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:

We've been working with We Are Eight as a sponsor, a specialist recruitment agency focusing on Startups and Scaleups, supporting founders to hire the right people for the critical early stages of growth.

This week, we're sharing a piece from Senior Recruitment Consultant Sami Wareeth. In his article, Embrace the age of experimentation: 4 ways engineering teams are adopting a new look in 2026, Sami covers some of the more interesting, functional, and, in some cases, downright experimental approaches companies are taking right now.

💰 Three Australian VC funds make moves this week: a $70m medtech debut, a $15m secondaries close, and a $25m bet on women's midlife health. There’s a full write-up on each down below in New Fund, Who’s This.

🏦 The CGT debate has continued to rage online, in newspaper columns, and across social media. Labour has acknowledged concerns that its capital gains tax changes extend beyond startups, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers describing calls to expand existing small-business carve-outs as a "legitimate" conversation. 

🛰️  Airtree-backed HEO is closing a roughly $30 million Series B for its satellite-inspection technology. (AFR)

📊 Birchal, Australia’s largest crowdfunding platform, has repriced itself at a $5 million pre-money valuation and is inviting the crowd to invest again. The valuation is down more than 80% from $40 million in 2022. The crowdfunding round will be on its own platform with shares at 9 cents, having previously traded at $1.

💰 Following a US$4.1M deal with Superpower, the SF-based preventative health app, co-founded by Australian Max Marchione, ASX-listed biotech Tetratherix is raising about $15 million at $6 a share via Barrenjoey and Morgans. (AFR)

🏛️ Anthropic has secured its first direct Australian federal government contract, with the Fair Work Commission paying $13,000 for access to Claude's Opus models to test potential business applications, including, presumably, managing the surge in unfair dismissal claims that the FWC president has attributed almost entirely to AI. (Innovation Aus)

Founder: Dom Reardon

Small businesses have been the forgotten customers of the energy transition. Households got rooftop solar and home batteries; large industrials got demand-response contracts and behind-the-meter deals. The cafe, the brewery and the corner manufacturer were left with a bill they could not control and no realistic path to capex-funded infrastructure of their own.

Cable, a Sydney-based energy startup, has raised $4 million in pre-seed funding to close that gap, backed by London climate fund Systemiq Capital and Sydney's Black Nova, alongside a group of angels drawn from startups, venture capital and infrastructure. The cheque is Systemiq Capital's first investment in an Australian company.

Cable sells battery-backed electricity plans rather than hardware. The company installs and owns the batteries, and customers sign up for a plan the same way they would with any retailer, with no upfront cost and nothing to maintain. Cable says the model can cut an annual electricity bill by up to 40%. Its target customer is the small business spending between $5,000 and $50,000 a year on power.

The mechanics sit behind a software stack that controls Cable's battery fleet, bills customers on a consumption-only basis, and manages positions in the wholesale market, where spot prices swing from negative mid-afternoon to extreme highs at the evening peak in demand. "Our batteries charge when the spot price is low, and discharge when it's expensive. This has become a lower-cost way to hedge than traditional derivatives. We pass those savings on to our customers," said founder Dominic Reardon.

The company was founded in mid-2025 and has spent the past six months in private beta. The raise funds a move to public beta across the Sydney metro market.

The thesis underlying the raise is that thousands of small, owned batteries sitting behind small-business meters can be coordinated into a distributed grid asset, with customers sharing in the upside through lower bills rather than bearing the installation cost.

Reardon brings energy and venture experience to the role. He co-founded DECO, a venture-backed renewable energy startup operating in the UK and Europe, and before that was an investor at Eight Roads and Airtree Ventures, and began his career in Macquarie Capital's technology investment banking team.

Due Diligence: Capital Brief, SmartCompany

Founders: Professor Brian Abbey and Dr Eugeniu Balaur

Pathology has run on the same basic workflow for more than a century: stain a tissue sample with chemical dyes, then have a pathologist read it under a microscope. It is slow, dye-dependent, and leaves room for a subjective call about whether a cell is normal.

AlleSense, a La Trobe University biotech spin-out, has raised $5 million to change the slide itself. The round was led by existing investor Welcome Ventures, a special-purpose vehicle focused on medical research commercialisation, with Breakthrough Victoria tipping in $1 million and the federal Australian Economic Accelerator (AEA Innovate) grant program contributing $2.5 million. La Trobe is also a shareholder. The company previously raised a $2.5 million in seed funding in 2023.

AlleSense was founded in 2020 by La Trobe researchers Professor Brian Abbey and Dr Eugeniu Balaur, and is led by chief executive Julian Sutton of Welcome, who is also a director of ASX-listed 4DMedical. Its core technology, the NanoMslide, is a world-first nanofabricated microscope slide that uses colour contrast rather than chemical staining to make abnormal cells stand out. A special coating effectively turns the slide into a miniature chemistry lab, removing dyes from the process and slotting into existing optical microscopes and pathology workflows rather than replacing them.

