💌 Aussie Startup & VC Summary | 21st June, 2025

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 👀 

💚 Impact-driven startups increased their share of Australian early-stage VC funding to 41.5% in 2024 (38.9% in 2022; 55.6% peak in 2023), bucking the overall funding slowdown across 2,800 deals and 10,000 companies tracked (Giant Leap & Cut Through Venture)

• Climate tech startups soaked up $1 billion of VC in 2024, double that of Health funding and five times the People sectors (edtech, HR, D&I), propelled by corporate demand, policy tailwinds and maturing solutions in carbon sequestration, storage and adaptation.

• Health investment held steady, with biotech drawing most capital thanks to AI-enabled drug discovery and strong return potential, while digital health lagged amid commercial and reimbursement hurdles.

• This week, we also saw two climate funds raise some big VC money. Both ReGen Ventures and Climate Tech Partners announced that they have committed capital to invest in climate tech. Check out New Fund, Who This below for more information

🎨 Canva snaps up AI ad-tech start-up Magic Brief to deepen marketing stack while hitting 25M paying users, up 5M in nine months!! ARR races past US$3B (AFR, Smart Company)

• Magic Brief brings targeted creative analytics built on $6B of ad spend; all 10 staff will join Canva.

• Magic Brief was founded in 2022 in Sydney by George Howes and Dan Nolan. It announced its pre‑Seed round in July 2023, where it raised $2 million led by Blackbird Ventures (Nick Crocker), with Archangel Ventures and angels like Vimeo’s Zach Klein and Eucalyptus’s Tim Doyle investing.

• Following this, the platform gained solid traction with campaigns analysing billions in ad spend, attracting clients such as Linktree, Eucalyptus, Hey Bud, Lucent Globe, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, and others.

• While Canva is certainly positioning itself for an IPO, co-founder Cameron Adams says there is “no rush” and says regular secondary sales are keeping insiders liquid.

💽 AWS lifts Australia commitment to A$20 B through 2029, adding >A$7 B to its previously announced hyperscale plan. (Innovation Aus)

• Spend covers expansion, operation, and power for new AI-ready data centre capacity; the granular capex/opex split is not disclosed.

• Additionally, AWS will also invest in three solar farms (170 MW total) in Victoria and Queensland, built by European Energy, which will help feed AWS’s huge electricity appetite.

⛺Kiki kicked out of NYC, again, after short-term-rental rules choke growth; founders scouting “friendlier” city for v4.0 launch according to founder LinkedIn post. (Startup Daily)

• NYC will treat Kiki like Airbnb-style hotel operator which means sub-30-day whole-unit lets effectively banned, killing the startups momentum since their last pivot.

• Since its founding six years ago, the company has relocated three times and pivoted its business model. The startup was born in New Zealand → Sydney (12 months) → NYC (3 months) → pivoted to “girls-only club” → back to subletting.

⚡️ Startup Retro ⚡️

Circumvent secures $9.2M seed round to build proactive cloud security

Founders:  Michael Watts and Thomas Bui

Serial cybersecurity founder Michael Watts, fresh off a US$100 million exit from Cloud Conformity (acquired by Trend Micro in 2019), has launched his new venture, Circumvent, and just closed a hefty $9.2 million Seed round led by Paladin Capital Group. 

Co‑founder and CTO Thomas Bui, a long-time partner of Watts, has joined forces to tackle one of cloud security’s biggest headaches: alert fatigue. 

Circumvent is building a next‑generation proactive platform that ingests and enriches signals from cloud-native, open-source, and third-party tools. The secret sauce? A Multi‑Agent AI System that autonomously prioritises, correlates and remediates issues, transforming alerts into one-click fixes integrated directly into DevSecOps pipelines. 

Already signed up with enterprises across the US, Australia and New Zealand, the startup supports AWS, Azure and Google Cloud users. The fresh capital will fast‑track product development, bolster early customer engagement, and establish a commercial HQ in San Francisco, while its R&D hub remains in Sydney.

Due Diligence: Startup Daily, Security Week

Bygen tops up Series A with extra $3.5M for coal-free activated carbon

Founders: Dr Lewis Dunnigan and Ben Morton

Adelaide-based Bygen has banked a $3.5 million top-up to its Series A, giving the University of Adelaide spin-out fresh runway to scale its coal-free activated-carbon tech. Existing investors Breakthrough Victoria, Alberts Impact Ventures, Investible’s Climate Tech Fund, Artesian and the University of Adelaide invested in the round, which was oversubscribed from current investors. 

Bygen’s low-temperature activation (LTA) process turns agricultural waste, such as nut shells and sawdust, into highly porous carbon. This process replaces the 1,000 °C steam and fossil fuel-powered process that is currently used to make conventional products. Bygens exothermic reactor runs on its own heat, sequesters carbon, and, according to co-founder and CEO Dr Lewis Dunnigan, is on track for carbon-negative certification.

