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. 🚀
This week marks some absolute massive moments for Australian startups. Plus Australia qualified for the knock out stages of the world cup!!! 🦘🍾 But let's just focus on startups…
Tim Davis, an Australian founder who moved to SF in 2012 has just sold his AI inference company, Modular, for $5.6B. in the same week, we also see a transition of scaled tech companies to AI. Airwallex have delayed their IPO due investment in AI product, and Immutable, one of the rare Aussie Web3 unicorn stories (hyped or otherwise) has officially transitioned their product to AI.
In other news, I took a step back away from the CGT debate this week, mostly due to fatigue. Despite this, I saw immense irony when Defence Minister Defence Minister Richard Marles advocated for Australia to create, build and own it's own frontier models to avoid dependence on international models in the same week his party was passing tax legislation that will ultimately push our most ambitious and high growth founders overseas.
👀 Headlines 👀
🚀 💰 Airwallex has raised US$320m (~A$490m) in a Series H led by returning backer Addition, lifting its valuation by 37% to US$11bn (A$16bn), up from US$8bn just seven months ago. (The Australian, AFR)
The Melbourne-born fintech's annualised revenue hit A$1.3bn in March, up 74% year-on-year, with annualised transaction volume more than doubling to US$287bn. It now serves 40,000+ Australian businesses (including Qantas, Canva, and Afterpay) and 676,000 businesses globally across 85+ licences.
🏆 Modular, the unified AI inference platform, has been acquired by Nasdaq-listed Qualcomm for US$3.9bn (A$5.6bn) in an all-scrip deal — just four years after launch. The Silicon Valley AI software startup was co-founded by Melburnian Tim Davis, making him one of Australia's most successful tech founders. (The Australian)
The deal values Modular well above its US$1.6bn valuation from last year, when it raised US$250m. Prior to this, Modular raised US$130m across 2022–2023. Qualcomm expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares to Modular's equity owners, with the deal due to close later this year.
Founded in 2022 by Davis, and American co-founder Chris Lattner, Modular builds software that lets AI run efficiently across different chip architectures — enabling developers to deploy across hardware without rewriting code. It serves Oracle, Amazon, Nvidia and AMD, and claims to have the world's fastest AI inference engine and its own Python-superset language, Mojo.
Davis arrived in Silicon Valley in 2012 after stints at NAB and a Monash law/commerce degree. Davis apparently left Australia partly because local seed investors "would take a very large percentage of the business." He later worked at Google Brain, where he met Lattner, before leaving in 2022 to start Modular.
🍺Heaps Normal is the fastest-growing non-alcoholic beer in Australia, growing at more than three times the pace of the broader non-alc category, according to the State of the Hops Report (drawn from Dan Murphy's and BWS purchasing data). (State of the Hops Report 2026)
Non-alcoholic beer is now in its 11th consecutive year of growth. Co-founder and CEO of Heaps Normal, Andy Miller, credits a cultural shift: "Not drinking alcohol is no longer a statement. People are just choosing the drink they want in the moment," a shift predominantly driven by Millennials and Gen Z, who think about play and wellness differently.
🏛️ The 2026/27 NSW Budget makes zero mention of startups or Tech Central (Startup Daily)
The omission caps a pattern of retreat: NSW has closed the Sydney Startup Hub, stalled its own Innovation and Productivity Council, and walked away from SXSW Sydney and TechStars Sydney. April 2025's Innovation Blueprint gets no follow-up funding in the budget.
The government is instead pinning growth on data centres and renewable energy, which Treasurer Daniel Mookhey says now makes private investment the leading source of NSW economic growth.
The opposition leader Kellie Sloane used her budget reply to pledge NSW's "most competitive state payroll tax regime" for SMEs — lifting the threshold from $1.2m to $1.5m (indexed) and cutting the rate from 5.45% to 4.75% for sub-$10m-turnover businesses, sparing ~4,000 firms and handing 25,000 more the lowest payroll tax in the country. Shadow Innovation minister Jacqui Munro framed founders as "big winners", with the package also doubling Business Connect funding, promising NSW's first comprehensive industry strategy in 20+ years, and a formal plan to manage the data centre boom.
💰 Culture Amp has laid off 70 staff, roughly 9% of its workforce, just seven months after cutting 60 roles in November 2025. It's the third major round of redundancies at the Melbourne HR tech company since April 2023. (Capital Brief)
The cuts follow Caroline Rawlinson's appointment as CEO in January, after co-founder Didier Elzinga stepped down to executive chair. Rawlinson says the restructure aligns investment with "refreshed strategic priorities" and is understood to strip out middle management for faster decision-making. (Capital Brief)
According to Capital Brief, revenue is at US$180–200m across ~7,500 global customers. The November cuts were framed as a pivot toward AI products, particularly the AI Coach.
