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. 🚀
Sponsor shoutout:
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👀 Headlines 👀
🏦 ANZ shuts down 1835i. The bank has wound up its external VC manager, 1835i, three weeks after selling its ~1% Airwallex stake for US$44m (A$67m). (Capital Brief, Startup Daily)
ANZ is pivoting to an internal structure, meaning a new non-operating holdings company has been set up that gives it flexibility to make investments without an external VC, so most 1835i assets will transfer in-house rather than be actively VC-managed.
For ANZ, the closure follows the killing of Cashrewards (acquired for A$76m in 2022) and comes amid 3,500 job cuts over 12 months and an A$240m ASIC penalty.
1835i (founded 2019 as ANZ Ventures; rebranded mid-2021) had ~10 portfolio companies and a 14-person team; it reportedly invested ~$100M overall. The entire team is understood to be redundant.
📰 Breakthrough Victoria allegedly is not actively investing while an independent review is being conducted by the Allan Government.
BTV is a $2 billion state innovation vehicle launched in November 2020 and is Australia’s largest of its kind at inception. The fund has already faced $360 million in cuts over four years in the 2024 Budget, and its annual deal target was reduced from 15–21 to 10 for FY24/25, reflecting pressure from the state’s widening deficit.
To date, BTV has made 69 investment commitments totalling $480 million.
Several local venture capitalists argue that the state should back a fund-of-funds for emerging managers to address early-stage market failures, rather than taking direct stakes in startups, pointing to models used in Israel and the UK.
The review forms part of the wider “Silver Review” of government spending and includes LaunchVic, making it the most comprehensive reset of Victoria’s innovation investment in a decade.
💰 TEN13 has secured its first institutional mandate, with Queensland Investment Corporation appointing the Brisbane firm as a venture manager under the state’s $130 million Venture Capital Development Fund. (Startup Daily)
The move formalises TEN13’s evolution from a pure syndicate into an institutionally backed VC after more than a year of due diligence.
Its first deal under the mandate is a contribution to OneMRI’s $2.5 million seed round, completed last month. Co-founder Stew Glynn said the mandate validates TEN13’s differentiated model and gives Queensland founders greater access to capital and global networks while building locally.
Backed by more than 500 co-investors, including high-net-worths, family offices and operators, TEN13 has already deployed over $115 million into 50-plus companies, with portfolio highlights such as Go1 and Clipchamp (acquired by Microsoft in 2021).
🐮 NZ’s fastest-growing startup Halter, valued at US$1.55b, faces an Australian rollout snag because virtual fencing is still illegal in Victoria, NSW and South Australia, creating a “two-tier” cattle economy across state borders. (Capital Brief)
Queensland and Tasmania permit the tech. Apparently, ~25% of Tassie’s dairy herd now uses Halter.
Solar smart collars, combined with connectivity towers and a phone app, let farmers draw virtual fence lines. The collars then move cows around through audio beeps, and gentle vibrations guide cattle.
Legacy animal-welfare rules predate virtual fencing. Proponents argue that welfare improves over traditional methods due to early-warning health data and less stressful movements. All three states have committed to legalise virtual fencing by year end.
🙅 SXSW Sydney is facing a sharp community backlash, raising fresh questions about whether the NSW Government’s reported $12.5 million spend to “secure the rights” is delivering value for money. (Innovation Aus)
The flashpoint was a viral LinkedIn post from Jessy Wu who labelled the event “loathsome and rancid”, sparking more than 900+ reactions and over 130 supportive comments within hours.
Wu argues that the festival harms homegrown events, engages in price gouging, and exploits the very community it claims to serve. She has responded by declaring “Rentseeking Leech Week”.
Media outlets that were asked to submit an expression of interest merely to access press passes were allegedly told to commit to publishing two articles about the event before it even began.
Startup community groups, like this publication, were also asked to pay a $5,000 fee for mentioning SXSW briefly in an event description for a community coffee catch-up in the same city! Not a vibe.
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⚡ Startup Retro ⚡
NZ-based Javln raises $5.4M to expand full-stack brokerage platform into Australia
Founder: Dale Smith
Auckland-based insurtech Javln has banked NZ$6M (A$5.3M) to accelerate its Australian expansion, with the round led by boutique fund manager Microequities Asset Management. Founded in 2011 by Dale Smith, Javln offers a cloud SaaS platform that unifies client, policy, claims and document management for brokers, financial and risk advisers, and underwriting agencies. The company says it now serves more than 11,000 contracted users.
CEO David Leach called the raise a “pivotal moment” following a strategic partnership with Envest, Australia’s largest privately owned insurance and financial services distribution group. JAVLN builds tools to run a brokerage from end to end. Things like policy workflows, CRM, claims, reporting, document & compliance are optimised for brokers in Australia & New Zealand.
Beyond go-to-market, the capital will also fund R&D as the company leans harder into AI to modernise back-office insurance workflows across ANZ.
