💌 Aussie Startup & VC Summary | 31st October, 2026
💌 Aussie Startup & VC Summary | 31st October, 2026
Is CommBank's Anthropic investment the best Aus VC bet of 2025? Potential CGT relief for startups and VCs. Blackbird has its biggest quarter of deployment ever, and meet the ex-Tesla engineers who raised $23M for satellite batteries.
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 👀
🏛️ Huzzah!! Treasurer Jim Chalmers has introduced the startup tax bill, keeping a 50 per cent CGT discount for founders, employees and investors in eligible innovative companies, but holding firm on the R&D Tax Incentive changes the sector lobbied against. (Treasury, Capital Brief, Startup Daily)
Let’s not beat around the bush. This is still worse than what the situation was for founders and employees before the CGT changes were proposed. On the positive side, this latest version of the Innovative Business CGT Concession is friendlier than September's draft.
A company now needs more than 50 per cent (down from 75 per cent) of two of three measures to relate to innovation: assets, workforce (now including contractors) and income. The $10 million lifetime cap, scrapped in September, stays gone, and the 15-year company age window and three-year holding period stay. Treasury says VC investors can use it too, including where returns are paid as carried interest.
For R&D, cash refunds will generally stop once a company turns 10 (15 for therapeutic goods research). The minimum annual spend rises from $20,000 to $50,000, and supporting activities such as prototyping drop out from 1 July 2028.
In exchange, offset rates rise by 4.5 percentage points, the refundable turnover threshold lifts from $20 million to $50 million, and the annual cap rises from $150 million to $200 million. Activities 'integral' to core R&D can be added back later, after another round of consultation next year.
The bill passed the House on Thursday, two days after it was introduced. But the Senate is the real battleground. The Greens want R&D claims by oil and gas exporters such as Chevron, Woodside and Shell, worth about $350 million a year in tax credits, to be excluded in exchange for their support.
👀 Crossbench MP Allegra Spender has teamed up with founders and investors, including Airtree co-founder Daniel Petre and Seek co-founder Paul Bassat, to push for a blanket 40 per cent CGT discount on all active business assets instead of the government's innovation carve-out. (The Age)
Spender argues the carve-out only helps companies creating new or “significantly improved” products, leaving businesses in areas such as marketing, fashion and mining exposed to the new inflation-indexed model.
Parliamentary Budget Office analysis prepared for her shows a small positive budget impact. Her amendment got just nine votes when the bill passed the House on Thursday, so the fight now moves to the Senate.
🧠Anthropic has filed for a US IPO that could value it at up to US$2 trillion (about $2.8 trillion), and there are Australian angles all through it. (Capital Brief, AFR, S-1)
Australia is the only country outside North America where the prospectus says Anthropic has contracted data centre capacity through Zerra DC's project in Queensland. Macquarie Capital, which has also invested in Zerra, is one of 22 underwriters and is expected to run the Australian offer, which CommSec plans to market to local investors.
Then there's CommBank itself. The big four banks invested an undisclosed amount in March 2025, around the time Anthropic's Series E when the frontier model was valued at US$61.5 billion (Capital Brief).
The stake was marked at $153 million in June 2025 and written up to more than $1.5 billion a year later, a tenfold jump based on Anthropic's May round at US$965 million. If the IPO goes ahead at a US$1.6-2 trillion listing, MST Marquee's Brian Johnson puts CBA’s paper gain at about $2.8 billion (from the ~$100-150M invested), though he expects the bank to be locked out of selling into the float. Could this be Australia’s best VC bet of 2025… by a big four bank?
💰 Blackbird invested a record $297 million across 16 companies in the September quarter and is on track to deploy more than $1 billion this year. (Capital Brief)
Most of it went into later-stage companies such as Halter, Heidi, PsiQuantum, Baseten and Airwallex. Of the $50.5 million from its early-stage funds, 42 per cent ($21.1 million) went into AI infrastructure, followed by deep tech ($9.5 million), AI agents ($9.3 million), physical AI ($6.4 million) and vertical software ($4.1 million).
