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 👀
💰 Blackbird has closed its sixth fund at more than $1 billion, its second billion-dollar vintage in a row and just short of the $1.032 billion Australian record it set in 2022. (Capital Brief)
According to Blackbird's own investor disclosures, the funds have grown nicely from $29 million in 2013 to $193 million in 2015, $261 million in 2018, $647 million in 2020, $1.032 billion in 2022, and now more than $1 billion for the 2025 funds.
According to reports, the target was originally $1.2 billion, per a Gilbert + Tobin disclosure, after a $700 million first close.
As of June 30th, Blackbird reported the following: net IRR across all funds is 32.24 per cent, on a portfolio valued at $10.28 billion across 188 companies.
TVPI, or Total value to paid-in capital, is listed below. TVPI is where funds combine any distributed capital and residual value within the fund and divide that by the original paid-in capital to get a multiple. As you can see below, newer funds have lower multiples here because their investments are newer and haven’t had a chance to compound. These numbers below were updated as of 11 August
2012 is at 43.32x TVPI and 47.55% IRR
2015 is at 15.13x TVPI and 35.86% IRR.
2018 is at 5.30x TVPI and 27.86% IRR
2020 is at 2.20x TVPI and 16.78%
2022 is at 1.38x TVPI and 14.75% IRR.
🇳🇿 🥝 Across the pond, GD1 has hit a NZ$56.7 million (A$47 million) first close on Core Fund II, against a NZ$150 million target, with about a fifth of committed capital coming from New Zealand's Active Investor Plus "golden visa" holders. (B2B News NZ)
JB Were and Harbour Asset Management are anchoring the fund.
What grabbed my attention here was how the fund has made use of NZ’s Active Investor Plus golden visa, where senior technologists at Google, Apple, TSMC, Nvidia and SpaceX, looking to live in NZ, have contributed to the fund as part of their visa application, demonstrating that it is possible to route migrant money into venture.
📉 As reported last week, Blackbird and AirTree have cut their carrying value of Canva by 17 per cent to US$34.9 billion following independent external assessments, but Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, thinks the cut should be much steeper. (Capital Brief, SmartCompany)
In February this year, Lemkin modelled Canva at US$4 billion ARR, growing 35 per cent and put its value at US$44 to 48 billion, calling the US$42 billion secondary fair to slightly cheap. This month, he has the valuation at US$12 billion.
It’s important to note that these valuations are all driven by public comparisons. I had a chance to speak to Stripe chief economist Ernie Tedeschi this week, who has looked at actual payment volume for the 100 largest non-AI SaaS companies on Stripe, and found "a brief dip followed by a swift recovery and continued growth, a pattern quite different from what equity markets were pricing".
Software's forward price-to-earnings ratio has gone from 84.1x across 2020 to 2022 to 22.7x in the first quarter of this year, below the S&P 500 for the first time. If revenue is holding while multiples compress, most of what has happened to Canva's mark is the category being repriced. That being said, top-line growth shrinking is never a good thing.
🧠 AirTree has told its portfolio founders it will sell out of companies that cannot show their business is safe from AI, according to a tightly held investor update obtained by the AFR. (AFR)
AirTree puts 88% of fund value in "AI-resilient positions", while conceding low certainty "given the pace of change". About 14 per cent of portfolio net assets sit in an active management bucket focused on hard pivots, cost-cutting, extended runways, and consolidation.
🤝 During this week's Stripe Tour, Stripe launched Treasury in Australia, bringing its multi-currency suite directly into Airwallex's territory. (Capital Brief)
Stripe serves roughly 1 million merchants here and adds about 37,000 a month. Alongside Treasury, Stripe launched local payments processing in international markets to increase card authorisation rates, adaptive pricing for cross-border revenue, AI fraud defence (timely, as Canva has been targeted by token fraud recently), and real-time AI billing.
🏛️ The states are pulling in opposite directions on data centres. (Startup Daily, Capital Brief, ABC)
NSW has set power, water, environmental and community consultation standards that builders must meet to qualify for fast-tracked assessment, with IPART to review data centre water charges.
