💌 Aussie start-up & Venture Capital Retro! 6th August

G'day and welcome to Overnight Successes, the weekly newsletter that levels you up on Aussie start-ups.

We did it! Hello to all 208 subscribers! Last week we set the challenge to hit #200 and I'm happy to announce we did it! I owe subscriber #200 a coffee. If you work at a superfund starting with H - expect an email soon!

The results from our first poll are in. As a cohort, we've very optimistic about Aussie start-ups. I love it. 57% of us are pretty excited and 42% are super excited which leaves 0% feeling bearish.

Headlines:

• 👭 The largest female led seed round was raised by Human. More below!

• 🎨 Blackbird lowers Canva valuation by $14.4B after rejigging its valuation methodology.

• ✂️ Eucalyptus makes staff cuts off around 20% following a loan falling out.

If this was forwarded to you, please join investors from Startmate, Rampersand VC, x15, Blackbird, Superseed, Macquarie, Folklore, and Flying Fox keeping up to date with Aussie Start-ups here!

1. Start-up retro: Summarising the week's start-up raises with a smidge of context.

2. Aussie Raisins: Summarising Aussie start-ups looking to get some investment.

3. Notice Board: Signposting key events and opportunities in the ecosystem.

4. Accredited Tweeters: Snippets from Twitter and linkedin!

5. (KaaS) Knowledge as a Services: Articles to make you smarter. Or share with co-workers to make them think you’re smart.

Start-up Retro!

MedTech

🧠 Splose

News: The healthcare practice management platform specialized for Allied Health professionals, Splouse, has raised $1M. Splouses’ platform is developed to automate elements of practice currently handled by decades-old software. The start up was founded by Nicholas Sanderson with the goal to reduce long waiting times for those in the NDIS. The platform cuts down on administration time saving significant labour costs for practitioners. For contextz currently, over 500,000 Australians are supported by the NDIS with permanent disabilities. Growth will come from local Aussie customer acquisition as well as international expansion.

Read more about it: (Start-up Daily)

No-code

💻 👷Sitemate

News: The no-code platform focusing on automation for the built environment, Sitemate, has nabbed $5.2M in cash led by Blackbird Ventures. Sitemate cuts down on paperwork and enables automation and digital document management. Clients include industries like mining, gas, manufacturing and energy. Sitemate rolled through the Startmate 2017 accelerator program where founder Hartley Pike met Nick Crocker (then Startmate, now Blackbird). Although there was a bumpy start, Sitemate has locked away 1000 customers and expanded into the UK and North America. Sitemate has grown by being product-led with thousands of workers taking app with them to new job sites. The new cash will be injected into offices in new geographies and investment into new product and engineering staff.

Note to founders, name your company with the same naming convention as a VC fund, they might just love it.

Read more about it: (BusinessNewsAustralia)

Agriculture

🦾🥔 LYRO

News: The start-up behind an autonomous fruit picking robot, LYRO Robotics, has raised $1.5M in cash from a mix of investors including Artesian. The robot can pick fresh produce from conveyor belts and pack it into boxes. The raise comes while agriculture workers are in short supply. The robots can identify the product, pick it up and stow it neatly for warehousing. Importantly, the robots don’t get sunburnt and leave to Bondi beach for 6 months to travel around a bit. The cash will be used to create more picking & packing arms and then reach more farms. The robots should reduce wastage across the industry by ensuring more produce grown reaches supermarket shelves.

Read more about it: (Startup daily)

MedTech

🚑 Carepatron

News: The platform helping doctors spend more time with their patients instead of doing admin work, Carepatron, has raised NZ$1.6M in pre-seed. The cash comes led from Blackbird which hopes to grow the NZ-based business. 700 health teams use the platform with the majority of users in the US and Asia. Carepatron reduces the time spent on paperwork and manual processes. Solo practitioners gravitate towards the platform as they can replace admin employees and their legacy systems. The platform also works across mobile allowing clients to access important information easier.

Read more about it: (Techcrunch)

Hydrogen Energy

🌊🔋 Hysata

News: Hysata has secured $42M to fuel expansion after developing a new technology to produce hydrogen. Touted as 20% more efficient than previous methods, Hysata is slightly closer to reaching commercialisation than competitors. The round was apparently over subscribed with investors like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Vestas Ventures (Denmark), BlueScope and Hostplus all chipping in. The tech means Hysata will produce the cheapest green hydrogen in the world. Typically, the highest expenses in producing hydrogen come from the electrolysers and cost of energy. The Hysata electrolysers should be ready for market by 2025 and will be a key contribution to helping Australia hit net zero by 2050.

Electrolyser: An apparatus that produces hydrogen through a chemical process - aka electrolysis. Electrolysis is the process of breaking down water into it’s chemical elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen.

Read more about it: (AFR)

Dairy

🥛 All G Foods

News: All G Foods, the synthetic dairy producer has milked investors for $25M. UK-based Argonomics lead the round with a focus on scaling up the production. All G Foods is based in Waterloo, NSW and focuses on synthetic meat and dairy. The technology enables All G Foods to combine the base ingredients (water and sugar) with microbes to create cellular-grown products. Investors are punting on All G Foods being able to create milk that is cheaper than cow-based dairy. The market for non-dairy milk is growing in Australia with consumers moving away from dairy and All G hopes to capitalise on the trust built in China for Aussie products. Competition comes from US-based teams creating similar outputs with different technologies. Apparently, there’s more than one way to milk a cell. The new process will cut down on greenhouse gas as fermentation tanks create far less methane - a nice win for planet earth.

Read more about it: (AFR)

Aussie Raisins: Companies looking for 💵!

• Nano, the business that can create mortgages in under 10 minutes, is looking to raise $75M from investors. Nano cuts down on wait times with traditional banks approving a loan in 7+ days.

• Datafarming, the start-up that utlises satellite imagery to help farmers, is looking to raise $5M in cash to help fund expansion. Datafarming, already services 40% of Aussie paddocks and is growing nicel

Notice Board

• The Startmate Women Fellowship is a two-month program that helps ambitious women find their dream job in a startup. Read more about the Fellowship and apply before August 14 (more info here).

• Optus Future Makers Program is calling all social enterprises to their accelerator. Get involved if you're building in health, environment or social. (more info here).

Accredited Tweeters

(KaaS) Knowledge as a Service

• How to build your seed round pitch deck. Following the good feedback from last week's seed stage focus, this resource by y-combinator goes through a pretty simple deck template for a seed stage pitch! Keep it simple, stupid.

• Balacing the Grind with Friend of the newsletter Paz Pisarki. Love the OS shoutout!

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