More than 100 fintech leaders have signed a letter to both the Labor government and Coalition opposition ahead of the May 3 election calling on them to live up to promises made in previous campaigns for reform in financial services, saying the sector’s growth is being hampered by “policy inertia”. Issues such as crypto and… Read more »
Two Australian startups are among 10 companies to make the cut for global food and beverage giant PepsiCo’s annual Asia-Pacific greenhouse accelerator. The program, now in its third year, is designed to bolster companies in sustainable agriculture, the circular economy, and climate, tackling issues around food, energy and waste. They’ve scored a A$31,542 grant as… Read more »
Credit to the Chinese – they were the first to experiment with blending Australia’s most famous wine (and one of its most expensive), Penfolds Grange, decades ago, serving the red wine with cola. (There’s even a bar in Adelaide where you can try it – and we love this 3-star review of the 1965, selling… Read more »
The battle between corporate regulator the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and Block Earner has swung in favour of the crypto platform after the Federal Court overturned a ruling that its Earner product was a financial product. The battle over the fixed-yield digital asset-related Earner has been running for the past two years after… Read more »
A Californian healthtech startup cofounded by a 20-something expat Australian has raised US$30 million (A$47m) in a Series A to build a “health super-app”. The raise for San Francisco-based Superpower, founded in 2023 by former Sydneysider Max Marchione, the COO, Jacob Peters, CEO and Kevin Unkrich, CTO, values the startup at US$200m as a long… Read more »
Zero Co, the cleaning products startup will close at the end of the month with founder and CEO Mike Smith pulling down the shutters because they can’t find a pathway to profitability. The six-year-old startup set records in 2021 when it raised a record $5 million in just six hours on the Birchal crowd-sourced funding… Read more »
Australian Radio Network (ARN), the media company behind KIIS, as well as Gold and iHeart, used an AI-generated female Asian host to broadcast 4 hours of midweek radio, without disclosing it. The fake presenter, “Thy”, has been generated reportedly using someone in the finance department at ARN. The show broadcasts on CADA – “Australia’s home… Read more »
Max Mito, the cofounder and CEO of StrongRoomAI, has denied he admitted to fraud in a meeting with investors last month that led VC EVP to call in police and launch legal action to freeze the assets of Mito and several others. Mito’s counsel, Alexander Langshaw, told a Federal Court hearing in Sydney last Thursday… Read more »
Seer Medical will get a second life after the metech startup’s administrators found three investors willing to back the business with $40 million. Creditors signed a Deed of Company Arrangement with neurodiagnostic equipment manufacturer Cadwell Industries, existing investor Breakthrough Victoria, and Singapore’s TrialCap in a deal worth $40m. All three will take an equity position… Read more »
One of the most critical defence navigation problems – what to do when GPS is unavailable – has a new solution thanks to Sydney quantum startup Q-CTRL. GPS denial is becoming a weapon of both traditional warfare and nontraditional economic sabotage amid growing global conflicts, with the cost of an outage estimated to exceed $1… Read more »
Back in 2023, SafetyCulture founder Luke Anear had a vision – a four-part documentary series with profiling the founders of some of Australia’s most successful tech companies, including himself. It was an insight into the highs and lows and drama of local startup life, which was released as a pay-per-view on Apple TV, Prime… Read more »
If you need a reality check on just how crazy Donald Trump’s tariff plan-du-jour was last week, well, after wiping trillions in value from global markets, he followed up with April 9’s insider trading scam before the US President tanked markets all over again and capped it off with some crony capitalism. Economics analyst Joey… Read more »
More than 10 bids were submitted to the voluntary administrators of failed startup StrongRoom AI, hoping to snap up the value left in the business, despite it being mired in legal action over allegedly faked revenue figures and a VC investor wanting its $10 million back. Final offers for what remains of StrongRoom are due… Read more »
Canva is getting into the spreadsheet business as the software giant looks to move beyond pretty graphics to workplace productivity tools and take on enterprise software giants like Google. The 13-year-old design platform’s annual product song and dance show, the fourth Canva Create – this year themed as “Uncharted” – also revealed that annual revenue… Read more »
Just before Christmas, as staff put on Hawaiian shirts and went to Christmas lunches HR hoped didn’t create more work for them, New Zealand ASX-listed accounting platform Xero (ASX: XRO) dropped details on a new pay plan for CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. The December 18 release, titled “Xero CEO pay revised, aligns to performance and… Read more »
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