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. 🚀
Sponsor shoutout:
Very excited to be welcoming a new sponsor to the newsletter; it’s my pleasure to introduce the team at We Are Eight, led by Danny.
We Are Eight is a recruitment consultancy built specifically for founders, VCs and tech leaders who need to hire well from the jump. I’ve been drawn to working with them after seeing the calibre of startups they’ve worked with, the testimonials from amazing founders, and the care they take in working with fast-growing companies.
Their small team carries around 40 years of combined experience across Engineering, Product, Design and GTM, and they've helped build foundation teams at companies like Tactiq, SEER Medical, Mr. Yum (now me&u), Stile Education, Sophiie.ai, Uptick and plenty more. They’ve got three pretty epic jobs listed below. Check them out!
👀 Headlines 👀
🐦 Blackbird's annual Sunrise conference took place this week at Sydney's Carriageworks, with AI, the SaaSpocalypse and fighting back against Tall Poppy Syndrome dominating conversation among the ~900 founders, investors, and operators in attendance (AFR)
The conference was supported by Anthropic, AWS, Airwallex, Stripe and Vercel. The most prominent stage presence came from Anthropic, which hosted and appeared on several stages throughout the conference. Anthropic's head of the Claude Code product, Angela Jiang, told software founders they need to build deeper, more complex products to survive, arguing that AI will commoditise anything that simply takes a user from A to B.
Jiang also called time on the per-seat SaaS model, arguing that AI agents consume resources so unpredictably that usage-based pricing is the only model that makes sense. This was built on by Canva's Cliff Obrecht, who gave a deeper business context to the changes made at Canva in becoming an AI company. Since Canva AI was launched a few weeks ago, 1 million users have already tried it.
Perhaps the bigger takeaway was to think bigger and be more ambitious. The drumbeat from founders like Cliff, Heidi’s Dr Tom Kelly and Euc’s Charlie Gearside was to be more ambitious and fight against tall poppy syndrome that plagues Australia.
💰 Airwallex has launched Latitude 37, a new program backing 10+ early-stage Australian AI founders each year with A$100K in equity-free capital, totalling A$1M annually. (Airwallex Announcement, SMH)
The program is named after Melbourne's latitude, and the initiative also includes access to Airwallex's global network and immersion tours in San Francisco and Singapore.
The Latitude 37 program comes as Airwallex deepens its Australian roots despite being co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore. Airwallex has already committed over A$5M to the University of Melbourne and funds the initiative through its Pledge 1% commitment. Applications open late May 2026. Stay tuned!
In other Airwallex news, Airwallex's Australian revenue has crossed A$100M for the first time, rising 30% to A$105.6M in 2025 — but its local after-tax loss also widened to A$17.2M as the Melbourne-founded fintech continues to prioritise growth over profitability. The result comes as AUSTRAC's investigation into potential anti-money laundering failures at the platform remains ongoing, with an external auditor's report due by June 30. That being said, I’m sure investors are still sitting pretty happy with Airwallex’s growth lately. (AFR)
📊 Cut Through Venture released their 2026 Q1 report with A$1.8B raised, up 63% on Q1 2025. But the top 10 deals captured 59% of all capital, and the top 20 captured 79%. Three unicorns have been crowned this year, with an honourable mention to Euc, which had a A$1.6B exit, too.
Viewing the Cut Through graphs, you see a strong start to 2026 for Australia, only beaten by the ZIRP-era days of 2021. However, Sub-$5M rounds are at their lowest since 2020. The market has genuinely reopened, but only at the top.
Advanced Navigation (A$1.5B), Gilmour Space (A$1.5B), and Neara (A$1.1B) all crossed the unicorn threshold this quarter. These three are atom businesses: navigation systems, rockets, and grid infrastructure, which are a long way from the SaaS unicorns we’re used to.
The vertical vs horizontal SaaS gap is now a chasm. According to the report, vertical SaaS saw A$800M raised across 59 deals, with 50% of investors rating it exciting. Horizontal SaaS saw A$202M land across 19 deals, with 22% of investors rating it unexciting.
According to Cake Equity data, the median seed post-money valuation hit A$16M in Q1 2026, up from A$7.7M in Q1 2024. SAFE caps have moved to A$15M.
Finally, the time it takes to graduate to Series B is taking dramatically longer. The median age of startups at Series B is 9.7 years in Q1 2026, up from 5.2 years in 2021.