Tasmania has gone the other way and opened a parliamentary inquiry into whether its planning system can handle AI data centres at all. The trigger is Firmus's three northern sites at St Leonards, Bell Bay and Wesley Vale, which together would draw around 20 per cent of the state's power.
Assistant tech minister Andrew Charlton wants something back for the build-out, pushing Expectation 5 of the National Data Centre Expectations, which asks operators to give favourable compute access to Australian startups, researchers and nonprofits.
Like many, I’ve found the facts about data centres quite hard to get clear on. I went through the numbers a couple of weeks ago, focusing particularly on water usage. You can check out my piece titled “ Australia's data centre water debate needs to cool down.
The ISO 27001 Checklist for Teams Ready to go Global
ISO 27001 is the globally recognised standard for information security — and the credential often required by European customers, governments, and regulated industries. This checklist maps every step, from building your ISMS to passing your certification audit.
Whether driven by a customer request or a proactive security push, you'll have a clear picture of exactly what to tackle and when with this checklist from Vanta.
⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Vessev raises A$27 million Series A to put electric hydrofoil ferries on Australian harbours
Founders: Max Olson, Eric Laakmann
Vessev, an Auckland marine startup building fully electric hydrofoiling passenger vessels, has raised A$27 million in a Series A led by Blackbird. GD1 and Rypples joined the cap table, alongside existing investors K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Shasta Ventures, NZVC and returning angels.
The money goes to ramping production of the VS-9 and VS-12, building out a global go-to-market team, and further work on the onboard software and telemetry platform. The vessels use carbon fibre foils to lift the hull clear of the water, which cuts both drag and wake. The VS-9 carries 10 passengers at a 25-knot cruising speed with a range of 50 nautical miles. The larger VS-12, still in development, will take up to 30. Vessev has 58 staff in Auckland and wants to be turning out a VS-9 every five weeks by 2027.
Vessev has a deal to deliver VS-12 vessels into Sydney for a future harbour network, VS-9 vessels are expected on Perth's Swan River in 2027, and in Hobart, Fly Derwent has doubled its order to 10 vessels and is working with the company on manufacturing in Tasmania. Its first United States customer will see demonstrations on Lake Tahoe later this year.
Max Olson and Eric Laakmann founded Vessev in 2017 and launched the VS-9 in 2024. Olson, the chief technology officer, previously co-founded Blackbird-backed agtech unicorn Halter. Laakmann, the chief executive, was an engineering lead at Apple across three generations of the Apple Watch before sailing 30,000 nautical miles to New Zealand.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Nbryo doubles its seed to $20 million to compress seven years of cattle breeding into seven days
Founders: Euan Murdoch, Kaye Murdoch
Getting elite genetics through a commercial beef herd the conventional way is a decades-long project, done one calf at a time. Nbryo, a Brisbane agri-biotech using bio-digital and robotic technology to mass-produce cattle embryos in vitro, has doubled its seed round from $10 million to $20 million.
The new capital includes $2 million from the Sowing the Seeds of Farming Innovation Fund, the Queensland Government's $30 million vehicle managed by QIC Ventures, and is that fund's first investment. Existing backers, the Gates Foundation, AgriZero and Tenacious Ventures, came in alongside it.
Nbryo was founded by Euan and Kaye Murdoch, who bought Nindooinbah, a seed stock breeding farm. The company says its technology condenses seven years of conventional breeding into a seven-day production cycle, with trials running across Australia, New Zealand and Europe and research partnerships at the University of Queensland, the University of New England and QUT.
Alongside the equity, Nbryo and its research partners have secured $18 million in grant funding from the Gates Foundation, Meat and Livestock Australia, and state and federal programs.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Sophiie AI raises $5 million at a $30 million valuation to run the back office for tradies
Founders: Jacob Banks, Luke Kelleher, Juan Castro
Australian trades businesses lose an estimated 16 hours a week to admin, most of it after the tools are down for the day. Sophiie AI, a Gold Coast startup whose AI receptionist answers the phone for tradies and service businesses, has raised $5 million in seed funding at a $30 million valuation.
