Melbourne marketing startup IntelligenceBank has landed its first M&A deal, acquiring rival AI-powered brand compliance platform Red Marker from global education giant Kaplan. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. IntelligenceBank will acquire Red Marker’s technology stack, IP, and team of 20 based in Sydney, the US and UK. It will give the combined… Read more »
A startup that checks in on how well university students are learning has been accepted into the University of California, Berkley’s SkyDeck accelerator program, banking US$200,000 (A$305k) as part of the deal. Sindy Labs is the brainchild of former University of Melbourne medical student Benjamin Arya, Taha Ansari and Oliver Cucanic. They founded their startup… Read more »
Shareholder engagement platform InvestorHub topped up last year’s Series A with an extra $4 million. The new round was led by existing backer EVP, with follow-on investment from Archangel Ventures and Flying Fox Ventures too. It takes the total value of the Series A to $9 million after an initial $4 million in May 2023,… Read more »
Google has ditched its long-running plan to get rid of third-party tracking cookies on Chrome, after more than four years of promising to do so to improve online privacy. The tech giant revealed that it would no longer be banning third-party cookies from next year as previously planned in a Privacy Sandbox blog post, and will… Read more »
Rocket developer and satellite launcher Gilmour Space Technologies will kick off a new suborbital flight test service in Australia next year for commercial and defence customers that require hypersonic speeds above Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound). The move comes amid frustrating delays in approval to launch the first Australian-made orbital rocket, developed… Read more »
Australia may get the world’s first quantum computer by 2027, but within 12 months, PsiQuantum plans to build a second one in Chicago after scoring another massive government funding deal. The California startup’s latest cash injection of US$500 million (A$760m) over 30 years, funded by the Illinois government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago… Read more »
Hospitality entrepreneur Stevan Premutico is stepping down from the board of me&u, the ordering platform he founded, and away from the business in the wake of its merger with Mr Yum. “I am immensely proud of what the team has achieved. We began with an ambitious idea to transform how we order and pay in… Read more »
Square Peg is raising for a sixth fund, as well as a new “Opportunities Fund 3”, seeking a combined $840 million, but cofounder Paul Bassat has promised more money will go back into investor pockets than they will invest in the years ahead. Twelve years on, Bassat said in Square Peg’s half-yearly update to June… Read more »
Four space research projects at the University of South Australia (UniSA) have received $18 million in funding as part of the $230m iLAuNCH program. The funding coincides with the opening of a new Advanced Manufacturing Metal 3D printing facility at VPG Innovation, in Adelaide’s Camden Park. The 3D printing machines can produce titanium and nickel… Read more »
Business lending fintech Fundabl has raised $3.2 million in an equity round as it looks to increase its venture debt business as alternative capital for startups. Fundabl was founded by Ethan Singer and David Salkinder in 2021 before launching in March 2022, going on to raise $16 million in a mixture of equity and debt… Read more »
Social media is a problem for economists. They don’t know how to value it. It has long been argued that it ought to be in the national accounts as part of gross domestic product. One 2019 study estimated Facebook alone is worth US$40 to US$50 per month for consumers in the United States. But that’s… Read more »
Crowdfunding market leader Birchal has cut its costs base by 30%, along with several roles, after the first half of 2024 “significantly underperformed” the platform’s expectations. News of the job losses were first revealed by SmartCompany just 24 hours after Birchal set out to paint a positive picture for the sector in its annual review… Read more »
Approximately 12.9 million Australians had their personal and health information stolen during a data breach involving MediSecure, the defunct electronic prescriptions company has confirmed. The figure means almost half of the Australian population was likely impacted by the breach of scripts distributed by MediSecure up until November 2023, making it one of the largest cyber… Read more »
Three years after selling A Cloud Guru for $2 billion, cofounder Sam Kroonenburg is back in early-stage startup land with an AI-based adtech and $5.5 million in Seed funding to kick it off. His new play is Cuttable, an automated content marketing agency that’s like Canva-for-ads, so users can create digital advertising rapidly, at a lower… Read more »
The global space economy is expected to be worth forecast to be worth $2.7 trillion with a decade, so the NSW government has decided to get in on the action with $500,000 in grant funding. The new NSW Space+ Program grants have been launched ahead of an estimated 10,000 delegates heading to Sydney in September… Read more »
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