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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 👀
🏛️ A retrospective change to the government's CGT legislation means that fund managers' performance fees, including entitlements accrued on an investment made more than a decade ago and yet to be paid out, will be taxed at up to 47 per cent from July 2027, up from 23.5 per cent, wiping out a tax break that venture capital and private equity managers have long relied on. (AFR)
Carried interest in VCLPs and ESVCLPs has been taxed as a discounted capital gain at 23.5 per cent. Under the CGT laws Treasurer Jim Chalmers pushed through parliament in late June, it will be taxed at up to 47 per cent from 1 July 2027. Carry received on or before 30 June 2027 keeps the old rate, which could push managers to sell assets early.
It’s expected that the changes will hit about 90% of the local VC and PE industry.
📉 NextDC lost about $3 billion in market value in 40 minutes after local community opposition stalled power works for its Melbourne M3 data centre. (AFR, Capital Brief)
It shows how fragile these projects are. Pushback in a single suburb, West Footscray, over 22-metre power poles was enough for Jemena to suspend the power works, and NextDC now can't deliver the 225MW its customer has contracted until FY28. Residents' concerns range from noise and emissions to backup generator fire risks and construction disruption. (AFR)
Across Australia, opposition is pushing operators to pay for their social licence. Wagga Wagga council wants 1 per cent of capital expenditure directed to a local fund. CDC has committed $150 million over its project's life, plus a $75 million fund, while IREN has pledged $200 million over 30 years for its 900MW project. AirTrunk's $37 million contribution to Cessnock council matches 1 per cent of its Kurri Kurri capital expenditure, yet a petition opposing the project has passed 3,000 signatures. The company has also opened a shopfront near the 540MW site. IREN is leasing a shopfront in Eudunda for its 800MW Bundey project in South Australia and attending agricultural fairs and shearing contests. (Capital Brief)
🏛️ 🚺 Victoria has topped up the Alice Anderson Fund for female founders with another $10 million ahead of the state election, while the Opposition wants to sell Innovation Victoria's startup portfolio to help pay for its healthcare plan. (InnovationAus, Startup Daily)
The fund was apparently running low on money, and some founders feared it would be scrapped when LaunchVic and Breakthrough Victoria merged into Innovation Victoria this year.
If the Opposition wins next month's election, it plans to cut Innovation Victoria's investment function and sell its roughly 100-company early-stage portfolio to help fund a $1.27 billion healthcare plan. In a similar vein, federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor said he would "100%" scrap funding for the quantum company PsiQuantum, before his office clarified that a Coalition government wouldn't tear up the existing contract. The federal and Queensland governments have committed $940 million to PsiQuantum. Its cryoplant is due in the second half of 2027. (Capital Brief)
🧠 A busy week for Australia's scale-ups: Canva has built its own AI image model, released this week, and Airwallex has launched business accounts that AI agents can run as it leans into London. (AFR, Capital Brief)
Canva Craft is its first in-house image model, trained on Canva's own templates and capable of generating images with readable text from plain-language prompts. Canva says the Design Arena leaderboard ranks it behind only three OpenAI models and ahead of Google's Nano Banana. Canva Craft will also be offered to developers and AI agents through an API.
Airwallex is hosting its Shift event in London this week, with Anthropic and SpaceX taking part, as US-China tensions rise. Its official headquarters are still in Singapore and San Francisco, but it has made a UK company its new global holding company, and CEO Jack Zhang and CFO Pranav Sood are both now based in London. Its new agentic business accounts let AI agents connect directly to a business's Airwallex financial data, with built-in risk controls and human sign-off.
💰 Seek's Growth Fund plans to deliver $840 million of liquidity to investors over five years and is weighing a near-term sale of about $1 billion of its startup and SaaS holdings. (Capital Brief)
Seek, the trading company, hopes to receive about $700 million of that.
The fund's $2 billion portfolio is concentrated in a few companies, with 74 per cent of its value in Employment Hero, Go1, HiBob and Online Education Services, and its valuation fell 13 per cent in the year to 30 June. Seek owns 83.8 per cent of the fund, and its own shares are down 52 per cent over 12 months.