Archangel Ventures, Admiralty Capital Group, Antler, Gandel Invest and Aussie Angels all backed the round.
Founded in 2024 by chief executive Jacob Banks, along with Luke Kelleher and Juan Castro, Sophiie AI started as a round-the-clock voice agent and has since expanded into booking, quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and follow-ups. The company says thousands of businesses now use it across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, growing 10 to 15 per cent month on month, and its website claims it has handled more than 750,000 calls.
Banks previously built an online marketplace listing more than 35,000 trade businesses. This fresh funding will go into product, headcount and a US launch later this year.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Business News Australia, FinSMEs
Gamgee raises $4 million led by Founders Fund for personalised mRNA cancer vaccines for dogs
Founders: Paul Conyngham
When Paul Conyngham's rescue dog Rosie was diagnosed with mast cell cancer and the standard treatments ran out, he taught himself genomics and bioinformatics and designed a vaccine for her. It shrank her tumours before the cancer came back.
Gamgee, which builds personalised mRNA cancer vaccines for dogs, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund. The round was also complemented by a flurry of angel investors, including Celine Halioua, founder and chief executive of canine longevity company Loyal; Steve Eidelman, founder of Modern Animal; Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi; and Gokul Rajaram, who created Google AdSense. Gamgee's own site also lists Golden Gate Ventures, Atypical Ventures, the Doogood Foundation and Y Combinator among its backers.
The Gamgee process is to sequence each dog's tumour, use AI to identify the targets specific to that tumour, and then manufacture an individualised vaccine that trains the animal's immune system to attack the cancer. It is the same personalised neoantigen approach being pursued in human oncology, applied to a market where treatment options thin out fast.
Studies are underway in eastern Australia and are accepting patients, run alongside partnerships with UNSW, the University of Queensland and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Gamgee itself went through Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and lists San Francisco as its new base.
Due Diligence: GlobeNewswire, Y Combinator
Seitec hits first close with $4M locked in its seed round for stealthy defence sensors
Founders: Daniel Stevens
Every sensor that emits a signal also announces its location, which is a major problem in stealth conflict zones.
Seitec, a Canberra defence tech company building software-defined passive seismic sensing systems, has raised $4 million in a first close of its seed round, with about $1 million still open.
ACTivate Capital led with $1.5 million, joined by defence specialist Beaten Zone Venture Partners and UNSW. It is one of the first cheques out of ACTivate, the ACT Government-backed fund that has reached a $23 million first close against a $50 million target.
Daniel Stevens founded Seitec in late 2021 after 20 years as a RAAF avionics technician. Its two products detect, classify and track people, vehicles and drones from ground vibration alone, so nothing radiates. UXOTrackS is a distributed seismic node array that localises unexploded ordnance impacts across weapons ranges in near real time. Nightingale covers perimeter security, force protection and counter-drone work.
UXOTrackS has reached Australian Defence Force service entry. Seitec holds paid trial contracts with the Air Warfare System Program Office and the Office of National Intelligence and is advancing through the United States Air Force Foreign Comparative Testing program. The fresh funding will go towards growing the Canberra team, product development and a push into allied markets.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Business News Australia, FinSMEs
Sterling raises NZ$3.8 million led by Blackbird to do the finance team's work overnight
Founders: Nik Wakelin, Ludwig Wendzich
Sterling, a New Zealand startup selling an AI autopilot for finance and accounting teams, has raised NZ$3.8 million (A$3.15 million) in seed funding. Blackbird led, with Rowan Simpson, Eliot Crowther and alumni of Trade Me, Pushpay, Xero and Vend also participating.
Sterling plugs into the accounts inbox, ERPs and tools like Xero, then processes invoices, reconciles bank feeds and runs month-end while the office is closed, logging every action it takes and escalating anything it cannot resolve.