Bygen creates two product lines. Granular Activated Carbon (GAC are large granules ideal for continuous filtration systems, while Powdered Activated Carbon (PAC) are fine particles (<0.18 mm) designed for rapid adsorption in batch processes. Use cases for the products include drinking water treatment, wastewater treatment, gold recovery in mining operations, and air purification. 

A 400-tonne-per-year plant is already live in Adelaide; four larger facilities, three in the US, one in Malaysia, are being delivered under a capital-light licensing model that shares kit sales and royalties with local partners. Technical and commercial validation this year will tee up a Series B in 2026 to finance a playbook of five-plus plants annually, a path Dunnigan says could make Bygen one of the world’s biggest activated-carbon producers while stripping tens of millions of tonnes of CO₂ from the supply chain.

Due Diligence: Business News Australia

🔦 Inhouse Ventures Community Spotlight 🔦

• Connect with Ben in brand mode at Mercha

• Connect with Christiaan in scale mode at In Motion

• Fundraising? Join the Inhouse Ventures Community

💸 Wins💸 

🎮 NSW is boosting support for its video game sector in the upcoming state Budget (Innovation Aus)

• A portion of a $380 million screen and digital games package will go toward increasing funding for the Digital Games Rebate, which offers a 10% rebate on qualifying spend over $350,000.

• This move expands a 2021 policy aimed at competing with other states. The rebate helps game studios offset costs like local salaries, licensing, testing, marketing, and some post-launch expenses. 

• Of the $380 million, $280 million will go to production incentives across gaming and film
  This includes topping up the games rebate, support for visual effects and post-production, and the "Made in NSW" fund to attract global productions.
  

🍗 Vow's cultured quail meat gets green light in Australia with several restaurants serving as launch point. (Founder LinkedIn Post)

• Sydney-based biotech startup Vow has received approval from FSANZ to sell its cultivated quail products locally, after two years of regulatory review, including public consultation.

• Vow’s Forged Parfait and Forged Gras are foie gras-style delicacies that have been served in Singapore and Hong Kong since 2024.

• Chef-turned-scientist George Peppou and ex-Cochlear designer Tim Noakesmith have experimented with over 50 animal species to craft high-flavour, non-traditional meat products grown in fermentation tanks.

• This journey has been up and down. The company raised $7.7M (Seed) and $73.5M (Series A) from backers like Blackbird, Square Peg, and Grok Ventures. However, it cut 25 jobs earlier this year due to a challenging funding environment.

• Vow positions its offerings as a new category of food, not a meat substitute. Chef Mike McEnearney (former head chef of Sydney's Rockpool restaurant) has joined as an ambassador, calling the tech-driven flavours “irresistible” and “a huge opportunity” for chefs and diners alike.

💰️ New Fund, Who’s This? 💰️

🟢 Climate Tech Partners (CTP), a venture firm focused on Series A climate startups, has hit a $50 million first close backed by big-name corporate and institutional investors. (Startup Daily)

• Founded in 2023 by Investible alumni Patrick Sieb and Tom Kline, the firm more than doubled its size with $15 million each from Australian Ethical Investments and the federal Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC). An earlier $15 million commitment from Qantas and Airbus targets aviation decarbonisation, including the development of sustainable fuels.

• The fund has now received commitments, including $15 million each from Australian Ethical Investments (AEI) and the federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC).

• The debut fund, anchored by billionaire Daniel Besen’s family office, has drawn 11 corporate partners across energy, transport, logistics, and industry sectors where those same partners are expected to become future customers of the startups CTP backs.

• The fund’s thesis centres on climate-readiness meeting market demand. 

🌴 ReGen Ventures, the Byron Bay-based climate tech VC firm, has raised $92 million for its second fund. 

• Led by ex-Macquarie banker Dan Fitzgerald, ReGen focuses on early-stage startups using AI, robotics, and deep tech to solve environmental problems while making life “mind-blowingly more awesome.”

• The new fund has attracted some big names: Angela Bennett’s AMB Holdings, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm’s family office, Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar and Kim Jackson, Airtree’s Daniel Petre, and Canva co-founder Cameron Adams and Lisa Miller. ReGen also boasts international investors, including the founders of Adyen and On Running.

• The firm has now raised nearly three-quarters of its $125 million target, with capital coming from 14 countries. While it’s yet to back an Aussie startup, its current portfolio includes a fire-starting robot (BurnBot), solar-powered weeding bots (Aigen), and a cow-free leather startup, Pact.

📆 Notice Board 📆 

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🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)

Will’s Pick 💁‍♂️ The Next Great Distribution Shift by Brian Balfour

• Brian Balfour’s substack argues that while AI has revolutionised how we build products, it hasn’t yet transformed how we distribute them.

• Drawing from historical platform cycles (Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn), he reveals the consistent "open-grow-close-monetise" pattern tech giants follow.

• Balfour predicts OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be the next dominant platform, using memory and context as its moat to lock in users and become the new gateway for software distribution. I disagree with this, but it is thought-provoking nevertheless.

• He urges founders and product leaders to prepare now—integrate strategically, build their own moats, and anticipate the eventual "platform tax" Worth a read!

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‘Til next time,

👋 Will