JG’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 👀
🏛️ Levi Fawcett, founder of New Zealand-based automotive-AI startup Partly, which announced its US$50 million (A$71.5 million) funding a few months ago, says Jim Chalmers' capital gains tax overhaul has "put him off" building in Australia. (The Australian)
NZ startups need to think global from day one, even more so than Australian ones. Because of this, Australia is often the first port of call when they expand their team.
In this case though, Partly will lean harder on London and Austin, Texas, and build a smaller Sydney team than it otherwise would. Fawcett said the CGT changes "dampened the enthusiasm" and made Australia "feel less friendly". Fawcett framed it as more than one policy: "It's not just that specific policy. It's just a very concerning trend.
🧠 Cover Genius, the Australian-founded embedded insurance platform, has raised US$100 million (A$142 million) from Vista Credit Partners, lifting its valuation to US$1.9 billion (A$2.7 billion) as it pivots to an AI-first platform and pushes global expansion. (Business Wire)
Cover Genius runs a B2B2C embedded protection platform connecting 200+ partners with 50+ insurance carriers, protecting more than 70 million end customers at the point of sale across travel, retail, ticketing and logistics.
The credit funding via Vista Credit Partners, the private credit arm of Vista Equity Partners, which means it’s not a traditional dilutive equity round.
The money is earmarked for three priorities: deepening enterprise partner integrations, scaling AI (hyper-personalisation engines, agentic distribution, and automated claims resolution), and platform scalability plus selective acquisitions into new verticals.
2025 revenue grew 50% year-on-year, cumulative gross written sales crossed US$3 billion (A$4.3 billion), and the platform reached 240 million policies via integrations with Klarna, Revolut, Booking.com, Agoda, Priceline, Turkish Airlines and Uber.
👼™ Aussie Angels has rebranded to Ventari, marking a new chapter for the ANZ investment platform that now sits behind more than 35% of all early-stage startup deals in the region.
Founded in November 2021 by Cheryl Mack, Thomas Worden and Sacha Schmitz, the platform was built to solve the cost of running an angel syndicate, which costs roughly $100,000 to set up and another $100,000 a year to maintain.
Nearly five years on, Ventari's infrastructure supports more than 3,000 wholesale investors and 60+ funds and syndicates across Australia and New Zealand, with over $75 million deployed to date.
It has grown beyond its angel-syndicate roots into fund infrastructure for emerging and established managers, hosting funds and syndicates that typically range from $250,000 to $30 million.
CEO Cheryl Mack said the rebrand reflects a broader shift, with family offices, operators-turned-angels and traditional investors all treating tech as a core allocation.
📊 New analysis from VC fund Giant Leap warns Australia is losing its best climate tech companies offshore at the scale-up stage, with almost no domestic growth capital between Series B and profitability.
Climate tech raised A$680 million across 69 deals in 2025. But the sector is dominated by pre-seed and seed.
The path to Series B is lengthening for climate tech startups, with the median company now reaching it at 9.7 years, nearly double the 5.2 years it took in 2021.
Giant Leap's Will Richardson (not me, we are often confused!) said companies with proof of concept but not yet EBITDA-positive have almost nowhere at home to raise a $20–50 million round, so they head offshore or stall.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Cullbeck raises NZ$20M Seed round to make green iron
Founders: Chris Bumby, Chris Jansen, Martin Hacon and Bavinesh Maisuria.
CullBeck, a Wellington deep-tech startup spun out of Victoria University of Wellington's Robinson Research Institute, has raised NZ$20 million (A$18.5 million) to commercialise a process that makes iron using hydrogen instead of coal.
The round, which values the company at around NZ$60 million, was led by Outset Ventures, with 2040 Ventures contributing more than half the equity investment, alongside the New Zealand government's Aspire fund, K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, and Motion Capital.
Conventional ironmaking strips oxygen from ore using coal in a blast furnace, a CO₂-heavy process that takes more than eight hours. CullBeck's continuous fluidised bed reactor does the same job with hydrogen in under two and a half minutes, and emits only water. It's tuned for titanomagnetite, the iron-rich black sand along New Zealand's West Coast, and also found in South Africa and China.
Developed over seven years by Professor Chris Bumby's team with NZ$8 million in government funding, the technology is now headed for a demonstration plant beside NZ Steel's Glenbrook site. CullBeck has already signed an Australian anchor customer that committed to buying 18 modules, a deal it projects at more than a billion dollars if the demonstrator performs. Hacon sees demand well beyond Australasia, from titanomagnetite deposits across the Ring of Fire to North American buyers of vanadium and titanium.