To further sharpen its AI push, Javln has appointed Tim Mole as Head of AI & Data. With over 30 years of experience in management, analytics, and AI leadership, Mole will embed machine intelligence across policy and document management products, aiming to speed up underwriting and claims, reduce errors, and enhance broker productivity.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
SwarmFarm Robotics secures $30M Series B for autonomous farming robots
Founders: Andrew and Jocie Bate
Queensland’s SwarmFarm Robotics has banked $30 million Series B funding to scale its autonomous “SwarmBot” farm robots and push into North America. Edaphon led the round with participation from QIC, Emmertech, Tenacious Ventures, Artesian’s GrainInnovate, Tribe Global Ventures and Access Capital. Australia’s green bank, the CEFC, chipped in $7 million via its Powering Australia Technology Fund, backing the startup’s pitch that cleaner, smaller, smarter machines can outperform traditional big iron.
Founded in Emerald with manufacturing facilities in Toowoomba, SwarmFarm has deployed over 200 lightweight, self-driving robots across Australia. The platforms run precision applications, most notably targeted spraying, which the company says can reduce herbicide use by up to 95 per cent and decrease fuel-related emissions by 35 per cent, while supporting no-till practices that enhance soil health. ‘
Rather than sell a single “do-everything” machine, SwarmFarm is betting on “Integrated Autonomy”: a modular, open ecosystem where third-party tools run on small autonomous carriers, allowing farmers to design workflows around their land, not around the constraints of oversized kits. This video is a great explainer of the product.
New capital will fund North American expansion, team growth and a deeper partner ecosystem. Local farmers say the robots are lowering costs, reducing compaction, and opening up operating models that weren’t previously viable.
Due Diligence: Innovation Aus, Startup Daily
Enhance Labs raises $2.3M pre-seed to enhance human thought with AI, not replace it
Founders: Haziq Nordin, Jesse Head and Mike Keating
Brisbane-based Enhance Labs has raised A$2.3 million (pre-seed) to tackle what it calls “AI slop,” the generic, low-value outputs that hinder real work. Blackbird Ventures led the round with support from QIC Ventures, backing a voice-first collaboration platform designed to amplify human thinking rather than replace it.
Founded by Haziq Nordin (ex-Amazon), Jesse Head (ex-Google) and second-time founder Mike Keating, Enhance lets users think out loud and captures ideas in the moment. The system asks probing questions, surfaces assumptions and turns raw thoughts into shareable artefacts teams can refine together — a workflow the company pitches as the “last mile” where powerful models meet human insight.
Early adopters reportedly include teams at Amazon, Canva and Microsoft, alongside several startups, who say the product converts inspiration into productive reasoning time instead of yet another draft to rewrite. Enhance Labs' mission is to preserve human judgment while making it easier to capture, refine and share.
How does Enhance win in the long run? Enhance’s thesis includes aiming to amass unique usage data that compounds into company-specific moats, and to ride the cost curve of foundational AI infrastructure as it becomes ever more accessible. If successful, Enhance won’t just be another productivity tool — it could define a new category of collaborative context across all software users.
A waitlist is live at enhancelabs.ai, with funds earmarked for product development and early go-to-market.
Due Diligence: Blackbird Investment Notes, AFR, SmartCompany
Amber raises $10M to grow home battery and power automation platform for the home
Founders: Dan Adams & Chris Thompson
Melbourne-based Amber has raised $10 million to expand its home battery and EV automation platform into overseas markets, split evenly between E.ON Next UK (£2.5m ~ A$5m) and Australia’s Virescent Ventures (A$5m). The cash will speed up licensing Amber’s software to utilities, letting households automatically use, store and sell electricity against real-time wholesale prices..
E.ON is already piloting Amber’s software with up to 1,000 UK homes under its “Next Solar Max” trial, pairing a dynamic tariff with automated solar-and-battery optimisation.
Amber, founded in 2017, pitches itself as Australia’s largest residential battery automation provider, claiming to orchestrate ~40% of the domestic market. The round follows a $45M million raise earlier this year led by ETF Partners to scale its battery and EV automation stack ahead of a European push.
Due diligence: Startup Daily
Indi secures $1.46M to build a co-pilot for complex paediatric care
Founders: Jeff Quach and Orrin Bedford
Indi, an AI co-pilot for parents of children with complex care needs, has raised A$1.46 million to accelerate product development and partnerships, positioning itself as Australia’s next breakout healthtech. The round was led by Giant Leap with participation from Antler and angels. Funds will go to hiring, integrations with allied-health clinics, and pilots with families navigating care, education and the NDIS.
Founded by Orrin Benford and CTO Jeff Quach, Indi emerged from lived experience. After Benford’s daughter suffered a seizure in 2021, an 18-month battle through a fragmented system led him to hack the first version; he still uses the app.
Indi pitches a new category of family-centred digital health: it captures moments of insight, structures care tasks, coordinates a child’s “village” of parents, therapists and clinicians, and turns paperwork into a shared source of truth.
