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 Albanese government on Thursday said that low or no-cost startups will be spared from parts of next year's capital gains tax discount changes, with a partial carve-out tied to strict innovation criteria, a 10-year age limit and a $50 million turnover cap to channel relief toward the riskiest stages. Treasury then released its consultation paper to gather further feedback from the sector. (Innovation Aus, Innovation Aus)
Within the consultation paper, a new “innovative business CGT concession” will also be made available to innovative startups, preserving the 50% capital gains discount on share sales by eligible companies for founders and employees with sweat equity. Eligibility criteria below.
Shareholders would have the choice to calculate their CGT liability using the 50 per cent discount without a minimum tax, or using cost base indexation and the 30 per cent minimum tax when they realise a capital gain. This would, apparently, align the CGT treatment for early-stage investment in innovative start-ups with the arrangements for investments in eligible new residential dwellings.
The discount would be available for gains on shares issued after 30 June 2027 that meet all of the following eligibility criteria.
Eligible shares must be new equity issued after 30 June 2027, by an unlisted and independent company.
Eligible shares must have been issued while the start-up is small and young — that is, annual turnover of less than $50 million and less than 10 years of incorporation.
Eligible shares must have been issued by an active, innovative start-up.
Eligible shares must have been held by the taxpayer for a minimum of five years.
Following the release of the potential carve-outs, Sam Kroonenburg, founder of A Cloud Guru and now Cuttable, said in an interview with the AFR that the changes were positive for current start-up employees, but the cap was too low and globally uncompetitive. “It is still a 47 per cent tax on our most successful tech companies, which drive nearly all of the jobs growth and reinvestment in the ecosystem,” said Kroonenburg. “The most successful of our next wave of start-ups will now move overseas. It’s a sad day for Australian ambition.
📊 Australia is now the world's fastest-growing venture ecosystem of the past decade, according to the Australia Venture & Startup Report 2026 from Side Stage Ventures and Dealroom. The local market has grown 13.7 times faster than any other major hub and creates more $10 billion companies per dollar invested than anywhere else.
Australian VC has delivered a 24.4% pooled return over five years, almost double its US peers and ahead of Europe and China. The country ranks first globally for decacorns created per dollar invested, with six decacorns off less than US$40 billion of VC since 2000.
2026 is on track to be the strongest year for VC dollars deployed since 2022, though early-stage investment has fallen every year since 2021. Australian founders now raise 41% of their early-stage capital from overseas, double the share in Europe or the US — a signal of both international appeal and thin domestic early-stage capital. Median seed valuations sit 50% below the US.
Record exit activity: Australia ranks fourth globally for VC-backed M&A value since 2020 at US$56 billion, with over 65 exits in 2025. Eucalyptus's AU$1.6 billion acquisition is held up as proof the talent flywheel is recycling capital into the next generation.
Investment has shifted from fintech and enterprise software to AI, health and energy. Australia now has 470+ VC-backed AI startups with a combined enterprise value of US$34.9 billion, up 6.3x since 2019.
🔬 PsiQuantum broke ground at its Brisbane site, even before formally securing the land it hopes will host its first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer and Asia-Pacific headquarters. (Innovation Aus)
PsiQuantum has broken ground on its Australian quantum computing facility at the Moreton Bay Central Innovation Precinct, after abandoning earlier plans to build at Brisbane Airport. The Moreton Bay site will house the company's first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer and its Asia-Pacific HQ.
Construction at the Moreton Bay Central Innovation Precinct started Thursday with a sod-turning ceremony attended by government officials, even though PsiQuantum has not yet secured the land. The company aims for the site to be operational by the end of 2027, but there’s uncertainty about whether the computer will be ready by then. A cryoplant from Germany's Linde, essential for cooling, is expected in the second half of 2027.
Fellow quantum player Diraq, spun out of UNSW in 2022, has opened a US headquarters in Palo Alto — also home to PsiQuantum — expecting to double its team there by year's end. The firm is targeting its first product by 2029. (Innovation Aus)
👤 River City Labs, one of Queensland's longest-running startup accelerators, will close by 30 June after its parent body, the Australian Computer Society, decided to wind down the 14-year-old organisation, along with sister brands Ocean City Labs and Something Tech. (Capital Brief)
The closure leaves several government-funded programs mid-delivery, including a 20-company cohort of female founders backed by the Queensland government, with partners yet to be formally notified. Founded by Steve Baxter and acquired by ACS about eight years ago, River City Labs stood down all eight staff last week.
📊 Equity Clear, the non-profit founded in 2022 by Samar Mcheileh, Lisa Fedorenko and Rachel Yang, has launched Show Us the Data — a national standard for tracking how funding opportunities move through investor pipelines, not just where they end up.
