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 👀
🏛️ The Robyn Denholm-led panel behind Australia's Strategic Examination of R&D has hit back at criticism that its landmark "Ambitious Australia" report is too university-centric, insisting universities are "not the centre of gravity", and the reform agenda is explicitly industry-led. (Innovation Aus)
The pushback answers UTS innovation adviser Roy Green, who told a Senate inquiry the report's National Strategic Initiatives were a replication of existing government-funded program that pairs universities with industry partners. Specifically, he was referring to the trailblazer program.
The government is yet to respond to most of the review five months on, and the panel has separately slammed Labor's R&D Tax Incentive changes.
📉 Canva has downgraded its revenue outlook (but is still growing), blaming the soaring cost of building on frontier AI models for product delays and a revenue miss as it races to reinvent itself as an AI company. (AFR, Startup Daily, The Australian)
In a Q2 update to investors, the US$42 billion (A$60 billion) giant reported quarterly revenue of $921.9 million, up 25% year-on-year but below its own guidance. It now expects to hit around 20% revenue growth this financial year, down from the 30% it had signalled and 38% last year.
Canva has also paused the rollout of Canva AI 2.0 after frontier models from the likes of OpenAI proved too costly to give away to millions of free users on its freemium model, even as more than 75 million people use Canva AI each month.
Leaning on its 2024 Leonardo.AI acquisition, Canva says it has cut cost per task by nearly 90% and is swapping its own models (Proteus, Lucid Origin and I2V) in for OpenAI and Google's Veo3.
📈 Atlassian, on the other hand, saw its shares soar about 35% after the Sydney-founded software giant posted its first quarterly operating profit in more than two years, with Q4 revenue up 28% to US$1.8 billion (A$2.4 billion), easing investor fears about its AI transition. (Capital Brief)
On March 11, 2026, Atlassian cut 1,600 jobs or around 10% of its global workforce.
Ben Thompson, the founder of Employment Hero, declared on x.com that ‘SaaS is back’ following this headline.
🏛️ The Western Australian government has carved $2 million out of its $40 million innovation fund to set up a new Commercialisation Hub, a four-year effort to help local scaleups cross the "valley of death" between research and market. (Innovation Aus)
The hub sits on top of WA's existing innovation hubs (CyberWest, the WA Life Sciences Innovation Hub and others) and will focus on IP management, commercialisation strategy, grant bids and building investor networks.
Expressions of interest for an operator close at the end of September, with the operator to be selected by year's end. More info on the specifics of the hub can be found here.
💰 AI-factory builder Firmus has closed a US$2 billion (A$2.9 billion) equity round at a valuation north of US$10.5 billion, its biggest raise yet, as the IPO-hopeful accelerates plans to build Nvidia-powered data centres across Australia and the Asia Pacific. (AFR)
The round drew follow-on cheques from Coatue and Nvidia, plus new backers Blackstone and trading firm Jane Street, taking Firmus's total raised over the past year beyond US$3 billion.
The capital fast-tracks Project Southgate, its planned data centres in Tasmania and South Australia, plus an expansion into Indonesia, though only one of its five Australian projects (an 84MW Launceston facility) has planning approval so far.
Firmus's delayed float, now slated for later this year, is closely watched as a local on-ramp to the AI-infrastructure boom, even as questions linger over community opposition and oversupply.
🌎 Build from anywhere apparently means build from the US, with early-stage startups being pushed to move to the US, sparking a debate on LinkedIn. (Capital Brief)
Startmate sent 19 founders to SF in May, its first cohort trip since Covid, and says the SF leg is now a fixture for every cohort.
But this follows a trend of Local early-stage VCs formalising the pipeline to the Bay Area, pointing to its unmatched density of capital, customers and serendipitous connections.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Vexev raises A$8.5 million to take its autonomous vascular-imaging robot to the US
Founders: Dr John Carroll and Dr Eamonn Colley
Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, yet high-quality vascular imaging still hinges on the availability of a specialist sonographer.
Vexev, a Sydney medical robotics company, wants to remove that bottleneck, and has raised A$8.5 million (US$6 million) to push its robotic ultrasound platform toward US commercialisation. The round takes total funding to date to about US$19 million.
It was backed by existing investors Blackbird Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, Startmate and Horizon, alongside new backers TreeArc Investment Group, TEN13, Bioshore Ventures and Alumni Ventures. The capital is earmarked for FDA 510(k) regulatory work, manufacturing scale-up and commercialisation.
Vexev's platform, VxWave, combines robotics, AI and ultrasound to automate vascular scans that would normally require a trained sonographer. It is being developed for upper-limb imaging, starting with dialysis vascular access, where patients need frequent monitoring and clinics are stretched for staff. In a multi-site US clinical study with U.S. Renal Care, one of the country's largest dialysis providers, VxWave hit a 94 per cent scanning success rate when operated by non-specialist clinical staff.
"We believe high-quality vascular imaging should be available wherever patients receive care, not only when a specialist is available," said John Carroll, co-founder and CEO of Vexev. The company plans to extend the platform from dialysis access into broader cardiovascular and peripheral artery disease applications.