Investors say the opportunity is urgent. One in five parents face complex care journeys, yet existing tools are generic and siloed. With fresh capital, Indi will scale its co-pilot and prove that better coordination can meaningfully improve outcomes.
Due Diligence: Startup Daily
Lift Women lands $1.3M to build a crowdfunding platform to better support women
Founders: Irene Tsang
Australian crowdfunding platform Lift Women has raised $1.3M to expand its marketplace for women-led startups and embed AI across the product. The round was led by Braxton Capital Ventures (Singapore), with participation from prominent angels including Maggie Zhou (ex-MD, Alibaba ANZ) and Gordon Watson (former chair, AXA Asia). The capital will fuel expansion into Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and China, grow programme capacity for founder education and investor access, and fund hiring to accelerate product development.
Founded in 2021 by Irene Tsang, Lift Women positions itself as a “zero-to-one” platform: a place to become backable and liftable before “fundable”. The company says it has facilitated 363 crowdfunding projects, backing startups such as Ovum, Xylo Systems and Understanding Zoe, and delivered 10,000+ mentorship hours, with founders subsequently raising millions in follow-on capital.
Tsang frames the mission as closing the gender capital gap and making fundraising easier, more positive and more accessible for women. The timing underscores a stubborn market failure: women founders captured just 2% of Australian VC in 2024 (down from 3% in 2023).
Due Diligence: SmartCompany
🥳 Wins 🥳
🤑 Zeller enters the UK as its first international market (AFR, Capital Brief)
Ex-ByteDance executive Lars Weber will lead the London base, with hiring underway for over 40 roles (tech, ops, and GTM) over the next three years, as Zeller targets the UK’s 5.5 million businesses that process approximately £1.3 trillion annually.
Founded in 2020 by ex-Square leaders Ben Pfisterer and Dominic Yap, Zeller serves 100,000+ Australian businesses with an all-in-one stack (payments, accounts, cards, expenses, invoicing, real-time reporting).
🏭 Fleet Space opens a 5,300 m² “hyperfactory” in Adelaide that will vertically integrate design, manufacturing, operations and R&D, with capacity for thousands of geophysical sensors and hundreds of satellites annually. (Innovation Aus)
It underpins Fleet’s ExoSphere platform, already used by 50+ mining companies across five continents.
Fleet is preparing lunar deployments (SPIDER sensors on Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 2) and a 2029 Apophis asteroid survey, alongside collaborations with NASA in Arctic projects.
🏆 Startup Daily held its annual awards. Here’s the full list of winners from the evening, but a couple of startups to watch from the night!
Relevance AI won Startup of the Year (+ AI Gamechanger): Sydney’s agentic-AI platform lets non-technical teams spin up and manage “digital teammates” to automate complex workflows beyond rigid, rule-based bots.
EPCA won Most Innovative Startup: Proudly Aboriginal-owned, the company retrofits 100-tonne mining haul trucks from diesel to full battery-electric, cutting emissions quickly without scrapping existing fleets.
Xefco won Best Sustainability Startup: Waterless, low-emissions textile finishing tech that eliminates wastewater and slashes chemicals aimed at helping one of the world’s dirtiest industries.
Press Play Ventures won The GSD Award: LaunchVic-backed pre-accelerator helping women transition into entrepreneurship; 120 women have launched 104 startups.
Featured startup jobs
🏠 Slate is building the first AI-native finance platform for lending, emerging out of Ownhome with $42M in backing from top-tier VCs and banks. If you’re an elite full-stack builder with a founder mindset, this is a brilliant chance to join a tight-knit high-calibre team at day zero. Slate – Senior Software Engineer (Founding)
🟢 Hello Canopy is rethinking HR tech with an AI-native enablement platform that helps HR teams focus on people, not paperwork. Backed by Techstars, the team has proven its MVP and is now scaling into a category-defining product that blends compliance, engagement, and performance into one centralised system. As Founding Engineer, you’ll set the technical foundations, shape the product, and influence how the company scales.
🏎 Vyro is the operating system for automotive retail — powering digital car sales for brands like Polestar, Škoda, and CUPRA. Profitable and scaling fast, they’re raising Series A to expand globally. The Activations team is the sharp end of growth: getting new clients live, troubleshooting high-stakes rollouts, and shipping fixes in days, not months. Vyro’s Senior Engineer (Activations) role puts you right at the frontline.
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.
🤝 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)
This is a scary but well-worth-reading article. It crisply explains how the shift from books to phones isn’t just a vibe change… It’s reshaping cognition, culture, and democracy!
It offers actions for leaders & parents with clear reasons to prioritise deep reading (in schools, workplaces, and at home) if you want better focus, judgement, and creativity. And who would have thought that it doesn’t recommend 100% AI-generated short-form videos as a solution.
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👔 Connect with me on LinkedIn: Overnight Success, Will Richards
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‘Til next time,
👋 Will