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. 🚀 Happy grand final weekend to those who celebrate!
I had the opportunity to hear from the investment team at Blackbird about what they love seeing in an early-stage pitch and what they find overrated. You can read the article here!
Sponsor shoutout:
Introducing Stripe for Startups. For early-stage, venture-backed founders – Stripe Startups is where to start. Enrol in the program and receive access to credits on Stripe fees, expert insights, and a focused community of other founders building on Stripe.
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👀 Headlines 👀
🔬 The R&D Tax Incentive list has been released for FY22-23, with Atlassian topping the list with a $220 million claim. (Innovation Aus)
At a high level, six firms >$100m each, but new claims are surging. 12,956 companies lodged $16.2bn in claims (up $5bn YoY), mainly due to the inclusion of “early balancer” taxpayers. The average claim has increased from $0.97 million to $ 1.25 million.
The breakdown is interesting. Public & multinationals are claiming the most, with $8.7 billion split between 2,428 firms, while small businesses are claiming $2.4 billion across 6,016.
Australia’s overall R&D spending as a share of GDP has declined since 2008 and is forecast to continue declining.
On the policy side, a Strategic Examination is underway, which proposes a shake-up. Some ideas being flagged are new streams for startups/SMEs with different requirements.
Here’s the Google sheet with the complete list of claimants. Note that this is the total amount claimed, not necessarily what they received.
🪸 Tasmanian-based Sea Forest looks to IPO on the ASX after inking a Europe distribution deal with Marubeni’s Orffa methane-reducing seaweed feed across the EU. (AFR)
The Tasmanian Asparagopsis seaweed additive, a feed supplement for livestock, is now available in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark. This expansion comes as the company actively pursues an IPO to fund further international growth.
The demand for this product is driven by new regulatory tailwinds, with EU countries introducing levies on livestock methane production. For instance, Denmark will impose a levy of approximately US$43 per tonne of livestock methane starting in 2030. By incorporating this supplement in very low quantities, farmers can reduce methane emissions from their livestock and avoid these carbon levies.
The company is backed by a strong investor base of 200 shareholders, including Macquarie Infrastructure (~10%), Peter Gunn, Zoë Foster Blake & Hamish Blake, Mick Fanning, and Archer Capital’s Peter & Kirsty Gold.
⛓️ In crypto news: The Treasury has released the Treasury Laws Amendment (Digital Asset and Tokenised Custody Platforms) Bill 2025 exposure draft to regulate digital asset and tokenised custody platforms under Australia’s financial services regime. (Innovation Aus)
Platforms will require an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) through the creation of two new financial product classes under the Corporations Act, thereby extending existing consumer protections and introducing targeted obligations.
Obligations include no misleading/deceptive conduct, no unfair contract terms, and acting efficiently, honestly and fairly. Breaches carry fines of up to the greater of A$16.5m, three times the benefit, or 10% of annual turnover.
The bill also follows a proportional approach, which says that “low-risk” small exchanges (holding less than A$5,000 per customer) are exempt, aimed at supporting innovation and competition.
The framework is designed to align with the EU/UK and other leading jurisdictions. AUSTRAC counts ~400 registered digital exchange providers, but only around 10% are licensed with ASIC.
BTC Markets calls it a pragmatic balance that brings long-awaited clarity; Kraken supports positioning Australia as a credible hub but cautions against a one-size-fits-all approach.
Founder to Founder: The Guide to Building a Breakout Startup in the AI Age
Christina Cacioppo (CEO & Co-founder of Vanta) and Mario Gabriele (CEO & Founder of The Generalist) come together for a tactical deep-dive into what it truly takes to build a breakout startup. In a market evolving at breakneck speed, they share sharp insights and real-world strategies for staying ahead of the curve.
⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
Morse Micro secures $88M Series C to scale production of high-throughput, long-range chips for IoT devices
Founders: Michael de Nil; Andrew Terry
Sydney-based Morse Micro has banked a US$59 million (A$88 million) Series C to accelerate international expansion and scale production of its Wi-Fi HaLow chips for the “IoT 2.0” era. The round was led by strategic partner MegaChips, with participation from Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, Blackbird, Main Sequence, Uniseed, Ray Stata, Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull, Startmate, and institutional backers including Hostplus, NGS and UniSuper. The raise lifts total funding to more than US$193 million (A$290 million).
This fresh capital will accelerate Morse Micro's expansion into international markets and scale production of its Wi-Fi HaLow chips. Morse Micro says HaLow, long-range, low-power Wi-Fi, delivers greater throughput over far longer distances than conventional Wi-Fi, enabling large-scale deployments across smart homes, industry and cities. The company is launching HaLowLink 2, a next-gen evaluation platform, alongside a second-generation SoC, fresh reference designs and mass-production wins with leading OEMs.
According to the CEO of the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, David Gall, “Morse Micro is Australia's largest semiconductor manufacturer and a home-grown Australian success story. Wi-Fi was invented and patented by CSIRO scientists in 1993, and we are proud to be investing in an Australian company that is once again enabling next-generation Wi-Fi connectivity for the rest of the world”. Morse Micro employs over 130 people in Australia, including employees in regional New South Wales.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief, AFR
Nevam raises $1.2m to build a CX ‘digital twin’ and command centre for marketers
Founder: Brittany Fox
Sydney martech startup Nevam has secured $1.2 million to scale what it bills as the first live journey-mapping “command centre” for enterprise marketers. Fresh from Techstars Sydney 2024, the round includes Techstars, Brand Fund, the Huljich Family Office, and angel investors. Founder and CEO Brittany Fox says brands are flooding channels with AI-generated content but lack visibility into how journeys actually perform, creating blind spots between content and conversion.
Rather than chase the elusive “single customer view”, Nevam promises a single view of the experience: it sends agents through journeys, unifies tool outputs, and layers analytics and voice-of-customer to fix failure points proactively. Early roll-outs with Endeavour Group’s BWS surfaced operational gaps, prompting Nevam to add KPIs and time-tracking metrics to help teams prioritise solutions.
Positioned as a control room, Nevam syncs with existing stacks to orchestrate and measure across channels. Fox argues the startup’s edge is tackling unglamorous data plumbing that flashy AI misses: “We catch the blind spots and help teams leverage the tools they already have.”
The capital will expand its headcount and ship a “CX digital twin” to simulate, test, and optimise journeys, aiming to disrupt legacy analytics and NPS, and scale into additional industries.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily, SmartCompany
Alloy Robotics emerges from stealth with $4.5M to help robots process data
Founder: Joe Harris
Sydney startup Alloy Robotics has come out of stealth with a US$4.5 million pre-seed led by Blackbird, with Airtree, Skip Capital and Bay Area fund Xtal Ventures joining. Angels include senior engineers from Tesla, Waymo, Halter, Carbon Robotics and Reach Robotics, plus all four Eucalyptus founders.
Founded eight months ago by 29-year-old electrical engineer Joe Harris (ex-CCO at Eucalyptus), Alloy is building a unified data layer for robotics, software that ingests a gigabyte-a-minute “firehose”, encodes it at source, and makes it instantly searchable in natural language so teams can isolate the 1% that matters, spot recurring failures and track trends over time.
Customers use Alloy to debug and improve robots more efficiently across multiple domains. Drone teams search flight footage linked to telemetry to identify issues such as blur, GPS loss, or unstable altitude. Agricultural robotics engineers align camera frames with LiDAR and CAN bus logs to isolate network timeouts, navigation errors, and safety events.
