White-label payment technology provider, mx51, which last year span out of fintech Assembly Payments, has raised $25 million in its first round, led by Acorn Capital, Artesian, Commencer Capital and Mastercard. The Sydney-based fintech claims to be the first Australian fintech to develop a bank-grade, modern, Payment-as-a-Service platform, offering integrated payment solutions for merchants. Last… Read more »
Melbourne proptech startup Rental Heroes has raised $1 million in seed funding for its AI-based tenant request SaaS platform. Seed investment group Investible led the round, with existing investor, Artesian, once again backing the two-year-old startup alongside US-based Hustle Fund and Morten Birk Belling, managing director of Menulog ANZ. Rental Heroes is pioneering the use… Read more »
Fintech Athena Home Loans has raised $90 million in its latest funding round. A range of previous investors returned for the series D, led by Square Peg Capital, including AirTree Ventures, Macquarie Bank, superannuation funds AustralianSuper, Hostplus, and Sunsuper, plus Salesforce Ventures, and Apex Capital. Athena previously raised $70 million in a series C in… Read more »
Melbourne-based social media venture Linktree has tapped the market for more cash, just five months after its A$15 million series A, raising another US$45m (A$59m) in a Series B The round was co-led by European VC Index Ventures, and New York’s Coatue. AirTree Ventures and Insight Partners returned as investors with a Who’s Who of… Read more »
Cell-based meat production startup Vow Foods has raised $7.7m (US$6m) in a seed round led by Square Peg Capital, alongside Blackbird Ventures, Grok Ventures and new investor Tenacious Ventures. James Tynan from Square Peg will join Vow’s board. The cellular agtech startup, based in Western Sydney, began with lab-grown meat from pork and kangaroo cells… Read more »
The startup scene is unrelenting, with thousands of innovators and big thinkers competing for relevance and jostling for funding in an industry where competition is high and business life-expectancy is low. In what is a volatile industry, there are two ways in which these businesses operate. The first approach is more orthodox, marked by the… Read more »
Sydney software startup Pathzero, which launched in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdowns through the Antler Australia program, has raised $1 million in a seed round. Antler, Black Nova Group and senior business figures including former bank boss Brian Hartzer, climate campaigner, Simon Sheikh, and former Australian Ethical Investment CEO Phil Vernon, as well as two… Read more »
SME online lender Capify has raised $14 million in an equity round with the Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division continuing to back the fintech through its existing credit facilities. The investment – Capify’s first, having landed a $135 million credit facility from Goldman Sachs in 2019, marks a return to lending for the fintech after… Read more »
Airwallex has topped up its US$160 million (AU$254m) series D raise from April with an extra US$40 million ($57m) with Skip Capital, the family investment fund run by Kim Jackson with her husband, Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar. Regular backer Square Peg Capital also returned for the latest cash injection, which continues to value the… Read more »
Keeping track of all the things kids get up to outside of the classroom is one of the biggest juggles parents and educators face, but a new startup, which just raised $850,000 from startup VC firm Jelix Ventures, is well on its way to solving that problem. Software venture Clipboard, founded in late 2017 by… Read more »
Venture capital (VC) funding for startups has fallen by around 20% since December 2019 as the covid-19 pandemic smashed the global economy, but the impact is unevenly distributed according to new research from Startup Genome. The California-based analytics firm’s latest report into global startup funding, the first in a series its planning looking at the… Read more »
Remote work in the era of Microsoft Teams and Zoom meetings has been a boom for business software companies and a Brisbane remote learning startup is riding the wave with the backing of some of the world’s biggest companies. GO1 has raised $61 million (US$40m) in Series C in around led by SEEK and US… Read more »
A roundtable discussing funding for startups, featuring leading VC investors, will be held in Sydney next week. The roundtable series, presented by Techboard and RSM, will be held at Freelancer’s HQ at World Square, next Tuesday, August 6, 5-8pm. Techboard co-founder Peter van Bruchem said he designed the roundtables to be a twist on a panel… Read more »
A new biotech funding program for startups working on new therapies, technologies and medical devices is offering up to $1 million in matching grants to help companies develop their ideas through to the proof of concept stage. The Biomedical Translation Bridge program is an initiative of the Medical Research Future Fund. It’s run by MTPConnect –… Read more »
Techboard, Australia’s largest startup and tech directory, released its latest quarterly funding report today, revealing the March 2019 quarter was a bumper period for the sector when it came to funding. While the finalisation of the bid for online property exchange network PEXA (Property Exchange Australia Ltd), launched in late 2018 by the Commonwealth… Read more »
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