💉 A world-first trial led by Sydney's Melanoma Institute Australia has found that a personalised mRNA vaccine, made from the mutations in each patient's own tumour, cut the risk of melanoma coming back by 42 per cent. (The Age, AAP, Boston Globe)
The Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial of Moderna and Merck's vaccine enrolled 1,137 people with high-risk melanoma that had been surgically removed.
After two years, 82 per cent of patients on the vaccine plus Merck's Keytruda were alive without the cancer returning, against 70 per cent on Keytruda and a placebo. Lead investigator Professor Georgina Long, the former Australian of the Year and medical director of Melanoma Institute Australia, presents the full data at ESMO in Madrid this weekend.
Associate Professor Seth Cheetham, director of the Australian mRNA Cancer Vaccine Hub, called the results "pretty remarkable" and hopes the approach can work for other cancers. Further trials will need to show which tumour types respond, such as kidney, lung and bladder cancer, and longer follow-up is needed to show whether it improves overall survival.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Cuttable raises $20M Series A to build ads that learn
Founders: Sam Kroonenburg, Jack White, Ed Ring
Cuttable, the Melbourne-founded platform that helps ecommerce brands make and run social ads at scale, has raised a $20 million (US$14 million) Series A. The round values the company at more than $142 million (US$100 million).
The round was led by AirTree Ventures, with seed lead Square Peg and existing investors Rampersand and Glitch Capital following on.
Kroonenburg co-founded A Cloud Guru with his brother Ryan and sold it to Pluralsight for US$2 billion in 2021. Cuttable, founded in 2024, builds ads from a brand's own product shots and footage rather than generating images or video with AI. Its new 'ads that learn' feature reads results from Meta and TikTok alongside Shopify stock levels and CRM data, recommends which ads to run next, then cuts and publishes them.
More than 440 brands use it, including lululemon, Cotton On, July and Kathmandu, and a year after entering the US, Cuttable makes 40 per cent of its revenue there. Its own analysis of more than 280,000 ads found that brands need to run about 42 ads to find one that meaningfully moves revenue, and that 1 per cent of ads accounted for half of attributed revenue. The funding will enable the company to grow its teams in Melbourne, New York and San Francisco.
Due Diligence: SmartCompany, BackScoop, ADWEEK
Founders Fund and OpenAI co-lead Coherence Neuro's $64M Series A for a cancer-fighting brain implant
Founders: Elise Jenkins, Ben Woodington
Coherence Neuro, an Australian-founded company developing SOMA, a brain-computer interface implant designed to help manage cancer, has raised a $64 million (US$45 million) Series A, co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Australian Elise Jenkins and Ben Woodington, a former medical device engineer, met while doing PhDs at Cambridge and founded the company in 2022. Its implants use electrical signals to track and treat cancer in real time, and it has already begun testing them in human trials.
The funding will pay for its first chronic human trial in glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, with a larger trial in Melbourne as the next milestone. The founders put the new valuation in the hundreds of millions, more than five times its seed valuation from less than a year ago. Blackbird, which led the pre-seed, invested again, and Neuralink head neurosurgeon Matthew MacDougall joined as an angel.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief, Blackbird
Syncrowin raises $3M pre-seed for an AI operating system for heavy industry
Founders: Aisshwarya Kansakaar, Jaideep Upadhyay
Syncrowin, a Melbourne industrial AI startup, has raised a $3 million pre-seed round led by New York's Collide Capital, with Hustle Fund, POV Ventures, Co-Ventures, Ventari and angel investors also participating.
Syncrowin is building an AI operating system for heavy industries such as electricity, oil and gas, and manufacturing, layering intelligence over existing plants to improve productivity, efficiency and reliability. The funding will go into developing and deploying the platform and growing its AI and engineering teams in Australia and San Francisco.
In practice, it connects the separate systems on a site and pulls their data into a single view: wind turbines, solar inverters, weather forecasts, and the grid connection at a renewables plant, say, or pumps, compressors, process sensors, and maintenance records at an oil and gas facility. It tracks output against target and breaks down lost output by cause, including unplanned stops and running below rate, slow changeovers, rework, and waiting on information. It also picks up the warning signs that tend to show well before output drops, such as early equipment wear, and every recommendation comes with the reasoning behind it. As the company puts it, "Useful answers, not more dashboards."