Because Alloy unifies images, time-series and logs, users can query missions in plain English (e.g., “voltage spikes in rough seas”), auto-cluster similar failures into reusable “scenarios,” and turn them into training datasets, cutting the cycle from “find the bug” to “fix and retrain” from weeks to hours. Early partners in pilot include Breaker, Hullbot and Greenroom Robotics across defence AI, maritime automation and oceanic inspection.
As robotics hurtles toward a projected US$165 billion market by 2029, every company is hand-rolling brittle “data plumbing”. Alloy offers best-of-breed core infrastructure, enabling operators to learn continuously from real-world interactions and accelerate reliability and autonomy. In short, the “AWS for robots”, as Harris frames it.
Due Diligence: TechCrunch, Forbes
Fleetyr raises a $750k Seed round to unify fleet data
Founders: Tim Hill and Brodie Ruttan
Brisbane-based Fleetyr has secured a $750,000 seed round led by 77 Partners, with QIC Ventures, to expand its fleet and safety analytics platform globally. Founded in 2021 by Tim Hill and Brodie Ruttan, Fleetyr bootstrapped to profitability and now serves customers across five continents.
The pitch: fleets, from mining to hiring cars, drown in siloed data, encompassing telematics, dashcams, HR systems, and fuel cards. Fleetyr pipes these streams into a single interface to flag fraud, reduce idle time and lower operating costs, while giving managers clearer visibility over performance.
Hill says close collaboration with software and hardware providers has carved out a defensible position; partner channels now drive 90% of leads.
Backers see timing on Fleetyr’s side as the global fleet management software market surpasses US$50 billion by 2030, driven by rising costs, tighter regulations, and the surge in data from connected vehicles.
The capital will expand hiring, accelerate features such as benchmarking and network mapping, and deepen international expansion—turning fragmented fleet data into actionable savings.
Due Diligence: Fleetyr Announcement, Smart Company
Deckard Technologies secures $6m growth credit to take rental compliance beyond Airbnb
Founders: Greg Rose, Jess Flanagan, Tony Moriarty, and Craig Brown.
GovTech data platform Deckard Technologies has locked in a US$6 million growth credit facility from Mighty Partners to expand from short-term rental (STR) compliance into the far larger long-term rental (LTR) market.
Founded in Australia and now headquartered in the US, Deckard states that it has grown its revenue by more than 60% year-over-year and serves over 400 jurisdictions across the US, Canada, and Australia.
Its Rentalscape product already monitors over 250,000 short-term rentals (STRs); the new push targets long-term rental (LTR) oversight, focusing on housing affordability, tenant safety, and property compliance, where Deckard pegs the addressable market as three to seven times the size of STRs in the US alone.
The product itself serves local governments, city and county teams across finance/tax, code enforcement, housing and planning, who need to monitor and manage residential property activity at scale. Its SaaS platform provides municipalities with a single pane of glass to identify and enforce compliance on short-term and long-term rentals, optimise transient occupancy tax collection, and track foreclosed or vacant properties, achieving compliance rates of up to 95%.
The non-dilutive growth credit enables Deckard to accelerate without issuing equity, fund product build-out, and hire across sales and client success to meet demand. Mighty Partners calls the move into LTR “timely and transformative”, backing disciplined expansion while founders retain control. Existing backer EVP has invested A$15.9 million across primary and secondary rounds and says roughly half its portfolio uses venture debt to optimise returns.
Due Diligence: Capital Brief, EVP’s investment notes from 2024
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💸 M&A 💸
👷 Ideagen acquires WorkSafe Guardian, giving lone-worker safety a global runway with undisclosed deal terms
UK software group Ideagen has acquired Adelaide-born WorkSafe Guardian, a lone-worker safety platform that has grown from a local player to a national leader since Eastend Ventures backed it in 2022.
Founded by entrepreneurs Greg Lindner and Adam Whittaker, WorkSafe’s app delivers 24/7 monitoring, real-time emergency response and reporting for high-risk, dispersed workforces across health, government, community services, utilities and construction. The founders will stay on to continue delivering growth.