💰 AI and venture money run all through this year's AFR Young Rich List, with nine of the top 10 now billionaires (up from six) and 18 newcomers adding $5.16 billion. (AFR, AFR)
Canva's Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht top the list for a sixth year, though their wealth fell to $12.5 billion from $18.46 billion after Canva's $10 billion valuation cut. Firmus co-founder Tim Rosenfield jumps to No. 3 with $1.71 billion (up 986 per cent), Nscale's Josh Payne (No. 7) and Nathan Townsend (No. 8) debut as billionaires, and Immutable's James and Robbie Ferguson (No. 6) and Afterpay's Nick Molnar (No. 9) round out the tech names.
Newcomers include Heidi's Thomas Kelly (No. 45, $169 million), Everlab co-founder Anshul Jain (No. 69, $95 million), Andromeda's Grace Brown (No. 91, $62 million) after a $23 million Series A at a $100 million valuation, and Anthropic's Sholto Douglas (No. 64, $104 million).
Pat Cummins, the Australian cricket captain, features at No. 96 and is an active investor in Everlab and an LP at Athletic Ventures.
⚡️ Startup Retro ⚡️
MP Space raises $23M seed to power the next wave of satellites
Founders: Jay Manley, Sam Paterson
MP Space, a Sydney startup building battery systems for satellites, has raised a $23 million seed round, which InnovationAus calls one of Australia's largest ever.
The round was led by Blackbird, with Seraphim Space (in its first Australian investment), Systemiq Capital, Speedinvest and MFV Partners also participating.
Manley spent eight years on Tesla's powertrain and energy products, including Powerwall 2 and 3, and Paterson worked on battery packs for the Model S, X and 3 before stints at Apple, Zoox and Vow. They founded MP Space in January 2024 to build standardised lithium-ion battery packs that satellite makers can drop into their spacecraft rather than design their own. Its Pack2 platform comes in 432Wh and 864Wh versions.
Its batteries first flew on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 mission for an undisclosed customer, and it says orders now cover more than 500 spacecraft, including two unnamed constellation customers.
The funding will scale up manufacturing at its base in Cicada Innovations' Defence and Aerospace Hub in Eveleigh, with a target of 5,000 units a year by the end of next year. It will also add new power products, including solar chargers, power distribution units and solar array drives, build larger systems for Starship-era spacecraft, and grow the Australian engineering team.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Payload, Forbes Australia, InnovationAus
Metacognition increases its pre-seed to $15M for its 'Windows for robots'
Founders: Anton van den Hengel, Stephen Gould, Paul Dalby
Metacognition, the Adelaide startup building an operating system for AI agents and robots, has raised another $5 million from Airtree, bringing its pre-seed round to $15 million, weeks after Main Sequence invested $10 million.
Its operating system, Zeos, is designed to give AI agents and robots persistent memory, reasoning and more autonomy, and its open-source navigation model, NavGPT-3, has outperformed models from Alibaba and Mistral on navigation benchmarks.
Van den Hengel is a professor of machine learning at the University of Adelaide, the founding director of its Australian Institute for Machine Learning and a former director of machine learning at Amazon. Gould is an ANU professor and Amazon Scholar who co-founded Sensory Networks, which was sold to Intel in 2013, and Dalby is a research and innovation strategist who has helped secure more than $600 million in research funding.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief, Forbes Australia, Startup Daily, InnovationAus
AO Ventures backs sports AI platform Jump
Founders: Jordy Leiser, Marc Lore, Alex Rodriguez
Jump, a US startup building an AI platform for professional sports teams, has picked up an undisclosed investment from AO Ventures, the US$40 million (about $57 million) venture arm of Tennis Australia and the Australian Open.
