partners.
Quillio has two main products, one for law firms, and one for SMEs. Quillio for law firms is the core product and aims to automate the non-billable grunt work lawyers do rather than the billable advice: document review and redlining, chronology generation, AU/NZ legal research with citations, drafting (letters of advice, contracts, submissions), file notes, voice dictation. Delivered as a Word add-in plus web and mobile, with two-way sync into the practice management systems firms already run — Clio, Smokeball, Actionstep, OneLaw, iManage, NetDocuments.
Quillio for businesses is aimed at the majority of Australian SMEs without in-house counsel and helps them get a leg up on legal issues. It routes you by situation across ~50 named jobs, such as unpaid invoices and letters of demand, statutory demands, contract and NDA review, casual conversion and contractor classification, commercial lease renewal and landlord disputes, consumer guarantees, and tribunal prep. The app helps users draft documents, where a qualified lawyer can then review for a paid add-on.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief
Buildkite raised another $21M by convertible note as AI agents pile work onto continuous integration (CI) code updates
Founders: Keith Pitt, Lachlan Donald, Tim Lucas
Buildkite, the Melbourne developer-tooling company, raised a further $21 million through a convertible note in January.
The FY25 accounts show revenue up 16 per cent to $43.2 million, but net loss more than doubled to $28.4 million, and operating cash burn increased from $4.9 million to $23.4 million. AirTree co-led the US$21 million Series B in 2022 with OneVentures.
Buildkite is a CI/CD tool: every time a developer pushes code, it automatically runs the builds, tests and deployment steps that need to happen before that code can ship. The twist is that Buildkite only runs the control panel, the dashboard, the scheduling and the logs, while the actual work happens on "agents", small programs you install on your own servers or cloud account that ask Buildkite what to do next and report back when done.
That split is the whole pitch: you get a managed service to look at and configure, but your source code and compute never leave your own infrastructure, which is why security-conscious and very large engineering teams prefer the platform to a fully hosted competitor.
Workloads on the platform doubled in three months earlier this year, with customers asking for five to ten times more during 2026 as AI agents generate more code than traditional continuous integration was built to test. OpenAI uses Buildkite to orchestrate the systems that underpin ChatGPT and its API; Anthropic, Canva, Uber, Airbnb, and Cursor are also customers, and the platform now supports more than 60,000 users.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief
Elita raises $1.9M to turn dog cell-banking into pet longevity platform
Founders: Paloma Newton, Jackson Gritching
Elita, a Melbourne pet health startup, has raised $1.9 million to expand from cell banking into a platform built around extending how long dogs stay healthy.
US firm Boost VC came in alongside Gandel Invest, Artesian's Female Leaders Fund, Touch Ventures and M8 Ventures. Co-founder Paloma Newton says the round closed in three weeks, with another $100,000 left open for strategic investors. It follows $1.1 million raised in January 2025.
The company now pulls veterinary records, biological testing and owner observations into one place and analyses an individual dog against its own history rather than population averages.
The problem it is chasing is that dogs cannot describe symptoms and can hide pain or illness for months. It has launched 24-hour veterinary telehealth in Australia through VetChat and starts at-home biological testing next month for the oral and gut microbiome.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief
ReFresh raises $2.5M for scaled psychosocial systems for companies
Founders: Harrison Kennedy, Taylor Laing
ReFresh, a Sydney workplace psychosocial safety platform, has raised $2.5 million in Seed funding led by Black Nova Venture Capital, with follow-on cheques from Antler and Archangel Ventures. It takes the company past $4 million raised since it was founded in 2025.
ReFresh is pitching a single system rather than another survey: to identify hazards, assess and manage risk, and hold inspection-ready evidence in one place. It also tracks regulatory change across Australia's nine work health and safety jurisdictions and updates the requirements each control is mapped to. Clients span financial services, government and ASX-listed tech.
Chief executive Harrison Kennedy founded ReFresh at 23, after building mental health media platform Really Mental at 19. Co-founder Taylor Laing, previously head of engineering at Insite AI and 1800 Contacts, is based in the US, and the two built the company from opposite sides of the Pacific. The Refresh had staff, a pre-Seed round and onboarded customers before they met in person.
Mental health conditions are now the most expensive category of workers’ compensation claims nationally, running at four times the average claim.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
🚀 Wins 🚀
🏆 SiteHive was named Startup of the Year, and Heidi took two awards at the Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards. (Startup Daily)
Startup of the Year: SiteHive, for real-time environmental monitoring.