For Ideagen, which sells a broader Environment, Health, Safety, and Quality (EHSQ) suite, the deal plugs a purpose-built lone-worker solution into its global distribution, while WorkSafe customers gain deeper compliance and safety tooling without ripping and replacing.
🥳 Wins 🥳
👔 Perth-based biotech Uluu collabs with fashion brand Papinelle to make ~4,000 biodegradable seaweed buttons for Papinelle’s turquoise gingham pyjamas. (Smart Company)
How it works: Seaweed sugars → fermented by saltwater microbes → PHA bioplastic pellets → moulded into buttons; fossil-free, microplastic-free, fully biodegradable.
Uluu calls the approach regenerative, seaweed farming removes CO₂ and absorbs marine pollutants, and the collaboration shows that premium products don’t need plastic.
This is Uluu’s second commercial product after a Quiksilver surf-wax comb (Jan 2024). Papinelle is a global brand, with US retail partners (Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret, Saks, Anthropologie).
🚀 The CSIRO Lab22 has 3D-printed a bimetal rocket thruster for Space Machines Company (SMC), supported by the iLAuNCH Trailblazer programme. (AU Manufacturing)
On a Nikon SLM Solutions 3D printer, the rocket combines high-strength steel (outer jacket) with copper alloy (thermal conductivity) in a single print to create something that is lightweight, robust, and heat-efficient.
It replaces traditional copper-liner + brazed steel jacket (time-consuming, multiple failure points) with multi-material additive manufacturing, placing each material exactly where needed.
The thruster will power the Scintilla propulsion system on SMC’s Optimus Viper orbital servicing vehicle; dual-material design lets SMC rapidly iterate and optimise performance for mass production.
Featured startup jobs
🐶 Lyka, the pet wellness company revolutionising an outdated industry and paving the way for happier, healthier pets, is seeking a Product Manager. Check out their Senior Product Manager role here.
📻 Morse Micro, a Series C company building Wi-Fi HaLow chips that enable long-range, low-power wireless connectivity for IoT devices, is looking for graduate engineers.
Explore these roles and more on the new Matchbox x Overnight Success Job Board, the one place to discover Australia’s most promising early-stage startup jobs.
📆 Notice Board 📆
☕ Grab a coffee with me and some awesome founders, investors and builders before you head into SXSW or work. Supported by Vanta!
Float on through from 8:00 to 10:00 AM on the 14th of October. Sign up here.
❓🦄 Love trivia and based on the Gold Coast?
On the 30th of September, come along for some networking, general knowledge, AI questions and the potential to be crowned a “Unicorn. Register here.
🤝 The Business Show is landing in Sydney this November 5–6 at the ICC for its inaugural expo, and tickets are free!
The show promises to deliver networking opportunities, masterclasses, and a showcase of 250 leading business solutions so you can see how others in the market get things done! Grab your free ticket here.
The best place to find upcoming events to attend and promote any events you’re hosting is the ANZ Startup Events Calendar.
Would you like to promote an event or an opportunity? Enquire about a Notice Board promotion here.
🧠 KaaS (Knowledge as a Service)
Will’s Pick 💁 Spotify Removes 75 Million “Spammy” Songs, Cracks Down on AI Use by “Bad Actors” by Abid Rahman from The Hollywood Reporter
Not a startup article, but I found it very enlightening on some of the problems arising from AI.
Spotify has purged 75M “spammy” tracks and unveils tougher AI safeguards to protect artists and listeners from impersonation, content farms and “slop”.
This follows a new Spotify Impersonation Policy, which states that AI voice clones (and other unauthorised vocal mimicry) are prohibited unless explicitly approved by the impersonated artist. It also includes stronger enforcement against fraudulent uploads to artists’ profiles, with prevention tactics being tested via distributors.
Makes you wonder where else AI-generated slop content is appearing and what platforms and humans can do to limit it. E.g. short form video platforms…
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will