Jump brings ticketing, team-branded mobile apps, fan data and marketing into one system, with AI agents running workflows across ticket sales, service and the fan experience. It works with clubs across the NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, NWSL, USL and NCAA, and counts the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves, which Lore and Rodriguez bought last year, as an early customer.
It's AO Ventures' seventh investment in its first 15 months, joining ScorePlay, PlayerData, Bolt6, Padel Haus, Mindspring Padel and Raven Controls. Jump previously raised a US$20 million round led by Forerunner Ventures in 2023 and a US$23 million (about $33 million) Series A led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six in August 2025, with Courtside Ventures, Will Ventures and Drive by DraftKings also backing it
Due Diligence: Tennis Australia, ESPN
💸 New Fund, Who Dis? 💸
🌱 Stellar, a new Melbourne program for funded pre-seed and seed startups, has opened applications for its first cohort, with a $30,000 investment for each startup that joins. (Stellar)
Cohorts run for 20 weeks, starting in February and July each year, with up to 30 startups working side by side out of newly renovated space in Armadale. Alongside the cheque, startups get dedicated desks, commercial and leadership support, perks and credits, and a dedicated founder success concierge.
To join, startups need 12 months of runway (or be self-funded) and to commit to working from the office because Stellar is designed around the peer-to-peer element. The first cohort starts on 1 February 2027.
Applications close Wednesday, 11 November. There's a Founder Coffee and Q&A in Melbourne from 8:30 am on Friday 6 November for anyone weighing it up, capped at 25 people. Register here or apply here.
💲 PE firm Advent International has closed its flagship fund at US$27 billion (about $38.4 billion), above its US$26 billion target, with Asia-Pacific investors making up almost a quarter of commitments. While not a VC investor, they do buy tech businesses, potentially opening up more exit capital for VC-backed startups. (AFR, Advent)
It's the year's largest buyout fund close and the third-largest private equity fund ever raised.
Advent opened its Sydney office two years ago and did its first Australian deal last year, buying share registry business Automic from Five V Capital for $725 million. It has also bought New Zealand Clinical Research, a $1 billion clinical trials business, this year.
🚀 Wins 🚀
🤝 Melbourne-based biotech Audax Biosciences has signed an exclusive option and licence deal with Japan's Astellas for its lead cancer drug, DAX-044, worth up to US$1.34 billion (about $1.9 billion) plus royalties. (PR Newswire, Astellas)
Audax gets upfront and option exercise payments totalling US$285 million (about $405 million), up to US$1.05 billion in development and commercial milestones, and tiered double-digit royalties. It keeps the option to co-fund and co-promote the drug in Australia and New Zealand, and will fund development through to a Phase 1 trial expected to start in 2027.
DAX-044 is an IL-12 antibody-cytokine fusion, built on Audax's AVIKINE technology, aimed at solid tumours. If Astellas exercises its option, which depends on conditions including antitrust clearance, it gets a worldwide licence.
Formerly called oNKo-innate, Audax was co-founded by CEO Dr Jai Rautela and Professor Nicholas Huntington, who first worked together in Huntington's lab at WEHI, and was spun out of Monash University. It signed a research collaboration with Gilead and Kite in 2020.
🏦 NAB, which last week announced up to 2,500 job cuts, has become the first major Australian bank to go live on estateXchange, a Melbourne platform connecting the banks, super funds and other institutions involved when someone dies. (NAB)
Founded in 2023 by co-CEOs Sarah Poole and Marielle Yeoh, estateXchange raised $12.5 million in its first round in January from Macquarie Capital, OIF Ventures, Paul Little's family office and angels Carol Schwartz and Christine Christian (Startup Daily). HESTA, Cbus, AMP's North and Allianz are also on the platform, and it came up last week as a competitor to Willed.
According to research conducted by Deloitte Access Economics, an estate can involve up to 37 types of asset holders and take nine to 12 months to administer. One in four people changed their banks after going through it, as it can be such a negative experience.
