AI/Machine Learning

Cuttable’s Sam Kroonenburg shares the Black Friday/Cyber Monday secrets of 3 e-commerce founders

- November 18, 2025 5 MIN READ

Australian shoppers are expected to spend $6.8 billion this Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) , according to the Australian Retailers Association. For e-commerce founders, this represents one of the year’s biggest opportunities for growth. But the challenge has intensified. Temu has increased Australian ad spending by 110% (ABC News), while Shein has ramped up theirs by… Read more »

Funding

Birchal & chill: sexual pleasure startup Normal tries crowdfunding for its first raise

- November 18, 2025 2 MIN READ

After give years of self-funding, sexual wellness brand Normal has turned to crowd-sourced funding (CSF) platform Birchal for its first external raise. Normal, cofounded by sex coach, author and educator Georgia Grace and ex-McKinsey consultant and social scientist Lucy Wark, is Australia’s top female-founded sexual wellness brand, offering products to help people, especially women, have… Read more »

Noga Edelstein
Data

Equity Clear launches Show Us the Data roundtables to create a national standard for investor diversity reporting

- November 18, 2025 3 MIN READ

Show Us the Data, a national initiative led by Equity Clear, kicked off in Sydney last week looking to develop a Australia’s first Common Data Standard for Investor Diversity Reporting. Equity Clear, led by Noga Edelstein, is hosting a series of roundtables in Australia’s capital cities to create an industry-led framework for data standards that… Read more »

Airtasker CEO Tim Fung
ASX

ASX-listed Airtasker raises another $10 million

- November 17, 2025 2 MIN READ

Freelancer marketplace Airtasker has completed a $10 million equity capital placement led by US radio and podcast giant iHeartMedia, powering the Australian company’s overseas marketing effort. The deal will help Airtasker — the Sydney-based platform connecting customers to freelance gardeners, bartenders, accountants, and beyond — compete for publicity against global rivals like Upwork and Fiverr. The… Read more »

woman in man's suit
Leadership

Book review: Australian author Pip Finkemeyer’s satire, One Story, skewers the narcissism and mythmaking of tech leaders

- November 17, 2025 6 MIN READ

When I began reading Elaine Castillo’s Moderation, a new American novel about the psychological damage of online moderation, I had to pause. I’d read novels that confronted difficult material before, but this one blurred the line between bearing witness and re-enacting pain. The book follows Girlie, a content moderator for a social media giant whose… Read more »

Nathan Croxton
Accelerator

Team Techstars Sydney: Meet Onsite, the all-in-one building and strata management platform

- November 17, 2025 3 MIN READ

Ahead of the TechStars Sydney ‘Demo the Future’ evening on December 8, Startup Daily is profiling the 12 startups and their founders in the 2025 cohort. Our fourth profile is Onsite – a startup dealing one of the most painful parts of apartment living, strata management. Onsite  Founder: Nathan Croxton  One-liner: Onsite makes it easy for everyone… Read more »

Climate Tech

Business solar startup MetroElectro raises $1 million

- November 17, 2025 2 MIN READ

Solar power startup MetroElectro has raised $1 million from its existing investor, Singapore climate tech VC Wavemaker Impact. The alongside the equity raise, the Melbourne startup, founded in 2024 by Lloyd Heinrich, also secured a $4 million debt facility from Ecotone Partners. Wavemaker previously backed MetroElectro’s $1.03 million pre-Seed round in May 2024. Heinrich will… Read more »

Food and drink

Startup 360: StrongRoom liquidation latest, Warren Buffett’s final thoughts, Australian-grown coffee ambitions

- November 14, 2025 2 MIN READ

This week’s Startup 360 kicks off with cohost Simon Thomsen recounting the two days spent in the NSW Supreme Court this week as senior council for the liquidators of failed medtech StrongRoom AI probed cofounder and former CEO Max Mito, and director Divesh Sangvhi, about the potential insolvency of the business. Sangvhi sold his company,… Read more »

Firmus founders
AI/Machine Learning

AI data centre startup Firmus valuation trebles to $6 billion in just 8 weeks after raising another $500 million

- November 14, 2025 2 MIN READ

Artificial intelligence data centre startup Firmus Technologies has trebled its valuation to $6 billion after raising another $500 million, just two months after banking $330 million in a deal with Nvidia. After setting out to build an AI data centre in Tasmania, the Singapore-based company announced a $73.3 billion plan, Project Southgate, with AI infrastructure also… Read more »

Utopia
AI/Machine Learning

Australian government departments are all getting ‘chief AI officers’

- November 14, 2025 4 MIN READ

Chief artificial intelligence officers will be appointed to every federal agency in 2026 as generative AI causes a “fundamental shift” in government operations, according to an AI Plan for the Australian Public Service (APS) released by the federal government on Wednesday. The plan will see every government worker given access to generative AI tools, as… Read more »

Robot lawyer in a trial
AI/Machine Learning

AI is actually makes it harder to track work performance, so what should HR managers do?

- November 14, 2025 3 MIN READ

Let’s be honest, even just writing this sentence has meant engaging with some very basic artificial intelligence (AI) as the computer checks my spelling and grammar. Ultimately, the quality and integrity of the finished article are a human responsibility. But the questions this raises go well beyond everyday word processing. Powerful AI is now changing… Read more »