"This is not green iron," said CEO Martin Hacon. "It is cheaper iron that happens to be very green."
Due Diligence: Caffeine Daily
Founders: Christiane Theda and Alex Newton
Placing a catheter into the vein of a critically ill newborn is one of the most delicate procedures in intensive care, and the tools clinicians rely on were largely designed for adults. Navi Medical Technologies, a Melbourne and Boston medtech building vascular-access technology for the smallest patients, has raised $6.8 million to commercialise its device in the United States.
The round was led by a $4 million cheque from ANZ healthcare investor KP Rx, with existing backers Innovation Victoria (formerly Breakthrough Victoria) and Pacific Channel following on. It takes Navi's total funding to roughly $9.2 million, after a $2.4 million raise in mid-2023 supported by Medtech Actuator, Artesian and the Victorian government fund.
Navi's product, Neonav, helps clinicians accurately place and monitor central venous access devices, the catheters used to deliver nutrition, fluids and medication to premature and critically ill infants. Getting that placement right, and keeping it right, is notoriously difficult in neonatal and paediatric care, where the margin for error is measured in millimetres and the existing technology was never built for patients that small.
Neonav has secured US FDA clearance and is in clinical evaluation at two leading US paediatric hospitals, with American sales expected to begin this year. The capital is earmarked for scaling manufacturing, building out the US commercial team, and partnering with children's hospitals as Navi works to set a new standard of care in paediatric vascular access.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Capital Brief, PR Newswire
Outlier Space lands a record New Zealand pre-seed to manufacture in orbit
Founder: Jamie France
Outlier Space, an Auckland-founded microgravity startup, has raised NZ$10.5 million (US$7.35 million) in one of New Zealand's largest-ever pre-seed rounds to build a reusable satellite capsule that carries payloads into orbit and returns them safely to the ground.
The round was led by GD1, with Nova Threshold, Airtree, Icehouse Ventures, Investible, Side Stage Ventures and angel investor Brian Cartmell also participating.
Founder and chief executive Jamie France is a Rocket Lab alum and describes the product as an "anti-gravity chamber" that operates on a customer's behalf. In microgravity, the near-weightless condition found 160 kilometres up in space, molecules that separate by weight on Earth stay evenly distributed. This means you can produce drug compounds and crystal structures that can't be made under gravity. The company says the payoff can be reformulating a drug that once required a four-hour intravenous drip in hospital into a simple injection.
Getting to orbit is no longer the hard part as launch costs have fallen and rockets are plentiful; the bottleneck is now re-entry. Compounding the demand is the decommissioning of the International Space Station, where three decades of microgravity research has been done.
Outlier's closest analog, California's Varda Space Industries, is vertically integrated and makes drugs for itself. The funds go toward capsule testing, regulatory approvals, and pre-selling its first missions.
Due Diligence: Caffeine Daily, Payload Space
Octopusbot lands $1M to help forecast crop production for farmers
Founders: Rodrigo Cortes and Carolina Ferreira
Octopusbot, a Sydney agtech startup that uses AI to predict grain harvests, has raised more than $1 million in its first funding round, backed by Folklore Ventures and No Brand.
Founded in 2020 by engineers Carolina Ferreira and Rodrigo Cortes, the platform ingests historical yield data, satellite imagery, weather records and commodity-market signals to forecast crop production, supply risk and price direction. They claim 95%-plus accuracy up to seven months ahead of official estimates. That lead time is what the pitch allows growers, traders, food producers and fertiliser companies to act before prices move rather than after.
The six-year-old company now has 100-plus customers globally, covers more than a million hectares in Australia, and has partnered with agricultural services firm Elders.
Due Diligence: Stockhead, Startup Daily, The Land
Superstat raises $3.5M pre-seed to bring professional game analysis to team sport at all levels
Founders: Cordelia King, Kai Bloomfield and Sam Hung
Superstat, a Melbourne sports-tech startup, has raised A$3.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Blackbird to bring elite-grade performance analytics to sports that have never had it. The raise follows the Startmate S26 accelerator and includes angel backing from Blinq's Jarrod Webb and Mindset Health's Alex and Chris Naoumidis. Blackbird partner Niki Scevak led the deal.
The company's computer vision platform turns raw match footage into structured data automatically, including player stats, event timelines and performance patterns. Work that once ate a full weekend of manual video coding, or was never done, now runs automatically. Superstat started with basketball but is built to scale to any team sport.
Founded by Cordelia King, Kai Bloomfield (a former AFL data analyst) and Sam Hung, the startup has grown to more than 5,000 active users and ships new features almost daily based on coach feedback.