Nik Wakelin and Ludwig Wendzich founded the company in October 2025. Wakelin previously co-founded MinuteDock and Gelato.io and held a senior engineering role at Deliveroo. Wendzich spent close to a decade leading product and design at Vend and then Lightspeed, after earlier work as a front-end engineer at Apple.
Since rolling out in March, Sterling has completed about 1,200 hours of finance work for customers including honey exporter Manukora, early childhood software company Storypark and insurance broker Echelon. The raise funds hiring and a push into larger enterprise customers in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Capital Brief, RNZ, IT Brief
Bower raises $2 million pre-seed to help scientists remember what happens at the bench
Founders: Michelle MacRae, Renaud Joannes-Boyau
Bower, a Gold Coast startup building what it calls an operating system for scientific work, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding at a $10M valuation.
Brisbane's TEN13 led the round, with Admiralty Capital Group and Edale Capital also investing. Angels include Heidi Health chief technology officer Yu Liu, Dean Kelly, Harry Uffindell and Emma Ferrier, and Bernhard Hans Weigl has joined as a strategic advisor.
The platform captures what a scientist sees, says, and does at the bench through voice, video, and images, then turns it into a searchable record that an R&D team can reproduce and build on. There is an AI co-scientist layer over the top, and Bower Glasses, a smart-glasses wearable for hands-free capture and guidance.
Chief executive Michelle MacRae previously led generative AI video at Microsoft and worked on AI products at Dovetail and Google. Co-founder and chief science officer Renaud Joannes-Boyau is a professor of geochemistry. David Lyon, formerly of Atlassian and Xero, is chief technology officer, and James Boysons, who co-founded commerce platform EQL, is chief revenue officer.
Early customers include Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Mass Affinity, Bloodless Diagnostics and Southern Cross University. The money funds platform development and a PPE-certified wearables partnership over the next six months, then product expansion.
Due Diligence: AFR, Startup Daily
Visaible.ai raises $1 million to get hotels recommended by ChatGPT
Founders: Sam Rich
Visaible.ai, a Sydney startup that tracks how hotels surface in AI assistant answers and then fixes the underlying data, has raised about $1 million in seed funding led by Blacksheep Capital.
The platform monitors how properties appear in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, then sends agents to correct listing data, website content, schema, and FAQs so bookings come directly rather than through an online travel agent at a 15 to 25 per cent commission. Hotel teams only step in to approve brand-sensitive changes.
Sam Rich founded the company in late 2025. It now works with some of the largest hotel groups in Asia and Australia, and has launched in Australia, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam, on a subscription in the low hundreds of dollars per property per month. Visaible's own modelling puts the direct-booking revenue a standard 150-room property is currently leaving in the AI channel at about US$22,000 a month.
The raise funds end-to-end agentic automation and expansion into the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, The Hotel Conversation
🚀 Wins 🚀
⚡ Christie Jenkins is launching Ampere, a new fully in-person Australian accelerator, a year after Techstars Sydney shut down.
The accelerator will aim to write $200,000 cheques, which she describes as the best investment terms of any accelerator in Australia.
Ampere is kicking off with a full-day leadership summit in Sydney on Tuesday, 24 November. Tickets can be found here.
🩺 Six Australian biomedtech startups have shared $13.5 million in CUREator+ grants from the Medical Research Future Fund, delivered by Brandon BioCatalyst with ANDHealth. (Startup Daily, Business News Australia)
It is milestone-based, non-dilutive money with commercialisation support attached, and the grants are split like this:
Aleris Therapeutics received $2.5 million. Frontier Inflammasome Therapeutics received $2.5 million. Luma Bio received $2.5 million. Navier Medical received $2.13 million. Neurotologix received $1.95 million. WeGuide received $1.945 million.
🛡️ Newcastle's 3ME Technology has been selected by the United States Defense Innovation Unit for its EdgeVOLT prototype program. (Business Wire)
3ME will deliver its rugged, modular portable energy storage system for communications, sensors, and autonomous platforms in the field, including a cold-weather variant rated from minus 60 to plus 60 degrees, using South 8 Technologies' LiGas cells.