Investor Blackbird Ventures marked down its Culture Amp holding by 23.5% at its November investor day, alongside a write down of fellow SaaS unicorn SafetyCulture.
🎲 Crypto unicorn Immutable is pivoting from Web3 gaming to AI marketing and cut 29 roles — almost its entire game development team. The new product, Immutable Audience, is aimed at both traditional (Web2) and Web3 game publishers. (Forbes)
On average, Web3 game tokens are down 95% since 2022, sector VC funding has collapsed from US$4bn (2022) to US$360m (2025), and Immutable's IMX token trades at 14c, down from a US$9+ peak.
Despite the upheaval, Immutable still has a huge runway from its $280M 2022 Series C, which was backed by Airtree, Tencent, and Temasek.
Immutable Audience's pitch is to convert cold traffic into paying players and give studios a re-launchable, owned audience that compounds game-to-game. It works across platforms (Steam, App Store, etc.), and the site claims that 700+ games use it, including titles from Ubisoft and NetMarble.
It works in five stages: Capture (turn anonymous web traffic into identified players via high-converting game landing pages that grab emails, socials and Steam wishlists), Enrich (build unified player profiles scored by predicted lifetime value), Automate (AI-personalised email, Telegram and in-app campaigns triggered by player behaviour), Attribute (channel-level tracking of which sources actually drive paying players, not just clicks), and Launch (activate that "owned audience" on launch day and re-use it across every future title).
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 ⚡
Baseten lands $1.5B Series F to make inference more efficient
Founders: Phillip Howes, Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat and Pankaj Gupta
Baseten, the San Francisco AI inference platform co-founded by Sydney-raised Tuhin Srivastava, has raised US$1.5 billion in Series F, and Blackbird has written its largest-ever single-round cheque (more than US$200m) to back it. For perspective, an entire Blackbird fund in 2012 was just US$30m.
The round was led by Altimeter, Conviction and Spark Capital, completed across two tranches, valuing the company at US$11bn, then US$13bn. It's Baseten's fourth raise in 18 months, taking total capital past US$2 billion. It marks Blackbird's third bet on Srivastava and co-founder Philip Howes, dating back to their 2015 people-analytics startup Shape Analytics.
Baseten sits at the layer that turns trained models into production products — handling GPU orchestration, autoscaling and tooling as enterprises increasingly run custom, post-trained models they own. The traction is astonishing with revenue up roughly 20x year-on-year, more than one billion inference calls a day across 87 clusters and 18 clouds, with customers including Cursor, Notion, Lovable and Clay.
The fresh capital will fund more compute, software development and talent, with headcount set to triple this year.
Due Diligence: Overnight Success, Forbes, Baseten Announcement
Ovum secures $4M seed at $18M valuation for health journal for womankind
Founder: Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks
Ovum, the Melbourne women's health data startup, has raised $4 million in a Seed round, valuing the company at $18 million. The round was led by Admiralty Capital Group, with participation from Antler, Giant Leap, Aviron Investments, Foggy Valley Aotearoa, Brisbane Angels and Think & Grow. Existing backer LaunchVic returned via its female founder-focused Alice Anderson Fund. It follows a $1.7m pre-Seed in February 2025, ahead of an August launch.
Users chat with the AI conversationally, which ingests their symptoms, wearable data, test results, lifestyle logs, and medical history to build a long-term picture of their body — what the company calls the "Ovum Brain," trained on six "Health Factors." From that, it tracks cycles, surfaces daily health insights, spots patterns and connections across symptoms and habits, and generates tailored recommendations. A standout practical feature is exporting relevant health summaries to take to GP or specialist appointments, helping women advocate for themselves.
Ovum is a consumer subscription (B2C) business that also runs a "pay it forward" option where a subscriber can fund access for another woman facing financial or access barriers, delivered through partner organisations. Separately, Ovum is building an anonymised, opt-in global dataset on women's health, which underpins its research/clinical ambitions.
Traction has been quick: 30% month-on-month growth, 20,000+ downloads, 57,000 captured health insights, and more than 107,000 AI health conversations from women aged 15 to 84.
Founder Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks was inspired as a third-year medical student with chronic migraines told her pain "was just anxiety." Partners include Medibank, Fernwood Fitness, Sweat and Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, and Ovum has launched clinical trials with St George Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Women to assess AI as a preventative health tool. Backers are betting on "a company of global significance."
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Limitless Labs lands $20M Series A to bring AI to CNC manufacturing
Founders: David Priev, Assaf Peleg, and Shahaf Finder
Limitless Labs, an Israeli startup putting AI on the factory floor, has raised a $20 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg, with Grove Ventures, Meron Capital, and Kinetica joining. The round brings total funding to $27.3 million.,.