Next stop is Austin, Texas, where US youth-sport participation dwarfs Australia's and the University of Texas offers a deep technical talent pool. The team is already building models for NFL, volleyball, soccer and baseball, and is hiring locally.
Due Diligence: The Australian
Agscent raises $5M to teach AI how to smell, starting with pregnant cows
Founders: Bronwyn Darlington
Agscent, an NSW-based AgTech, is digitising the sense of smell and has closed a $5 million round valuing it at $26.9 million, which is up from $11.5 million two years ago. The funding was backed by agrifood-tech venture capital firm Tundra Capital, impact investor Scale Investors, and a group of individual investors, including farmers.
Founded by behavioural scientist Bronwyn Darlington, the company uses AI to "map the chemistry of scent," turning breath samples into diagnostic data. Its entry point is cattle: a handheld bag placed over a cow's nostril for 10 seconds detects pregnancy at 18 days after insemination, versus roughly 40 days for the standard method of manual rectal palpation. The three-week head start lets farmers re-inseminate sooner, which can be a meaningful productivity gain.
The tech is built on a NASA "electronic nose" originally used to monitor astronaut health on the ISS. Agscent holds a global NASA licence for animal and agricultural use, plus a proof-of-concept licence for human medical applications spanning disease detection, law enforcement and industrial monitoring.
Its big validation is a trial with Dairy Farmers of America, a cooperative representing more than 11,000 dairy farmers. A second DFA trial later this year will train the sensors to detect bovine respiratory disease. Agscent plans to begin manufacturing handheld devices in 2026.
Due Diligence: Business News Australia
🚀 Wins 🚀
🚀 Startmate has unveiled the 17 companies in its Winter '26 Accelerator cohort, with the group leaning into the infrastructure for AI agents (guardrails, runtime access, compliance) plus hard, regulated problems from orbital launch to property approvals and body-corporate admin. The full cohort is below.
🐛 Ansight — connects coding agents to live apps so they can inspect, debug, and verify their own work in real time. (Brisbane)
🛰️ Antares Aerospace — building reusable rockets to make getting a satellite into orbit as routine as overnight shipping. (Sydney)
🔍 BrandViz.AI — gets you recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini by fixing your site and publishing content in your voice, so organic pipeline shows up in weeks. (Brisbane)
📝 Clausifai — helps small businesses create, review, and sign contracts without a lawyer. (Adelaide)
🛡️ Coco — the trust layer stopping AI agents from executing actions enterprises haven't approved. (Melbourne)
📓 Derive — the intelligent notebook that understands reasoning, building the data layer for the future of AI education. (Brisbane)
🏗️ develpr — helps property developers get build approvals faster. (Sydney)
📐 EstiMate — helps construction teams quickly generate accurate construction estimates. (Melbourne)
💳 Forward — sources borrowers globally, structures their documents, and matches them to the best private credit fund from the minute a deal is submitted. (San Francisco)
💇 Glowback — puts client retention and rebookings on autopilot for beauty and wellness businesses. (Melbourne)
🌏 Hyperlocalise — lets product teams launch globally in days using AI agents to localise every customer touchpoint. (Sydney)
🦷 Orva — building the agentic layer for healthcare systems, starting with dental operation rooms. (Christchurch, NZ & India)
🔒 SecurityBreak — the AI threat intelligence company that helps organisations detect, investigate, and stop attacks against AI systems. (Brisbane)
🌌 Sunburnt Space Co — lets researchers test in zero gravity quickly and affordably using reusable rockets. (Sydney)
✅ Tailor — uses AI to cut multi-stakeholder document approvals from weeks to days, automating the full cycle from feedback to sign-off. (Brisbane)
🏢 Quarter — best-in-class software and people for body corporate management, supporting owners, not vested interests. (Wellington, NZ & Melbourne)
🖥️ Veltora — lets data centres optimise operations by predicting failures before they happen. (Melbourne)
🍆 Sydney medtech Eudaemon is ramping up production of its (world first) hydrogel condom. It remains the last company still standing from the Gates Foundation's 2013 challenge to build a better condom. (AFR)
Eudaemon has raised more than $19 million since forming in 2018, with backers including Eucalyptus co-founder Charlie Gearside and Swinburne Ventures, the university's investment arm.
Founders Nick Northcott and Dr Simon Cook grew the company out of a University of Wollongong bid; its "Project Geldom" uses a skin-like hydrogel (similar to a contact lens) rather than latex, aiming to feel like nothing at all. Insert Ned Flanders here.