Due Diligence: Company Announcement, Startup Daily
Zabidou raises $3.5M seed round to bring laser-guided quality control to the factory floor
Founders: Cibby Pulikkaseril
Deep tech founders love to build for the future. Cibby Pulikkaseril learned the hard way that the future can take too long to arrive. His first startup, LiDAR company Baraja, hit a $300 million valuation in 2021 before long commercialisation timelines and a crowded self-driving market caught up with it, cutting 75 per cent of staff in 2023, with some investors writing its value down to zero by 2024.
His second act, Zabidou, takes the opposite approach and has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Black Nova, with Main Sequence and Antler also backing. Founded in July last year, the company had earlier raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding.
Zabidou’s system pairs cameras and lasers to inspect manufacturing outputs like steel and concrete beams at the end of the production line, effectively automating the person who looks and feels for defects. "The camera that we use is the vision, and the lasers give us the touch," Pulikkaseril said.
The "cost of poor quality", imperfect outputs that have to be scrapped and remade, can run to 15 to 20 per cent of sales, and inspecting every item by hand is impractical, especially in regional areas where the labour is hard to find. Zabidou's systems, which it says cost around half as much as a human operator, are deployed across 15 sites and six customers, starting in construction and extending to, of all things, a pet food maker.
Due Diligence: Forbes Australia
🚀 Wins 🚀
🤖 Contactile, a Sydney startup giving robots a sense of touch, has won the ARM Hub's Propel-AIR robotics sprint, earning a residency at Boston's MassRobotics. (Innovation Aus)
Spun out of UNSW in 2019 by Dr Heba Khamis, Contactile makes a touch-enabled smart gripper with patented tactile sensors that let robots handle objects of varying size, weight and shape without reprogramming the grip. Previously, it raised a US$2.5 million seed round in 2022.
It edged out Melbourne's SpatioTemporal, which is building intent-aware motion intelligence for Physical AI, in the four-week sprint. MassRobotics says its residents have raised more than US$2 billion in venture funding since 2017.
🚀 A 100-kilogram solid rocket motor built entirely in Australia by the Defence Science and Technology Group and Thales Australia has passed its first flight test, launching from Southern Launch's Koonibba range in South Australia in what Defence calls a "major step forward" for sovereign space and missile capability. (Innovation Aus)
The Koonibba Rising Rocket completed a full-duration burn and was recovered for inspection, with Defence Industry minister Pat Conroy calling it a milestone in Australia's ability to design and test advanced rocket motors at home.
It lands as Australia stands up a sovereign solid-rocket-motor industry, having committed $126.9 million with Northrop Grumman to produce GMLRS missile motors from 2030, with Anduril, DefenceTex and Black Sky Industries also in the mix.
🍄 Two New Zealand participants of the Aurora Climate Lab cohort have launched with new climate materials products. (Caffeine Daily)
Climate startup Hyphera, out of the Aurora Climate Lab cohort, has launched with a mycelium-based replacement for the formaldehyde glue used in particle board. Founders Jess Chiang, James Ferrier and Gautam Nair.
NZ advanced-materials startup Futurity Bio-Ventures has exited stealth with a lignin-based green replacement for bitumen, with road trials alongside Fulton Hogan and an NZ-first production facility planned.
📆 Notice Board 📆
📅 💰 Stripe Tour lands in Sydney on 19 August 2026 at the International Convention Centre (8:30am–5:45pm AEST), with an optional pre-event training day on 18 August. Free to register here. ()
AI and agentic commerce will headline the agenda — sessions include "Agentic commerce under the hood", a "Commerce in the AI era" town hall, "Operationalising pricing for AI products", and how AI reshapes fraud defence.
Canva's Cliff Obrecht headlines the local drawcard — a fireside chat with the co-founder, alongside Stripe's ANZ leadership (Karl Durrance, Hayley Hopwood and others). Cliff’s talk is at 1:30.
🍳 Mighty Partners and LUNA are teaming up to host "Capital Efficient Growth" on Wednesday, 12 August at Work Club Barangaroo on how you can stay capital efficient as you scale.
The breakfast panel features Rob Paterson, CFO at Employment Hero; James Johnstone, Partner at Bailador Technology Investments (ASX: BTI); Kal Jamshidi, Managing Director at Mighty Partners; and James Solomons, CFO & Director of Tax at LUNA, as moderator
It kicks off at 8:30 AM. Register here.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick #1: AI eats the world talk by Benedict Evans
Fascinating talk. Ben argues that AI is a real platform shift on the scale of the web and mobile, but the winners won't be whoever has the best model… they'll be whoever wraps it in distribution, data and a real business problem. Most of the value is in applications that haven't been built yet.
Will’s Pick #2: Do you have a repeatable GTM motion?
Paul Perrett (Firmable co-founder) and Jo Lanyon (Glitch Capital Investment Principal) run through what it means to have a repeatable GTM motion, and the two sides (demand and conversion) that make up a repeatable system. A good resource to founders on their way to Series A and beyond.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will