The startup is building an AI platform for precision mechanical manufacturing. Its model is trained on the physics of metal cutting, the geometry of design files, and the real-world constraints of CNC machines — then deployed as an agent that slots into engineers' existing CAM workflows. Load a design file, and the agent plans every production stage, from cutting-tool selection to toolpath generation, cutting programming time by up to 50%.
Founded in 2024 by David Priev, Assaf Peleg, and Shahaf Finder, Limitless Labs has moved from pilots to production with aerospace, defence, and automotive heavyweights, including Blue Origin, Cadillac Formula 1, and ISCAR. It's also partnered with Sandvik's Cimatron, which has roughly 30,000 CAD/CAM users worldwide.
CEO Priev frames the bet around capturing scarce expertise: "The manufacturing world doesn't just need more automation, it needs a better way to capture and scale the expertise that still lives inside the heads of... experienced machinists." The cash funds U.S. expansion, deeper automation, and a headcount set to double.
Due Diligence: CTech, Square Peg Announcement
🚀 Wins 🚀
🚁 Skyportz won a $250,000 Australian Government export grant and the Blue Sky Innovation Award at the Avalon Airshow, with fabrication now underway on its first vertipad for electric air taxis, the Aeroberm.
💰 SavvyWise, a Perth-based AI tax-research platform, closed an A$1,558,006 OnMarket equity crowdfunding raise from 469 investors, the largest AI-tech equity crowdfunding raise of FY2025 to 26. (Startup News)
💰 New Fund, Who’s This? 💰
💰 NZ Super has invested NZ$35 million (US$20m) into Movac Growth Fund 7, the Wellington VC firm's new NZ-focused VC fund, which launched last month with NZ$185 million (US$105m) in initial fundraising. (Asia Asset Management)
NZ Super has been the largest investor across several previous Movac funds, with the two having built what the sovereign wealth fund calls "a close and highly effective working relationship" over the past decade. The fund manages NZ$93 billion, with 11% allocated to domestic assets.
Growth Fund 7 will focus mainly on growth-stage local NZ tech companies.
💰 Scaleup Mediafund has launched its fourth media-for-equity fund with $25 million in advertising capacity, a step up from its fully deployed $15 million third fund. It's backed by all five existing media partners: News Corp Australia, Foxtel, NOVA Entertainment, oOh!media and REA Group. (Business News Australia)
Since launching in 2017, Scaleup's media partners have committed more than $45 million in advertising and marketing inventory across 20+ portfolio companies, five of which have reached acquisition or IPO. The fully deployed third fund backed Finder, NobleOak Life (ASX: NOL), Naked Life, Settle Easy, Hawkes Brewing and Bare Funerals.
The model swaps discounted media inventory, typically around $1–2 million of advertising across TV, radio, out-of-home, print and digital, for equity in high-growth Australian businesses, giving founders mass-market reach without draining cash reserves.
Fund 4 targets companies at a growth inflection point where brand awareness is the main barrier to scaling, with the team reviewing opportunities across consumer, fintech, health and property tech.
📆 Notice Board 📆
🌍 Google for Startups Accelerator is now for all of ANZ, having opened applications to New Zealand AI and ML startups for the first time.
The equity-free 10-week program includes a Sydney-based bootcamp for around 10 to 15 seed-to-Series A companies. Application closes July 19th. More information here.
🌊 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!
🎓 The Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship's Impact Catalyst is a 10-day hybrid impact investing program (two 5-day online sprints plus in-person events, with 3 months of follow-on mentoring) led by Dan Madhavan of Ecotone Ventures.
It teaches the frameworks, judgement and networks to invest for measurable social and environmental impact alongside financial return — covering impact measurement, theory of change, blended finance and risk-return-impact portfolio construction.
The program is for sophisticated and angel investors, family office managers, emerging/future fund managers, corporate venturing and strategy teams, foundation and philanthropic leaders, and operators moving into investing.
The program kicks off on 5 August. More information here!
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will’s Pick: Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by Henrik Karlsson
Taken from Nick Crocker's latest currents newsletter This essay argues that the best things in life—careers, relationships, good work—aren't built from a blueprint. They unfold.
Karlsson's whole pitch is that you shouldn't start by deciding what you want your life to look like, because that's a fantasy you're imposing from the outside. Instead, you pay attention to what actually makes you feel alive, take small steps, get feedback from reality, and iterate.
The core idea worth stealing is "the context is smarter than you." Whatever you're trying to design, the information you need is already out there in the situation itself, not in your head.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will