Just for a moment last week, Larry Ellison, co-founder of US cloud computing company Oracle, became the world’s richest person. The octogenarian tech titan briefly overtook Elon Musk after Oracle’s share price rocketed 43% in a day, adding about US$100 billion (A$150 billion) to his wealth. The reason? Oracle inked a deal to provide artificial… Read more »
The Dell AI Innovation Day 2025 brought together top global AI leaders and trailblazing local scaleups – Airspeeder, Fleet Space Technologies and Relevance.AI among them – to give founders a peek beneath the hood of successful AI strategies. Global tech giant Dell Technologies, along with Startup Daily, kicked off the first-ever Dell AI Innovation Day… Read more »
The Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has sold a small stake in Swedish buy-now-pay-later fintech Klarna, worth around $100 million, as it lists in the US at more than 2x the price CBA paid for it 5 years ago. Klarna listed at US$40, higher than the expected $35-37 price, on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) overnight,… Read more »
Going global from day one, Sydney-based smart parking startup KERB chose to launch in Southeast Asia. Founder Rob Brown shares how that decision thrust his business into the fast lane. Just six weeks after launching a parking app to help Aussies rent their driveways, Brown realised the company had built the wrong product and needed to… Read more »
PsiQuantum, the US startup with Australian cofounders, has raised a gobsmacking US$1 billion (A$1.5bn) in a round that’s more than doubled its valuation in four years to US$7bn (A$10.5bn). The California startup, founded in Palo Alto in 2015 by expat Australian professors Jeremy O’Brien, Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson and Dr Pete Shadbolt, hopes to build… Read more »
Australians love reminding ourselves we invented Wi-Fi, the black box and the Hills Hoist. But those stories are outdated. The challenges we face today are new. Nostalgia won’t build the systems we need to turn our next breakthrough into something the world buys. No wonder we rank 68 out of 69 countries for entrepreneurship in… Read more »
It beggars belief that holding the world record for speedrunning Pokémon HeartGold can come down to how quickly you catch a rare Magikarp. It’s a notoriously pathetic monster, mocked both in-game and in the long-running anime series. But in HeartGold there’s an incredibly rare variant that’s set at level 50. Capturing it, and boosting it… Read more »
The federal government’s claim that several hundred Freedom of Information (FOI) applicants’ requests to the eSafety Commissioner last year were “AI bot-generated” is false, according to eSafety’s publicly available documents. “We’re frankly being inundated by anonymous requests … many of them we’re sure are AI bot-generated requests,” Minister for Health and Ageing Mark Butler said… Read more »
Over the past week, conversations about women founders and venture capital in Australia have been amplified by Blackbird’s latest portfolio data, reported by Startup Daily’s Simon Thomsen, alongside Elaine Stead’s thoughtful piece, The myth of the funnel. Both point to something important: The numbers we track matter, but the story they tell depends on how… Read more »
The Techstars Sydney Accelerator has invested US$1.44 million (A$2.2m) in 12 early stage startups announcing its class of 2025 today. From surfing to strata management, music, marketing, finance and biotech, it’s a wide range of ideas and solutions to big problems. The founders include a former concert violinist, an early AirBnb employee, a PHD researcher… Read more »
Wable, a social networking app for neurodivergent people, inspired by the ABC TV series Love on the Spectrum, has raised $1.5 million to expand in the US and UK. The round was led by Paul Sharbanee from Taurus Capital. The app is designed to connect neurodivergent people for friendship, dating, jobs, and support, filling a… Read more »
Sustainable building materials startup X-Hemp has raised $3.4 million in Seed funding after banking a final $1 million from strategic investment partner Danehill Group. The Central Tasmanian construction tech business, based at Cressy, 30 minutes south of Launceston, was founded in 2020 by Andi Lucas, and will use the cash for critical infrastructure, R&D and… Read more »
An AI assistant designed for financial advisers, developed by New Zealand fintech Marloo has trousered A$4.2 million in pre-Seed funding. This round was led by Blackbird Ventures, with support from CoVentures, Brand Fund and a Who’s Who of angel investors, including Xero cofounder Philip Fierlinger, Stake’s Matt Leibowitz, Halter’s Craig Piggott, Heidi Health’s Tom Kelly,… Read more »
Google will not have to sell its Chrome web browser in order to fix its illegal monopoly in the online search business, a United States federal judge has ruled. It will, however, need to do a few other things, such as sharing data with rival companies, in order to improve competition. The remedies ruling was… Read more »
Companion robots startup Andromeda has raised $23 million in a Series A that values the business at $100 million. The round was led by San Francisco VC Forerunner Ventures, supported by Rethink Impact, Artesian, CSIRO-backed Main Sequence, Visible and Trampoline, as well as ex-Atlassian futurist Dom Price. Existing backers Purpose Ventures, which led 2024’s $3… Read more »
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