Scaleup of the Year and AI Gamechanger: Heidi, the only double winner on the night.
Future Leader of the Year: Annie Liao, Build Club.
Best New Founder: Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks, Ovum AI.
📊 Airwallex delivered an estimated $4.6 billion to the Australian economy in 2025 and supported 29,000 jobs, according to new modelling commissioned by Airwallex and conducted by Mandala Partners.
🍽️ Sydney frozen meal business Délidoor is tracking at $13 million to $14 million in annual revenue five years in, on less than $1 million raised. (Smart Company)
Founded in 2021 during lockdowns by Jacques Lepron and Mathieu Thomas, with Michelin-trained executive chef Sébastien Houillon. It sells about 70,000 meals a month and wants to be doing that volume every week within three years.
It has just moved into a new Northern Sydney commercial kitchen after a four-month build, quadrupling production capacity. Delidoor has no subscription or lock-in, more than 200 dishes, and delivers to every state and the ACT.
⚡ EnergyLab's 2026 Climate Solutions Accelerator cohort is its first fully hardware-focused intake. (RenewEconomy)
The cohort covers EV charging, critical minerals recovery, battery materials, industrial emissions reduction and grid infrastructure.
AGRA Farming Technologies Builds and licenses indoor plant factories that grow crops more cheaply, reliably, and with higher quality than field cultivation.
Alt. Leather is developing a next-generation, plastic-free and animal-free leather alternative made from renewable feedstocks and agricultural waste.
Aspiring Materials has developed a patented, closed-loop process that converts abundant olivine into critical battery materials, low-carbon cement additives, magnesium hydroxide, and hydrogen, creating multiple revenue streams with zero waste.
CATCH Power makes home energy management hardware and software that coordinates household solar, batteries, EV charging and hot water in real time, with over 44,000 devices shipped across Australia.
DC3 Tech designs, integrates, and commissions direct-current microgrid systems for EV charging sites and data centres.
EVX is Australia’s only locally owned, completely vertically integrated public EV charging infrastructure provider. Focusing on integration with existing street furniture, EVX designs, manufactures, deploys, owns, and operates Australia’s fastest-growing kerbside charging network.
Loop Hydrometallurgy‘s patented Halion Loop technology offers a revolution in critical minerals processing: cheaper, cleaner, significantly more versatile, and with considerable reductions in the mine-to-metal carbon footprint.
Magnefy uses non-invasive magnetic sensing and AI technology that detects developing faults in power transformers and inverters months before failure, helping utilities, renewable energy companies, and data centres improve reliability, reduce downtime, and extend asset life.
MetroElectro installs, owns and operates rooftop solar and battery systems on commercial and industrial buildings under long-term subscription agreements, removing the need for any upfront capital from the landlord or tenant.
OzAmmonia has developed a platform electrolyser technology that converts industrial nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, a major industrial pollutant, directly into ammonia as a useful by-product, at roughly half the cost of current abatement technologies.
📆 Notice Board 📆
👯♀ NSW FLIP Phase 2 applications close this Sunday, 20 September.
A nine-week online pre-accelerator for women anywhere in NSW, run by I2N at the University of Newcastle through the NSW Diversity Pre-Accelerator Program. You do not need to have done Phase 1. Apply here.
🩺 ANDHealth+ Round 2 closes 28 September, with up to $5 million in non-dilutive funding on the table.
For Australian SMEs with proof-of-concept digital and connected health technology. No equity and no IP transfer, plus an advisory panel and access to ANDHealth's investor network. Apply here.
📋 Investment NSW wants founder input on the state's four innovation hubs, closing 2 October.
The Centre for International Economics is evaluating Tech Central, the Western Sydney Startup Hub, the Westmead HealthTech Hub and the National Defence and Aerospace Hub.
It takes about ten minutes, and they want to hear from founders who have never used them too. Take the survey.
📝 Rampersand and Product Counsel have opened The Builders Survey. It is after a picture of what building looks like in the age of AI: what is getting better, what is getting lost, and where builders trust AI and where they draw the line.
Designed by Rod Hamilton, Rampersand venture partner and Culture Amp co-founder, and open to anyone building products in Australia. It’s also a snazzily designed survey. Take the survey.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick: Home Depot - Acquired
An exceptional deep dive into the Bunnings of the US. Or did Bunnings copy Home Depot? Probably the latter. Anyway, great episode, and for the first time I downloaded the PDF they make for each ep and glanced at it throughout the recording.
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