The technology, which won the 2022 Eureka Prize for the Innovative Use of Technology, aims to enable faster, more accurate detection of breast, skin and colorectal cancers.

Due Diligence: Startup Daily

Founders: Blaze O'Byrne and Wilm Kranz

Accounting firms don't have a demand problem; they have a capacity problem. Tax season, particularly in the US, runs on unstructured documents, inconsistent client data and review-heavy processes that legacy software never really tamed. More than 120,000 accounting and audit roles sit unfilled each year, even as business tax keeps getting more complex.

Byron, an AI agent platform that automates business tax preparation for accounting firms, has raised US$6.5 million ($9.1 million) in a seed round led by Square Peg, with Sorenson Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and Correlation Ventures participating. Co-founded by Perth-born Blaze O'Byrne and Wilm Kranz, who met on the first day of their Computer Science Master's at the University of Chicago, the San Francisco company was built by AI and accounting specialists drawn from Amazon's artificial general intelligence team and Deloitte. The name nods to Byron Bay and O'Byrne's Australian roots.

Byron integrates with the systems that certified public accounting firms already use. It automatically rolls prior-year returns and work papers into a current-year Excel workbook, with each stage of the pipeline handled by an AI agent trained for that task, while accountants continue working in the Excel environment they know. Specialised agents handle book-to-tax adjustments, depreciation schedules, state apportionments and partnership allocations, and can process complex documents such as K-1s. Each extracted figure is linked back to its source and assigned a confidence score, allowing accountants to verify the output rather than rebuild it.

Due Diligence: Capital Brief, Square Peg Investment Notes

Founder: Dr Sarah McDonald

Maternal and fetal monitoring has barely changed in 60 years, with clinicians still relying on a handful of rudimentary biomarkers and risk assessments at admission, often revisited only after something has already gone wrong.

Oli, the Sydney medtech building a wireless wearable that predicts birth complications in real time, has raised $6.5 million in a Series A3 round backed by Scale Investors, Clare Ventures, and the University of Sydney. The raise lifts Oli's total private capital to $13 million, alongside more than $9.5 million in non-dilutive grants.

Founded in 2018 (formerly Baymatob) by mechatronic engineer Dr Sarah McDonald after the traumatic birth of her son Oliver, Oli captures millions of data points across 10 maternal and fetal biosensors without disrupting labour. Its patented signal technology flags early patterns preceding complications like postpartum haemorrhage and fetal distress, targeting up to 15 conditions.

The funding completes a 1,000-patient pivotal trial across seven Australian and US sites, now past 850 enrolments, and advances TGA and FDA submissions ahead of a planned 2027 commercial launch.

Due Diligence: SmartCompany

👭❤️‍🩹 Factory Capital has committed $25 million to peri- and post-menopause health and launched a non-profit to build the clinical foundations first. (Capital Brief, Femtech Insider)

💰 AdvanceVC, Australia's first dedicated VC secondaries fund, has hit its $15m target less than a year after launch, with a final close expected on 30 June. (Capital Brief)

💰 Synthesis Capital has banked close to $60 million toward a $70 million debut fund backing early-stage Australian health and medtech. (AFR)

🥝 Bridgewest Ventures has held a first close of NZ$60.2 million for its debut venture fund, targeting NZ$100 million total and focusing on deep-tech companies across New Zealand and Australia in life sciences, medtech, AI, advanced materials, and clean technology. 

💰 Brisbane HR and payroll platform Tanda, which has remained bootstrapped till now, has appointed Barrenjoey to find a private equity partner at a valuation north of $500 million. (AFR)

🤖 Freckle has launched a new product that lets GTM teams build enrichment workflows directly from the terminal using natural language via coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.).

The company has gone all-in on the shift, using the CLI for 100% of their own GTM workflows internally; beta waitlist is open here.

🤖 Aquila has demonstrated wireless electricity delivery via laser beam — powering a moving warehouse robot for 24 hours straight, covering 25km, at a steady 4 kilowatts. (Renew Economy)

👤 Will Hayward, former CEO of Crikey and SmartCompany publisher Private Media, has taken a 30% stake in The Contrarians and has effectively become a co-founder. (AFR)

🏛️ The NSW Government has selected the University of Newcastle's Integrated Innovation Network (I2N) to run its new $4 million Diversity Pre-Accelerator Program, expanding I2N's existing FLIP program statewide. (NSW Government)

The 16-week program will support up to 188 female founders across NSW over two years, with applications opening in June 2026, and no affiliation with the University is required to apply. Apply here!

💄 L'Oréal has opened applications for the 2026 Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program, offering ANZ startups a fully funded commercial pilot with one of L'Oréal's 40 global brands plus a year-long mentorship.

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Will’s Pick:  Beyond the trend: the ancient aesthetics of modern innovation by Maria Izvestkina (Thanks to the Ponnd team for sharing it!)

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‘Til next time,

👋 Will