CEO Aisshwarya Kansakaar, who grew up in Nepal, was Victoria's 2025 Young Australian of the Year. She and CTO Jaideep Upadhyay both have engineering backgrounds spanning mechatronics, industrial systems and AI. Syncrowin went through the University of Melbourne's MAP accelerator and has been selected for EnergyLab's Scale Up program.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, InnovationAus
SupaHuman raises $2.1M Series A to take its AI vocational training tools to Australia
Founders: Dave Howden, Blair Woods, Zane Hemmingsen-Jensen
SupaHuman, a Kiwi edtech building AI software for vocational education and workplace training, has raised a $2.1 million (NZ$2.6 million) Series A.
Wellington VC Movac led the round, with David Beard joining the board, and Ecliptic VC, K1W1, Snowball and Serge van Dam also invested.
Its VETos product generates assessments and learning resources mapped to a training provider's courses and checks them before regulatory audits, while Nova 5 turns that material into learning activities for providers and employers' learning and development teams. Customers include registered training organisations, TAFEs and industry skills bodies on both sides of the Tasman.
SupaHuman soft-launched in Melbourne in March, has signed Canberra Institute of Technology and Hader Institute, and has a 12-month partnership with the Future Skills Organisation's Skills Accelerator. The funding is for its Australian expansion, which NZTE is also supporting.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
UNSW Founders writes $1.6M in first cheques across 16 startups
UNSW Founders has invested $100,000 in each of the 16 startups in its 2026 10x Accelerator, for a total of $1.6 million. For most of them, it's the first money in.
The Health 10x cohort, run with The George Institute for Global Health, is LORAI Health (hormone therapy patches), EpiQuil (dissolvable microneedle patches), Geney Bio (cheaper manufacturing for cell and gene therapies), iiShield (an insulating jacket that protects kidneys during transplant surgery) and SMarT Minds Dx (a blood test for early Alzheimer's).
Climate 10x is Circular Sourcing (a marketplace for surplus mill fabric), Byrd (a construction skip that separates waste on site), ALBON (algae-based treatment of agrifood wastewater), LoopForm Materials (carbon fibre recycling) and Ephemeris (coordinating flight arrivals to cut fuel burn). All Industries 10x is Media City Scientific (an animal-free replacement for foetal bovine serum), Zenith Hosting (one-click managed open-source software), MotionLogic (vision AI for industrial video), UltraMarine InsurTech (usage-based boat insurance), Vocare (now Platypus, connecting enterprise data so AI agents can act in regulated industries) and Yarnie (a screen-free, landline-style phone for kids). LORAI, EpiQuil and Circular Sourcing also received $20,000 Westpac grants.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Willed raises nearly $10M at a $100M valuation for its online Will and funeral planning platform
Founders: Tim Glasson, Aaron Zelman, Dave Kaplan
Willed, the seven-year-old online Wills, probate, and funeral-planning platform, has raised just under $10 million at a $100 million valuation, up from about $60 million in 2024. ASX-listed trustee company Equity Trustees tipped in half. Existing backers Ellerston Capital and PSC Insurance founder Paul Dwyer also invested, along with co-founder Dave Kaplan, and Morgans ran the raise.
Users can create a Will or power of attorney online in under 20 minutes, and Willed's legal arm, Willed Law, will review it upon request at no extra cost. When someone dies, Willed Law handles probate, or letters of administration where there's no Will, for a fixed fee, and Willed's funeral planners arrange direct cremations and full funeral services around the clock. It also sells prepaid funerals, with the money held in an APRA-approved bond, and says its users have pledged more than $500 million to charities in their Wills.
The money will take Willed into independent executor services and virtual safes that hold the digital information families need after someone dies. It has worked with about 200,000 Australians, and the deal includes a five-year referral agreement with Equity Trustees and the right to nominate a board director. It competes with Safewill, estateXchange and Bare.
Due Diligence: AFR
Remagine Labs lands seed round for a programmable medicine patch
Founders: Pat Kelly, Professor Stan Skafidas
Remagine Labs, a Melbourne medtech, has closed a seed round led by Nasdaq-listed Praxis Precision Medicines, with Innovation Victoria following on from its $500,000 investment in August 2025. The amount wasn't disclosed.