Drawn from six months of consultation with 160+ organisations, it recommends a shared pipeline diversity reporting standard, after funding to women-only teams fell to 2% of VC deployed in 2025, down from 4% the year before.
The FY26 pilot has already exceeded its 20-org target, with Blackbird, AirTree, Main Sequence, Startmate and Cicada Innovations on board. The pilot has already shown some very interesting stats with Blackbird finding that female co-founding teams reaching its investment committee are currently more likely to get a yes than all-male teams.
🎨 Canva's first seed investor Bill Tai revealed Canva has rebuffed Adobe's acquisition approaches "countless times," but wouldn't rule out accepting a sufficiently high offer. He suggested AI giants like Anthropic could compete to buy Canva for its user base… apparently claiming one could "pay USD500 billion for it and it's accretive." 🤯(Capital Brief)
Canva apparently also once came close to acquiring Figma, which Tai says forced Adobe into its defensive USD20 billion Figma bid (with a $1 billion breakup fee).
The leak coincides with Tai's firm ACTAI Ventures offering a USD50 million parcel of Canva secondary shares at the company's USD42 billion valuation — unusually trickling down to smaller Australian investors, which some read as a sign that demand for pre-IPO paper was cooling.
🐸 Airwallex faces a fresh front in its US data-security row, with Republican senator Tom Cotton asking US Treasury officials to investigate Airwallex, the Melbourne-founded payments giant valued at US$8 billion (AU$11.2 billion), accusing it of having deep ties to the Chinese government and holding sensitive data on American AI labs and defence contractors. (AFR)
CEO Jack Zhang has dismissed the claims as "patently false," saying US customer data is stored domestically and can't be accessed by China-based staff, and that Tencent is a passive investor with under 10% and no board seat. The attacks followed on from criticism from Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois, whose firm has invested in Ramp.
👤 Buyer beware: David Fairfull, former CEO of failed AI marketing startup Metigy, has been sentenced to nine years' jail for misleading investors and dishonestly using his position as a director to secure a $7.7 million personal loan, which he spent on luxury homes in Mosman and Kangaroo Valley. (AFR)
He admitted to misleading investors who invested $15.7 million during a 2021 capital raise, and the judge found that Metigy raised about $39 million on the back of his false statements. (AFR)
Co-founded in 2015 and once chasing a $1 billion unicorn valuation, Metigy raised from Regal Funds Management, Five V Capital and Thorney Investment before collapsing into administration in 2022. ASIC found Fairfull forged banking documents and wildly overstated revenue… in one case claiming average monthly revenue of $85,000 when the true figure was $1,130.
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 ⚡
Everlab raises $65M Series A at ~$500M valuation to bet that prevention beats treatment
Founders: Omar Dr Steven Lu, Sam Kothari, Anshul Jain, Marc Hermann
Melbourne healthtech Everlab has closed an oversubscribed $65 million AUD Series A to attack a simple premise: most of medicine is built to treat people once they're already sick, and the bigger opportunity is catching problems first.
Airtree Ventures led the round, with Plural and returning backers Left Lane Capital and b2venture, plus angels including Australian Test captain Pat Cummins. It follows a $15 million seed round less than a year ago.
Everlab's app stitches together diagnostics, doctors, specialists, prescriptions, and continuous AI-assisted care into a single longitudinal view, integrating 1,850 provider locations, 180 clinicians, and 30 wearables, while processing 200,000 health reports monthly. It has completed 40,000 consultations across 20,000 patients and processed 21 million biomarker results — flagging undetected findings in more than 25% of members.
That track record has pulled in corporate clients including BCG, BHP and Bain, where CEO Marc Hermann says prevention is shifting from a wellbeing perk to "performance, productivity and risk-management initiative."
The cash funds a push into the UK and the $10 trillion global consumer healthcare market.
Due Diligence: Overnight Success, AFR, SMH, The Australian
New Energy Transport secures $5M to put electric trucks on Australian roads this year
Founders: Daniel Bleakley and Fredrik Pehrsson
Australian freight startup New Energy Transport has secured an initial $5 million AUD to fast-track the rollout of electric road freight, betting that the real obstacle to heavy-truck electrification isn't the trucks — it's the charging.
The equity raise was backed by Jekara Group, alongside family offices and high-net-worth backers, and facilitated by net zero advisory firm Pollination.
The funding supports an initial fleet of 20 electric prime movers, plus six mobile ultra-fast charging units, along key freight corridors in New South Wales. The kit is deliberately modular: NET says each unit isn't fixed to the ground, plugs into the grid and can be commercially operational within 16 weeks, then redeployed as demand shifts.