This is to be expected, as AI development is helping small teams move fast. Pre-seed founders are getting cheques earlier than ever (median 1.1 years old), but the path from first cheque to growth round has stretched dramatically.
👤 Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys has announced he is stepping down after 12 years at the company, with his final day set for June 19.
Humphreys joined in 2014 as employee number 12 and will stay on as an adviser, saying he plans to take a break before building again. (LinkedIn)
🏦 Global banks, including HSBC, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs gathered this week at the Quantum Australia Conference to chat about the risks and opportunities presented by quantum technologies in financial systems.
The banks are moving from quantum exploration to early deployment, particularly around post-quantum cryptography and financial use cases like portfolio optimisation, derivatives pricing, and fraud detection.
It was clear, though, that Australia punches above its weight in the quantum sector, with 40+ quantum companies, 26 research organisations, and the world's fifth-largest quantum workforce. Not bad for a country that makes up 0.3% of the global population.
The conference, organised by Quantum Australia, was attended by ~900 investors, policymakers, and industry leaders.
👥 VentureCrowd's parent company, VentureCrowd Holdings Pty Ltd, has entered administration with creditors claiming A$7.3M in outstanding debts. (SmartCompany)
CEO Steve Maarbani is framing it as a corporate debt restructuring, with operating subsidiaries and managed funds unaffected and continuing to trade. The holding company lost a A$2.4M Queensland Supreme Court judgment to a former shareholder in 2024, and a subsequent appeal was dismissed in early 2025.
A 'Series B+' crowdfunding campaign on its own platform raised just A$348K of a A$1M target before closing in March. Administrator W. Roland Robson was appointed on April 9; creditors subsequently voted to replace him with Barry Wight and Stephen Earel of Cor Cordis.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Liquid Instruments lands A$70M Series C at ~A$400M valuation for custom measurement of frontier tech
Founders: Daniel Shaddock
The instruments that sit inside Apple's labs, Nvidia's test rigs and Blue Origin's aerospace facilities share a common thread: many were built by a company headquartered in Canberra.
Liquid Instruments, which makes AI-enabled specialised measurement devices that underpin development across quantum computing, aerospace and defence, has closed a A$70M Series C. The National Reconstruction Fund anchored the round with a A$28.45M stake. The round was led by Keysight Technologies with Breakthrough Victoria (a returning backer), Acorn Capital, Significant Capital Ventures, and Tribeca all participating.
Founded in 2014 out of research conducted at the Australian National University, the company builds software-defined devices that replace traditional lab instruments, oscilloscopes, signal generators and the like. These use technology derived from gravitational wave research, recognised by the 2017 Nobel Prize. CEO Daniel Shaddock describes the product as "the invisible layer underneath all modern technologies," whether that's a smartphone, an MRI machine or a quantum computer.
Liquid Instruments will use the capital to repatriate manufacturing from Southeast Asia and the United States to Melbourne, adding 20 engineering roles to its existing 55-person local workforce. With 90% of revenue generated offshore, the decision to build domestically is a deliberate bet on Australian sovereign capability.
National Reconstruction Fund CIO Mary Manning framed the investment in broader terms — specialised local measurement tools could give Australian companies working in quantum and AI a critical leg up, both sectors designated national priorities.
Global AI infrastructure spend is projected to exceed USD $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% annual increase according to Gartner. Liquid Instruments sits in the supply chain that makes that buildout possible.
Due Diligence: AFR
Legora hits USD $5.6B valuation as Airtree and Atlassian join USD $50M Series D extension at USD $5.6B valuation
Stockholm-based Legal AI platform Legora has closed a USD $50M Series D extension, bringing the total round to USD $600M and valuing the company at USD $5.6B post-money.
Airtree Ventures joined the extension alongside a notable cohort of new investors, including Atlassian, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), Barclays, Insight, Liberty Global and Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora.
The rise follows a period of significant scale. Legora recently crossed USD $100M in annual recurring revenue, has grown its headcount from 40 to 400 employees in a year, and expanded its customer base from 200 to more than 1,000 organisations across 50+ markets. Customers include Barclays, White & Case and Linklaters, with corporate legal departments now one of its fastest-growing segments. Among law firms surveyed, the company claims an average of 4.3 non-billable hours saved per lawyer per week, with 42% reporting new work won directly as a result of using the platform.
The firm has also employed Jude Law for a raunchy promotional video, definitely worth a watch.