3ME is an AUKUS Authorised User and frames the award as Pillar II in practice. "This award is an important opportunity for 3ME Technology to demonstrate how Australian-developed energy systems can help address power and endurance challenges for defence users," said chief executive Justin Bain.
⚛️ The University of Queensland has opened Australia's first open-access quantum testbed backed by the Queensland Government's Quantum and Advanced Technologies Commercialisation Infrastructure Program, with CSIRO, QuantWare, Rohde & Schwarz and Zurich Instruments. (IT Brief)
A $10.8 million facility housing a five-qubit superconducting quantum computer and two dilution refrigerators has been built so startups and independent researchers can validate proof-of-concept work affordably before moving to larger systems.
🚀 Perth's Space Angel has landed a $1.75 million Western Australian government grant for a dual-corridor spaceport plan. (Startup Daily)
The matched Spaceport Establishment Support Grant funds site assessments at Eucla on the Nullarbor and on Christmas Island, plus a business case, targeting polar and equatorial launch corridors and two 2.9-kilometre runways by 2033. Since they’ve selected areas near the Nullarbor and Christmas Island, it feels like the requirement was to keep these areas as far from people as possible.
🎤 Eight Australian startups pitched at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, back in Sydney at Stripe Tour on Tuesday, with Apate.ai taking the win, Preve coming in second, and Aigentsphere coming in third. (TechCrunch)
The eight startups were Aigentsphere, Apate.ai, Callease Ai, Choosey App, Doomers AI, equ, LeadStory and Preve. Apate won $15,000 in Stripe fee credits and a place in Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt in San Francisco.
💰️ M&A 💰️
🤝 Australian sports tech company VALD has acquired GymAware, the velocity-based training system used across elite sport, universities, defence and research. (VALD)
Terms were not disclosed. Both companies are Australian-founded, and VALD says it now serves more than 15,000 organisations across 130 countries. It follows VALD's acquisition of the United States performance platform BridgeAthletic.
🤑 Aussie Raisins 🤑
⛏️ Melbourne-based deep tech Orivium is seeking a $30 million Series B to commercialise its process for recovering copper and critical metals from mine waste, low-grade ore and e-waste. Former Lenovo chief executive Bill Amelio is joining as the new global CEO. (Startup Daily)
📆 Notice Board 📆
🌏 West Tech Fest Heads East on Tuesday 8 September at Canva Space, Surry Hills, 5:30–7:30pm.
Rick Baker from Blackbird and Anna Guerrero from Clove on the rise of WA founders. Register
🏔 Forever Projects, the charity that helps mothers in Tanzania become more self-sufficient to raise their own children, is planning its 2027 trip, including hiking Mt Kilimanjaro.
I did the trip last year, and it was life-changing. The participants on the trip are people who work in and around tech and startups, and it’s an amazing way to build relationships while achieving something amazing. You can find out more here.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick: Australia's Plan to Turn Compute Into Sovereign AI — Dr Andrew Charlton MP [Compute Series] on The Joe Walker podcast
Joe Walker is doing a series on compute on an Australian perspective. This is a 2-hour-long conversation that goes pretty deep into how Dr Andrew Charlton is thinking about AI for Australia. They dive into a few topics, namely how Australia needs to think about being an AI taker vs. an AI maker. Charlton argues that, unlike electricity or automobiles, digital technologies let the inventing country capture most of the value, so Australia can't rely on adoption/diffusion alone.
The economics of data centres. Where compute shows up in the national accounts (capex boom largely offset by chip imports), and how a dollar spent on tokens splits — ~10c energy, <10c infrastructure, 20–30c chips, with the biggest share being IP and model development.
Social licence and the recent announcement of the Prime Minister's new national framework for AI data centres — requiring them to bring their own additional power, pay network connection costs, contribute to grid stability, handle water responsibly, and pay for Australian copyrighted material.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will