Remagine is building a wearable patch that delivers medication through the skin in a controlled, programmable way, as an alternative to oral medication for chronic conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. In July, Praxis and Remagine announced a collaboration to develop a transdermal version of Praxis's essential tremor drug, ulixacaltamide.
Co-founded by University of Melbourne researcher Professor Stan Skafidas and led by CEO Pat Kelly, the company has grown to more than 10 researchers and is heading towards first-in-human studies. It built its own pilot-scale manufacturing line at Melbourne's Jumar Bioincubator because it couldn't find a suitable supplier.
Due Diligence: Innovation Victoria, BioSpace
GonGlobal raises $1.2M to replace IVF injections with an inhaler
Founders: Ellen Gonda, Dr Igor Gonda
GonGlobal, a Victorian biotech, has raised $1.2 million. Innovation Victoria and RMIT University each contributed $500,000 through the University Innovation Platform, and a private investor contributed $200,000.
It's developing Ovulair, an inhaled drug-delivery system designed to replace repeated IVF injections. CEO Ellen Gonda went through five rounds of IVF herself, and her father and co-founder, chief scientific officer Dr Igor Gonda, is a specialist in non-invasive drug delivery. The company is working with RMIT researchers led by Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo.
GonGlobal went through JumpStart Studio's Press Play pre-accelerator for women founders in 2024, and the Alice Anderson Fund helped it close its pre-seed round in 2025. It has now raised $3 million in total over three years.
Due Diligence: Innovation Victoria, Startup Daily
💸 New Fund, Who Dis? 💸
💰 Icehouse Ventures' Growth Fund III has passed NZ$180 million (about A$146 million), NZ$30 million above its target, after KiwiSaver provider Simplicity committed another NZ$50 million. (Startup Daily, Caffeine)
Simplicity has now invested NZ$85 million across four Icehouse funds since 2019, and the pair say this latest commitment is the largest single KiwiSaver investment in New Zealand venture capital. KiwiSaver providers including Generate and Pie Funds have committed at least NZ$190 million through Icehouse and its portfolio companies, up from NZ$60 million when Growth Fund II closed in 2024.
The fund backs late-stage Kiwi companies, typically with millions in revenue and plans to go global, and will hold about 20. Its first investments are Halter, Calocurb and Supabase (not bad!!). It's still open, with a final close planned for the end of the year.
Growth Fund I, which backed Hnry, Tracksuit, Crimson, Sharesies, Dawn Aerospace and Halter, is tracking at 1.78x TVPI with an 18.9 per cent IRR. Growth Fund II is at 1.23x and 22.9 per cent.
💰 Outset Ventures is halfway to its $50 million Momentum Fund I, anchored by $10 million from NZ Growth Capital Partners, to back deep tech companies through the slow, expensive stretch between technology that works and a product at scale. (Caffeine)
🚀 Wins 🚀
🏆 Swipejobs founder and chair Katrina Leslie has been named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year for Australia, chosen from 27 national finalists at Thursday night's black-tie awards in Melbourne. (EY)
Leslie grew up on a cattle property in central Queensland, has five children, and Swipejobs is her fourth company. The AI-native jobs platform operating in the US and UK also won her the Technology category, and she'll represent Australia at the World Entrepreneur Of The Year in Monaco next year.
Swipejobs was in Aussie Raisins a fortnight ago, when it was road-testing a pitch for an ASX listing worth about $2 billion, built without institutional venture capital.
🏆 Melbourne's Cortical Labs, which combines neurons grown from human stem cells with silicon chips, has won the Gamechanger award in the AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies 2026. (AFR)
Every winner but one used AI. Category winners include Gridsight (grid modelling for utilities), SuperAPI (super payments for employers under the new payday super rules), repeat winner Chatstat (spotting cyberbullying and other online risks for schools), Innofocus Photonics (nano-manufactured light components for chipmakers and data centres), Orca Opti (AI governance for health information), Lumos (marketing intelligence), Qubigen (letting researchers learn from drug discovery data without moving it), Supply Scope (retail back-office automation) and Darwinium (telling humans, AI agents and malicious bots apart). The one AI-free winner was Ryco Filters' Syntec oil filter - try and get Claude to change an oil filter!