Due Diligence: TechCrunch
Manifest bags A$2M to help ad agencies automatically create timesheets using AI
Founders: Freddie McKenzie and Henry Collinson
The advertising industry's relationship with the timesheet is an awkward one. A blunt instrument trying to measure creative work that rarely fits neatly into billable hours. AI has made that friction acute.
Manifest, an AI-powered work intelligence platform for ad agencies, has raised A$2M in pre-seed funding to replace timesheets with automated, real-time capture of how creative work actually happens. The round was led by Brand Fund by Previously Unavailable (an early backer of Tracksuit, Ideally and Appetise) with participation from Antler, Icehouse Ventures, Techstars and the Huljich & Bhatnagar Family Offices. A cohort of industry operators also joined, including Henry Innis (Mutinex), Mark Coad (ex-IPG Mediabrands), Tim Burrowes (Mumbrella co-founder), and executives from BWM Dentsu, Sling & Stone, Prophet and Taboo Group.
The company was founded by Freddie McKenzie and Henry Collinson, with CTO Tom Reid, a former Microsoft engineer, leading development of Manifest's proprietary AI model. Manifest traces its origins to Shutterspeed, an internal tool McKenzie built at Auckland creative production agency Vivid Creative, which he founded in 2018. He exited the agency in 2025, and Shutterspeed evolved into the standalone product now launching publicly.
The platform sits across an agency's tools and AI systems, passively capturing workflows and surfaces a real-time operations view, time, effort, and output, without staff needing to self-report anything.
Manifest is initially rolling out with agencies across Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, with global expansion to follow.
Due Diligence: SmartCompany
Marloo secures A$14M Seed round to build the AI operating system for financial advisors
Founders: Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala and Ben Robertson.
Marloo, an AI platform for financial advisory firms, has raised USD $10M (A$14M) in a Seed round led by returning investor Blackbird Ventures, which doubled down on its pre-seed commitment from six months ago. The raise brings total funding to more than A$18M in under a year.
Founded by Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala and Ben Robertson, Marloo automates the notes, documents and compliance work that consumes adviser time — positioning itself not as a notetaker but as a full operating system for advisory practices. In practice, that means meeting transcription across Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, automatic document generation (Statements of Advice, advice proposals, paraplanner handover summaries), AI-powered form-filling, and email integration that pulls client correspondence into a single timeline.
One Tallowwood Wealth adviser reports saving 14 hours a week on documents alone; another says an SOA that used to take hours now takes 10 minutes. Over time, the platform is designed to surface client opportunities that advisers wouldn't have the bandwidth to identify manually.
In under six months, Marloo has signed more than 650 financial advisory firms across six countries, with revenue growing 42% month-on-month. Adviser usage has grown 150% over the same period, from roughly 10 interactions per week to 25.
Capital will be deployed on deeper penetration in Australia and the UK before targeting the US, the world's largest financial advice market, alongside shipping a complete product suite.
Due Diligence: The Australian, Startup Daily
Aigentsphere banks A$4M to govern the coming wave of enterprise AI agents
Founders: Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and Quinton Anderson
Aigentsphere, an automated management platform for AI agents, has raised A$4M in seed funding from Main Sequence, CSIRO's venture capital arm, at a valuation of A$20M. The capital will go towards accelerating product development and expanding sales and marketing across Australia and the United States.
The company targets what it calls "agent sprawl". The compliance risks, cost blowouts and performance blind spots that emerge when disconnected, untracked AI agents multiply across an organisation. Their framing is deliberate: AI agents should be managed the way companies manage people, applying the rigour of HR and risk management to an organisation's AI workforce rather than its human one.
Aigentsphere sits above the agents themselves, providing real-time monitoring, KPI tracking, anomaly detection and automated evaluators that check the work of other AIs, with a human always in the loop for serious alerts. Pre-built compliance templates cover GDPR, the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, SOX and ISO standards.
Critically, the platform is designed to be operated by compliance officers and risk teams without any technical expertise, which is a deliberate choice to get governance out of IT and into the hands of the people accountable for it.
Bayer Rosmarin, who serves as chair, brings a particular vantage point to the problem. Her tenure as Optus CEO encompassed two of the most significant corporate crises in recent Australian history. The cyberattack affected millions of customers in 2022, and a nationwide network outage in 2023 left 10 million people without connectivity for nearly 14 hours. The longer-term ambition is to carve out a distinct market segment focused not on building agents, but on risk and performance management in multi-agent systems.
