Jack Zhang launches Latitude 37, annual program giving 10 Australian AI founders $100k equity-free plus access to Airwallex's global network. Program includes immersion tours in San Francisco and Singapore. Zhang wants founders to keep early-stage equity instead of selling cheap to overseas investors.
Canberra's Liquid Instruments secured $70M Series C, bringing manufacturing back to Australia. The round included $28M from the National Reconstruction Fund and was co-led by US firm Keysight Technologies. Marloo, Aigentsphere, and Manifest raised the remaining $20M combined.
VentureCrowd Pty Ltd is in administration with creditors chasing $7.3 million. The equity crowdfunding platform's operating subsidiaries continue trading, but the parent company that raised $3.9 million in 2022 now faces liquidation. Worth noting: this follows a $2.4 million court judgment last year.
Q1 2026 funding rebounded hard, but 60% went to just 10 deals. Early-stage and late-stage rounds are getting done. Mid-stage startups ($1-10M revenue) are stuck in the gap, which means fewer expansion hires and territory builds.
Andreessen Horowitz carved out $1.7 billion from its $15 billion raise specifically for AI infrastructure investments. General Partner Jennifer Li is leading the bet, with portfolio companies including ElevenLabs (valued at $11 billion), OpenAI, and Cursor. The firm is rebuilding the entire tech stack: storage, compute, orchestration, and memory built for AI workloads, not cloud legacy.
Thoma Bravo's $6.4B Medallia acquisition just became a total loss. Lenders including Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo took control after the company could not service $3B in debt against $200M earnings. This is the second major PE-backed SaaS equity wipeout in 18 months, and the list of similar deals at risk is long.
Enterprise software grabbed 52% of all VC funding in 2025, up from 29% average over the prior decade. Total enterprise software VC hit $263B, a 64% jump year-on-year. The top 20 deals claimed 41% of all funding, with 14 rounds over $1B, including OpenAI's $110B round.
Meta is cutting 10% of its workforce: 8,000 redundancies plus 6,000 unfilled roles. The company is redirecting spend toward AI infrastructure and top-tier engineering talent. Cuts hit May 20, with marketing and ad ops teams particularly exposed as Meta automates advertising tools.
Australian data firm Techboard tracked 1100 startups that raised capital in 2025. Only 379 deals got announced publicly. The other 750 raises, worth unknown billions, never hit the news. For sales teams prospecting startups, two-thirds of your potential pipeline is invisible if you rely on Crunchbase or press releases.
Syenta closed a $36 million Series A led by Playground Global and the National Reconstruction Fund. The Sydney-based chip maker is commercialising tech that cuts chip packaging steps by 40%, aiming for production in 2027. Worth noting: this is a hardware play, not a sales tool, but watch for enterprise AI chip vendor hiring as they scale into the US market.
New Zealand consumer insights platform Ideally closed a $13.4M Series A led by Shearwater Capital, valuing the 18-month-old startup at $83M. The company counts Google, Telstra, and DoorDash as clients and has raised over $21M since launching in August 2023. US revenue is up 350% since opening a New York office earlier this year.
Canva is pushing its IPO to 2027, citing a business model shift to AI-based pricing. The Sydney-based company last valued itself at $65 billion in a secondary sale. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht says they are IPO-ready but want the AI transition locked in before going public.