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. 🚀

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This week, Carta is sharing their Australian Startup Outlook 2026, highlighting how Aussie startup founders are thinking about implementing AI… and if they think it’s a bubble.

📈 Australia’s tech sector contributed $248.5bn (8.9% of GDP) in 2025, up from $149bn (7.5%) in 2020, growing nearly 50% faster than the broader economy, according to a report by the Tech Council of Australia (commissioned with Austrade and AWS) (Innovation Aus)

🏗️ The Government of New South Wales is fast-tracking 15 data centre projects worth $51.9bn (Innovation Aus)

🤖 Former National AI Centre head Stela Solar has been appointed CEO of Stone & Chalk, succeeding Chris Kirk after a decade with the organisation. (Startup Daily)

🎨 Canva has acquired Melbourne-based DOOH platform Doohly for ~$30m, expanding into digital out-of-home advertising as part of its end-to-end marketing lifecycle strategy. (Capital Brief)

Founders: Name

When Craig Piggott founded Halter in 2016, he was betting that the humble cattle collar could replace centuries-old fencing infrastructure. Nine years later, the New Zealand-based agtech startup has closed a $US315 million (~$460 million AUD) round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, lifting its valuation to $US2 billion ($2.9 billion AUD) and cementing its status as one of the most valuable agricultural technology companies to come out of the ANZ region.

Halter's core product is a solar-powered GPS collar that lets farmers virtually fence, move, and monitor cattle via a smartphone app, using sound and vibration cues to guide animals between paddocks. More than 2,000 farms across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States now run the system, with roughly one million beef and dairy cows wearing collars. 

The round also drew participation from Mary Meeker's Bond Capital and Blackbird Ventures, Halter's largest external shareholder. Halter has now raised approximately $470 million AUD across two rounds since June 2025, with its valuation growing by more than $1 billion in under 12 months.

Piggott plans to direct the fresh capital toward expansion into South America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, alongside a 220-person hiring push. The raise comes after virtual fencing was legalised across all Australian states in late 2025, removing a regulatory barrier that had previously limited Halter's domestic footprint.

Due Diligence: AFR, SmartCompany

Founders: Sam Kroonenburg, Edward Ring and Jack White

Sydney adtech startup Cuttable has crossed the $100 million valuation mark after closing its second funding round, more than doubling its previous valuation of $44.5 million in under 12 months. The round brought Airtree Ventures and Glitch Capital onto the shareholder register, with Square Peg Capital and Rampersand returning to increase their positions. The raise amount was not disclosed.

Cuttable's platform uses AI to automatically generate and test multiple versions of digital ads across Meta, Google, and TikTok, eliminating the need for human creative teams to manually produce ad variants. The company pitches directly at what it sees as a structural shift in performance marketing: as social media algorithms increasingly determine which creative performs, brands need volume and iteration speed that traditional agencies and in-house teams can't match. More than 220 brands are now using the platform, with a concentration in e-commerce, including Appliances Online and Brooks Running.

The company was founded in 2024 by Sam Kroonenburg, who previously built and sold cloud training platform A Cloud Guru to Pluralsight for $2 billion in 2021. Kroonenburg is running Cuttable with a lean structure, with a team of just seven or eight engineers that he says is shipping product faster than A Cloud Guru did with more than 100. 

Due Diligence: AFR

Founders: Greg Rudakov and Steve Rudakov

There's a persistent, unglamorous problem in managed IT services: the ticketing systems enterprises use internally rarely talk to the tools their service providers rely on, forcing teams to manually keep records in sync across platforms. Melbourne-based Support Fusion was built to close that gap, and after going live in mid-2025, has raised $1 million in pre-Seed funding to accelerate growth across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK.

The round was led by Func Ventures and Exhort Ventures, with continued support from Antler. It also includes strategic backing from three industry operator angels: Biagio LaRosa, CEO of Melbourne Microsoft solutions partner Generation-e; Ryan Spillane, CEO of 360 Consulting; and Toby Alcock, founder of Paratira and former Global CTO of Logicalis. All three will contribute to product development alongside their investment. 

In nine months, Support Fusion has built connectors for more than 10 platforms, including ServiceNow, Jira, ConnectWise, Freshworks, and Zendesk, covering the majority of tools used in co-managed IT engagements globally.