The pitch targets falling condom use among Gen Z and the subsequent rising STI rates. The bet is that a better sensory experience will drive uptake in an $11-billion industry that has barely innovated since the 1970s.
In an Adelaide study of 35 couples, two in three participants preferred the hydrogel condom over latex on comfort, sensitivity and overall experience.
Next steps are installing more robots to reach ~27 million units a year, then a final 300-couple clinical trial. After this, the founders are eyeing regulatory approval ahead of the LA Olympics and a bid to be the Games' official condom supplier, which will no doubt grab headlines.
📹 🏆 Optara Systems, founded by Zainab Mohammadi, won UNSW Founders' Pitch Night South West with their platform that turns existing CCTV into real-time safety and operational intelligence.
Eight South West Sydney founders pitched at the Bankstown event, competing for a $40,000 prize pool, with Federal Education Minister Jason Clare on the judging panel.
Wren (AI for learning and assessments, Syam Iyer) took second; Npathy (a nurse-led virtual mental health clinic, Amanda Butt) won the Westpac Female Founders Award; and Memory Aid (a dementia connection tool, Celia Harris) took People's Choice.
👨💻 Twelve deep-tech ventures have been selected for the inaugural DeepStart program, Curtin University's new accelerator for mining, agriculture and critical minerals startups. (Curtin Uni)
Teams will be considered for investment during the program, drawing on a shared $500,000 pool with allocations depending on how many projects are deemed suitable and at what level, and Curtin isn't obliged to invest if none qualify.
DeepStart is backed by the Resources Technology and Critical Minerals Trailblazer and builds on the National Energy Transition Accelerator.
The cohort spans mine safety, agricultural resilience and sustainable critical-minerals supply — including EdgeIQ, SmartREE Technologies, Wireless Instrumented Rockbolt and Rhizobacterial Enhanced Seeds. A full list of the startups can be found here.
💰 M&A 💰
🤝 Procore Technologies (NYSE: PCOR) has entered a definitive agreement to acquire DroneDeploy for approximately $845 million USD ($1.2 billion AUD) in cash. Sydney's AirTree Ventures is on the cap table, having co-led DroneDeploy's Series E in 2021. (DroneDeploy Announcement)
DroneDeploy allows construction developers to see and measure their sites from every angle with 360 cameras, robots and drones. The AI agents proactively surface schedule or safety risks.
DroneDeploy brings roughly 20 trillion square feet of visual data, tens of millions of user annotations and more than 100,000 labelled safety issues to Procore's own dataset of nearly 400 million photos and 126 million drawings. The platform is used across more than 3 million jobsites in 180+ countries.
The acquisition is Procore's play to move from system of record to "system of intelligence" pairing drone, ground robot and wearable camera capture with Procore AI to auto-document sites and trigger actions.
AirTree co-led the $50 million Series E in February 2021 alongside Energize Ventures, and participated again in a $15 million strategic round in September 2025 alongside co-leads Emergence Capital and Scale Venture Partners, plus Bessemer Venture Partners and Uncork Capital.
🔎 People Moves 🔍
👤 HotDoc founder Ben Hurst has resigned as CEO after 14 years, stepping back from the digital doctors' booking platform he built into a business serving more than 5,000 clinics. (Ben’s LinkedIn Post)
Hurst founded HotDoc in 2012 to modernise a system still running on phone calls and fax machines. AirTree operating principal David Parfett has stepped in as acting CEO while the company searches for a permanent replacement.
The exit follows Potentia Capital's majority acquisition five months ago, which valued HotDoc at $250–300 million, with AirTree Ventures and Acclivis Group's Geoffrey Sayer retaining minority stakes.
The platform now handles 25 million appointments a year for 14 million Australians across a network of 25,000 GPs.
📆 Notice Board 📆
📅 SIGNAL: AI Builders in Sport Showcase is happening this Friday, the 7 August, 8:00–9:00am at The Commons, Cremorne in Melbourne.
Presented by SEEDS with Superstat (just raised, see above!) and Startmate, it's a morning gathering for sports tech builders and investors, headlined by product demos. Sign up free here.
🌱 South Australian founders with a product in market and early traction have a new path to investment readiness. ThincSeed is a 13-week program built for ventures that already have a working product, real customers or users, and early traction.
Selected founders work with facilitators, mentors and investors to strengthen commercial foundations and prepare for future fundraising conversations. Applications close Friday, 7 August 2026, 11:59 pm Adelaide time. 👉 Apply here
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will’s Pick: The Working Career Fit by Jake Carp (notion template)
Probably the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on how to get a job as a young person at a startup! Some good advice for mid career people too!
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will