Due Diligence: AFR
Live Roles With We Are Eight
We Are Eight partners with Founders and Tech Leaders to help hire the best talent in Australia.
They're currently embedded at Stile Education, acting as their Fractional Tech Recruitment Team, standing up 3 teams, and looking for the following people:
AI Software Engineers | $250-300k + Super
Platform Engineers | $170-240K + Super
Product Engineers | $170 - 240K + Super
Interested in this role or know someone who could be? Connect with Danny here or get in touch below.
🫰 New Fund, Who’s this? 🫰
💰 Side Stage Ventures has reached the first close of its Fund II at A$40M, targeting a final close of A$50M, more than double the size of its debut fund. The Sydney-based VC will continue writing first cheques of A$500K to A$1.5M into pre-seed and seed-stage Australian founders, with a thesis centred on creativity and taste as durable competitive advantages in an AI-driven world. (AFR)
Fund I has already delivered two exits in under three years, Leonardo.AI and MagicBrief, placing it in the top decile of venture funds globally. The fund is backed by founders and operators from Linktree, Airwallex, Canva, Leonardo.AI, Airtasker and Aconex.
Alongside the close, Elli Hanson, formerly Global Director of Design Strategy at Ogilvy and an exited founder of Flaus, has been promoted to Partner, the firm's first internal partnership promotion. (Elli LinkedIn Post)
🚀 Wins 🚀
⌛ Former Startmate CEO Michael Batko has launched Hourglass AI, an AI implementation firm that builds working systems inside Australian businesses on a fixed-fee basis. (Startup Daily)
Hourglass was co-founded by 22-year-old Finlay Ekin. The startup launched this week after operating in stealth since February, with early clients spanning retail, property, ecommerce and wellness.
👂Earflo, a medtech startup backed by Australian Medical Angels, has received FDA clearance and launched its at-home pediatric ear-pressure device in the US market.
The device offers a non-surgical alternative for children with middle ear fluid buildup, a condition that affects 90% of kids by age 5 and currently leads to nearly 1 million ear tube surgeries annually in the US. Clinical data show that 89% of children avoided surgery after 4 weeks of use.
All four co-founders of Earflo are Perth-born, including CEO Dr. Intan Oldakowska and CMO Dr. Peter Santa Maria, with the company seeded out of the Stanford Biodesign Global Faculty Training program that spawned Perth Biodesign, now in its 10th year.
The program has produced a string of WA medtech success stories, including VitalTrace, VeinTech (whose founder Nikhilesh Bappoo just won the Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation), and Diag-nose.io. Earflo is backed locally by the Curtin University Syndicate.
📆 Notice Board 📆
📡 Curtin University's DeepStart program is now accepting applications for its three-month deep tech accelerator, aimed at research teams and startups commercialising breakthrough science.
Each accepted team receives a A$5K grant, access to an investment pool of up to A$500K, a two-day NSW immersion at Tech23, and pathways to global networks via Greentown Labs.
The program is delivered in partnership with Cicada Innovations and Greentown Labs, and supported by the Resources Technology and Critical Minerals Trailblazer and Melt Ventures. It runs from 30 July to 8 October 2026.
Open to researchers, startups and innovative SMEs with strong commercial potential. An online discovery session runs Wednesday 20 May (12–1pm AWST). Applications close 12 June. Apply or learn more here
🏗 Taronga Group is now accepting applications for Asset Impact 2026, its growth-stage accelerator connecting tech companies with global real estate and infrastructure asset owners.
The program targets commercially ready startups with existing traction in energy efficiency, embodied carbon, robotics & automation, and risk management. Participants get access to 10,000+ live assets for deployment, corporate customer introductions, and potential investment from Taronga Group.
Applications close 31 May (or earlier if the cohort fills), with the program running July 2026 through March 2027. Apply 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 💁♂ The Gamecraft podcast is back with 2026 Trends & Specific Predictions and an Acquired-like episode on the strategy of Roblox
I was very happy when I saw Gamecraft was back, publishing episodes on the business of video games again. The show is hosted by Mitch Lasky (Benchmark) and Blake Robbins (also ex-Benchmark), now running a seed-stage VC.
If you’re not into video games, Gamecraft does a fantastic job of relating it back to business and software strategy, so still a good listen.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will