🍦 Kiwi food tech Andfoods has launched its dairy-free whipped cream, made from fermented black gram (a type of mung bean), in Singapore. (Green Queen)
Its channel to market is via commercial kitchens through foodservice distributor Lim Siang Huat, with The Glasshouse among its early customers. The cream is made in Shanghai.
Andfoods spun out of Massey University's Riddet Institute in 2023 and is led by co-founder and CEO Alex Devereux. It has raised NZ$4 million from investors, including Icehouse Ventures and K1W1, and is targeting a NZ$6 million Series A.
🤑 Aussie Raisins 🤑
💉 Former Macquarie executive Bill Moss is tipping into Sydney cancer biotech GlyTherix, which is running a $3 million raise to fund a 16-person clinical trial. (AFR)
Its lead treatment, Miltuximab, is a theranostic: the same antibody first images the diseased cells, then delivers targeted radiation. It targets GPC-1, a protein found on many aggressive solid tumours but not on healthy tissue, with pancreatic, bladder and oesophageal cancers and glioblastoma in its sights.
GlyTherix was founded and is led by researcher Brad Walsh. Macquarie University is a backer, and Miltuximab has already completed a first-in-human trial in Australia.
🚀 Four startups from Startmate's Winter '26 cohort are out raising after Demo Day. (Open Source CEO)
EstiMate (Ashton Dobbin and Baylin Spencer) turns construction drawings into itemised estimates in minutes. It grew to $120,000 in ARR in eight weeks and is raising $3 million.
Hyperlocalise (Minh Cung, Hans Bui and Michael Levot) builds AI infrastructure for multilingual content. It has US$71,000 in contracted ARR and is raising a US$2 million pre-seed.
BrandViz (ex-Google engineers Rushana Maksudova and David Andersen) helps B2B brands get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. It went from $120,000 to $264,000 in ARR during the program and is raising $2.5 million.
Orva (Akash Mokashi, Erika Orogo and Saurabh Bachawe) makes voice-powered gum charting that works with any dental software and is raising $2 million. Cold calling went nowhere, but visiting clinics in person lifted its conversion rate to 41 per cent.
💰️ M&A 💰️
🤝Superhero has bought a 10 per cent stake in ASX-listed rival Raiz Invest, whose shares have fallen 60 per cent over the past year. (AFR)
Superhero, the share trading and superannuation platform, raised $20 million at a $186 million valuation in August, and Barrenjoey executed the trade.
Raiz, the micro-investing app that rounds up purchases, has $2.3 billion in funds under management and 351,000 active customers, and swung to a $3.5 million profit this year. Superhero, founded in 2018, has about $4 billion in platform assets and more than 450,000 customers, and added crypto trading this year.
📆 Notice Board 📆
🚀 Applications for Startmate's Summer '27 accelerator close at 11:59 pm AEDT on Sunday 1 November.
It's a 14-week program from 1 February to 7 May 2027, remote-first with three in-person weeks, and comes with $120,000 for 8 per cent at a $1.5 million post-money valuation (or your last round's terms if you've raised at least $250,000). Apply here or refer a founder.
🎥Build Australia has extended applications for its paid Creator Fellowship to Sunday, 1 November, and is running free Builders meetups in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide in November.
The fellowship is a six-month, in-person role in Sydney producing original video with Build Australia's editorial team, paying $85,000 a year pro rata plus super. More here.
🎟️ West Tech Fest runs from 7 to 11 December in Fremantle, and Overnight Success readers get 10 per cent off West Tech Main tickets with the code OVERNIGHT. Get tickets here.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will's Pick: The Sane Asylum by Brie Wolfson at Colossus
Quite a different perspective here, but in this long-form essay, Brie argues that the growth-at-all-costs playbook of the AI era is damaging to some of the people building it because of the sacrifices they have to make, and that there’s an alternative to building AI-native companies at the frontier that can be profitable and sustainable.
Very interesting read to see what’s happening to people in some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will
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