Queensland skincare brand Frasé Skin closed $1.2 million in equity crowdfunding from 535 investors to fund US expansion. The tradie-focused e-commerce company hit $3 million ARR and 40,000 customers in three years, now launching on Amazon Prime with retail partnerships including Coles.
Auckland-based Hyades closed a $910k pre-seed to build spatial AI for enterprise teams. The startup turns satellite, drone, and radar data into AI-ready models for insurance, agriculture, and climate risk. Early stage, lean team, worth tracking as enterprise geospatial tooling heats up.
Canberra agtech startup Goterra has entered liquidation after administrators found no viable buyers. The insect farming company raised $36.5M over a decade, burned through its runway scaling autonomous waste processing tech, and recorded $1.43M revenue against ongoing losses. No details on what happens to the team.
The vertical SaaS leader posted $268.8M quarterly revenue with 110% NRR and 15.2% operating margin. Fintech now represents 22% of platform revenue and is outpacing core subscriptions. Trading at 6x-7x ARR despite strong fundamentals.
Vanessa Larco and Mercedes Bent are launching Premise, a consumer-focused early-stage fund. Worth noting: they are running it with startup discipline, formal investment memos, KPIs, and internal R&D. The thesis? Back technical founding teams building category-defining companies OpenAI will not kill.
Three years from first dollar to bigger than Salesforce. Anthropic's $47B annualized run rate in May 2026 already exceeds every pure-play software company globally except Microsoft. By year-end, tracking toward $70-90B, larger than the top 10 next-gen software companies combined.
Wagner Sustainable Fuels closed $2m from Qantas and Airbus plus $3.15m in ARENA grants to scale household waste conversion to aviation fuel. The Brisbane venture is targeting 104 million litres of SAF annually from its Toowoomba refinery, part of a $2.5bn infrastructure project with long-term airline offtake deals.
Monaco, the AI-native revenue platform built by former Brex sales leader Sam Blond, closed a $50M Series B led by Benchmark. The company claims AI-driven outbound will push revenue per rep from 2x to 5x pre-AI levels within two years. Total funding now sits at $85M.
Victoria's startup agency LaunchVic is gone, folded into Breakthrough Victoria to form Innovation Victoria. The move comes as the state government cuts $4 billion from public spending. LaunchVic completed over 190 investments since 2017, focusing on early-stage and women-led startups.
Elias Torres walked away from Drift's $1.2B acquisition calling it a failure. The product got shut down, the team was let go, and the mission died. Now he is building Agency, an AI company targeting $1B revenue with fewer than 100 employees, 80% engineers, and no traditional sales org.
Four Australian tech startups closed $80 million this week, led by aerospace company MAKO with $28 million Series A and Southern Launch with $25 million. This sits within Australia's $5.48 billion funding year, up 31% from 2024. Worth noting: hiring details were not disclosed in any of the rounds.
Brisbane robotics startup Emesent closed $25m: $10m venture debt from NRFC (its first deal), $15m SAFE note from Main Sequence and others. Fourth raise since 2018 CSIRO spinout. They map mines with drones, sell to Rio Tinto and BHP. Funding goes to product dev and manufacturing scale at Wacol facility.