"The bottleneck for electrifying road freight isn't the technology; it's the charging infrastructure," said co-CEO Fredrik Pehrsson. Co-CEO Daniel Bleakley pointed to surging demand from major transport buyers, promising electric freight on the road before year's end.
In a fun Aussie startup collaboration, a few months ago. New Energy Transport teamed up with Who Gives a Crap to make Australia’s First Electric End-to-End Freight Delivery | Sydney to Canberra.
Longer-term, NET is building a vertically integrated platform anchored by a Wilton, NSW depot — selected under the federal Investor Front Door program — scaling from 50 trucks to 200, with east-coast corridors targeted by 2031.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Aus Manufacturing
Flyweel secures $2.41M pre-seed to finance ad-spend of
Founders: Reuben Scheckter and Matteo Calo
Queensland fintech Flyweel has raised $2.41 million in pre-Seed funding to build what it calls the financial layer beneath ad spend and to treat advertising as a capital investment rather than a line-item cost.
The round was led by Ten13, with backing from Antler, QIC, and a roster of fintech operators including Mollie CEO Koen Köppen, Zip cofounder Larry Diamond, and Stake cofounder Matt Leibowitz.
Founded in 2025 by Reuben Scheckter and Matteo Calo, who met during Antler's residency, Flyweel targets lead sellers and sales-led service companies running $30K+/month in ads. Its core premise is that every ad dollar behaves like a loan: money goes out today, but revenue only arrives 30 to 120 days later. The startup has already managed over $110 million in ad spend across nearly 1,000 businesses.
The platform's job is to close that gap on two fronts. First, visibility — ad platforms, CRM, accounting, and the bank all report different numbers, so Flyweel pulls them into one view and layers an AI agent on top that answers plain-English questions about spend and revenue in seconds. Second is the grunt work: it auto-reconciles every ad charge to Xero as it lands and flags discrepancies, keeping the books audit-ready. Those tools are live today, and pricing is pegged to operational work and queries rather than ad spend, so scaling up doesn't carry a penalty.
Performance Capital, launching in 2026, will front ad spend and be repaid as revenue lands — underwritten by proven campaign ROAS rather than generic risk models — with per-campaign spend cards, yield on idle budgets, and autonomous budget reallocation on the roadmap.
Scheckter, who previously exited a lead-gen business, says AI is pushing companies to scale budgets in-house and ditch agencies, but the cash gap still forces them to throttle winning campaigns. Ten13's Stew Glynn likened the play to "what Stripe did for online payments" — the rail beneath a fast-moving AI advertising ecosystem.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
🚀 Wins 🚀
🔬 WestTech Fest, Western Australia's largest startup event, secured a four-year A$1.1 million state grant to 2029, its longest funding commitment to date, drawn from the WA government's $40 million startup accelerator fund, shiftings its innovation-hub focus from Perth to Fremantle. (Innovation Aus)
The five-day festival will move from Perth to Fremantle as the Cook government positions the maritime suburb as an innovation hub. It runs from December 7–11.
A new 'Port Pitch' event will bring WA's five harbour authorities together to seek startup solutions for port efficiency, safety, and security.
The conference has been run by Curtin University since its 2016 launch. West Tech drew 5,000+ attendees in 2025 (35% founders, 20% interstate or international).
📆 Notice Board 📆
🌊 Startup Gals launches a free community for women and non-binary folk in Aussie tech or those wanting to explore the startup ecosystem) can find their people, organise local meetups, and access support for promotion, sponsors and venues.
Fill out the registration form here to join the WhatsApp group and get updates on upcoming events!
🙌 Have you ever used your startup tech skills for charity yet? tekFoundation helps smaller Aussie charities build lasting digital capability by connecting them with skilled volunteers and trusted partners.
Long-time newsletter reader Joni Fleischer has put out a call for volunteers skilled in everything from websites and AI to marketing and data. tekFoundation places the right mix of resourcing, community and practical help so charities can keep up with the pace of tech. It has supported more than 60 charities over the past three years. If you want to get involved or volunteer your skills, sign up at tekFoundation.
🛠️ Blackbird has opened its Foundry Fellowship, a remote program for technical builders weighing up whether to start a company.
It is aimed at engineers, mathematicians, researchers, and technical operators across Australia and New Zealand who are interested in startups and frontier tech. Nominations and EOI’s can be made 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: You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful with Mark Pincus (FarmVille and Words With Friends)
Mark Pincus built Zynga into a multi-billion dollar company while experiencing both major success and painful failure. He talks about why most founders build the wrong thing, how great products tap into deep human needs, and what separates products people merely try from ones they use daily.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will