The company was founded by brothers Greg Rudakov (CEO) and Steve Rudakov (CTO). The capital will go toward GTM and alliances hiring, AI-focused engineering, and establishing a customer success presence in the US.

Due Diligence: Startup Daily

Founders: Paul Sealock, Dan Bull, Daniel Stuart-Jones, and Ursula Haywood

The beef industry has long relied on human visual estimates to assess livestock weight, a practice that creates financial losses at every point in the supply chain, from the farm gate to the processor. Auckland agtech Scanabull is targeting that gap with a computer vision platform that uses the iPhone's LiDAR sensor to produce an instant weight estimate for cattle in the field. The startup has raised $920,000 AUD (NZ$1.1 million) in a round led by Sprout Agritech, with support from Enterprise Angels and Callaghan Innovation's Deep Tech Incubator program.

Founded in April 2024 by Dan Bull, who grew up on a farm managing livestock, Scanabull's first product, WeighApp, lets farmers, stock agents, and veterinarians scan animals directly in yards, pens, or near farm gates. 

The AI models underpinning the platform have been trained on more than 100,000 animal data points and are designed to improve continuously as more scans are captured. Silver Fern Farms is among the industry partners already trialling the technology across New Zealand.

The capital will support further AI model development, additional data collection, and a broader commercial rollout into the Australian market and other major beef-producing regions by year-end. Bull also sees potential for the technology at the abattoir level, where processors typically have limited visibility over animal weight before livestock arrive at the plant.

Due Diligence: Startup Daily

Founder: Professor Michelle Simmons

Seven weeks after committing $20 million to Sydney quantum startup Diraq, the federal government's National Reconstruction Fund has placed the same bet on a rival — injecting $20 million into Silicon Quantum Computing as part of a larger ongoing funding round. The back-to-back investments signal a deliberate push to build sovereign quantum capability in Australia, with the NRF now holding stakes in most of the country's major quantum computing companies.

SQC was founded in 2017 by Professor Michelle Simmons (Australian of the Year in 2018) after spinning out of the University of New South Wales. The company is working toward what it claims will be the world's first commercial-scale silicon quantum computer, with a target of 2033.

Its key technical advantage is an in-house chip manufacturing process called PAQMan (Precision Atom Qubit Manufacturing), which allows SQC to design, produce, and test new quantum chips in under a week. The company has already launched its first commercial product, a quantum machine learning processor called Watermelon, which Telstra trialled and found delivered results in days that conventional deep learning models took weeks to produce.

The NRF funding will support SQC's semiconductor manufacturing scale-up and grow its team of more than 100. SQC and Diraq are both among 11 companies selected for the second round of a DARPA benchmarking program in the US — a marker of how seriously the global defence and research community is taking the Australian quantum cohort.

Due Diligence: InnovationAus, NRF Announcement, Capital Brief

CEO: Richard Fifita

Sydney-based Construction logistics startup Veyor has raised $10.5 million in Series A funding at a reported $50–75 million valuation, as the company accelerates expansion into the US and positions its platform as core infrastructure for construction site operations.

The round was led by Marbruck Investments, with participation from CoAct and returning backers Investible and SpringCapital. It follows a $2.75 million pre-Series A in 2024.

Veyor’s software replaces spreadsheets and email chains with a real-time system of record for site logistics, coordinating deliveries, suppliers, contractors and tenants across complex construction projects. The startup says the category remains largely underserved despite its importance to project efficiency and cost control.

The US now generates more than 30% of revenue and is growing 150% year-on-year, with customers across 30+ states. CEO Richard Fifita expects the market to contribute over half of total revenue within two years, and plans to relocate there as the company scales its go-to-market efforts.

Fresh capital will support deeper product expansion into procurement, inventory and warehouse workflows, as Veyor pushes to become the global operating layer for construction logistics. 

Due Diligence: SmartCompany

🚀 Sydney’s Space Machines Company (SMC) is doubling down on "mass-produced" spacecraft through a high-tech consortium involving the University of Technology Sydney and additive manufacturing firm Fordyno. (Innovation Aus)

🤼 Our friends at the community collective are holding their 8th cohort, and applications need to be in before the 30th of March. Apply here!

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Will’s Pick 💁‍♂ How to Make a Living as an Artist by Fnnch

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‘Til next time,

👋 Will