🤑 Aussie Raisins 🤑
🐷 ⌚ WA agtech Xsights, valued at about $135 million, is raising $10 million for its Fitbit-style health trackers for pigs. (AFR)
Reach Markets is running the round and has put in $5 million itself, with a follow-up raise planned in 12 to 18 months.
Founded in 2018 by Steve Wildisen, Dean Phillips and Charis Law, Xsights is now in eight countries. Its XioT Tag tracks 12 health markers so farmers can pull unwell pigs out for treatment, or see if they’re hitting their 10,000 steps. Its pitch is that 16 per cent of farm-born pigs die before slaughter from undetected disease.
🏢 Sydney AI rollup Dragonfly has bought its first strata management business eight months after launching, and is preparing to raise about $10 million. (Capital Brief)
Founded by Misha Saul and Ben Plummer, the former CEO of Invisible Technologies, Dragonfly buys strata managers and rebuilds them around a shared AI platform, betting that owning the business lets it make changes software vendors can't. Plummer says about 80 per cent of the technology could carry over to accounting, insurance and professional services.
It has signed term sheets for two or three more operators and plans to add debt to build $40 million to $50 million of acquisition capacity. Its first raise of about $2 million, backed by Side Stage Ventures and Marbruck, funded the development of the technology. Smaller strata operators typically sell for two to 3.5 times recurring management fees.
If Saul's name rings a bell, it's from last year's Strongroom AI saga. As head of EVP's Opportunities Fund, he led its $10.4 million investment in the pharmacy software startup, then, weeks later, raised the alarm, alleging EVP had been misled about the company's finances. Strongroom went into receivership and administration, and EVP called in the police and went to the Federal Court to freeze assets, drawing criticism from another early investor for not telling other shareholders first. Saul left EVP last August and launched Dragonfly with Plummer in February.
💰 M&A 💰
🤝 Five V Capital has agreed terms to buy a majority stake in Auckland compliance software company First AML, a payday for early backer Blackbird. (AFR)
Founded in 2017, First AML helps PE, VC and property firms run know-your-client and anti-money laundering checks on their investors, with clients including Grant Thornton, Blackbird and AirTree. It's making about $26 million (NZ$32 million) in revenue and growing strongly, especially in the UK.
The deal follows First AML hiring Barrenjoey to line up a secondary sale of about $80 million for early investors. Blackbird owned about 12 per cent after first investing in a $28.7 million round five years ago, and Bedrock Capital and Icehouse Ventures were also backers.
It's a rare and needed venture exit in a year when 71 per cent of investors surveyed by Cut Through Venture said their funds had recorded none.
📆 Notice Board 📆
💜 10x10 Philanthropy's events, part pitch night and part community funding round, are coming to Adelaide on Thursday 29 October and Sydney on Thursday 5 November.
It’s a very cool format. Each guest contributes $100, hears three early-stage not-for-profits pitch, questions the founders alongside the panel, and then votes on where the money goes.
Adelaide: 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at 55 Currie St, with Fat Farmers, The Orange Butterfly and Fruit Share Adelaide. Register here.
Sydney: 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at The Commons, George St, with Eyes of Hope, System 2 and ALLKND. Register here.
🚀 Applications for Curtin Accelerate 2027, a free 12-week accelerator in Perth with at least $500,000 of Melt Ventures funding on offer, close at 7 am on Monday 2 November.
It's for founders with a validated idea and runs in person in Perth. Each venture gets a $5,000 equity-free grant and up to $25,000 in AWS credits, with Melt Ventures' investment process built into the program. Apply here.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick: How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models by Felix Rieseberg at Anthropic
Really worth a read if you use AI every day but feel like you’re only scratching the surface (🙌 me). It’s also a great rallying cry to be more ambitious!
Felix breaks “being more ambitious” into four types.
Speed is doing the same work faster.
Altitude means handing over the outcome rather than the task, like asking it to keep an app crash-free instead of fixing one crash at a time.
Depth means pushing it to work like a field-leading expert, with real tools, raw data and outside checks.
Range means considering our work from the perspective of other fields.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will