A startup addressing the challenges of deceased estate management, cofounded by childhood friends, has banked $12.5 million in its first raise. Backing estateXchange are Macquarie Capital, OIF Ventures, and billionaire Paul Little’s family office, with busines execs Carol Schwartz and Pier 12 Capital chair Christine Christian, also on board as angel investors. The online platform digitises… Read more »
Paperbacked, a specialist venture studio for education founders, has launched to tackle a persistent gap in the Australian education sector: businesses that fall between under-resourced small operators and VC-backed scale-ups. Lindsey Dang, who built a seven-figure English iterature specialist tutoring business while completing dual law and arts degrees at Monash University (and is now on… Read more »
Disability worker Storm Menzies, founder of accessible makeup tools startup ByStorm Beauty has won the Kickstarter Challenge, taking home $30,000 in equity-free funding. Four runners-up also took home $7,500 for their startups following the grand final at Parliament House in Canberra today. The five-year-old Kickstarter Challenge, developed by Enterprising ME and run in conjunction with The… Read more »
Patient care platform Human Health has raised $8.5 million as it looks to expand its global reach. The round was led by new UK backer LocalGlobe, and supported by existing investors Airtree, Skip Capital, Aliavia and Scale Ventures, and several angel investors, including Cricket Health’s Arvind Rajan, former Kantar CEO Eric Salama and OIF’s David… Read more »
When Chelsea McCallum and Alison Williams launched Tummily, they weren’t just creating another wellness platform. They were redesigning how people experience – and take ownership of – their gut health. Within 24 hours of launch, Tummily had broken into Apple’s Top 100 Medical Apps, downloaded in over 40 countries. No massive ad campaign. No investor… Read more »
Another week, another report highlighting the stark reality of women in technology. The Tech Council of Australia’s new “Women in Highly Technical Occupations” report tells a story we’ve heard many times before: Australia is facing a critical tech worker shortage, yet the pipeline for women is leaking at every joint. The report rightly points out… Read more »
When tech trailblazer Ann Moffatt first joined the IT industry in 1959, there wasn’t a gender divide to speak of. “There were as many women programmers as men,” she recalled. However, things changed rapidly when men started to see technology as a real career. “They sort of pushed the women down, so that the women… Read more »
Yesterday, there were numerous articles written about the fact that a couple large VC funds missed their gender targets for new investments. We do ask our VC funds for more transparency and effort, and then low key shame them when they don’t meet their goals and state it publicly, even if they are moving the… Read more »
An all-women founding team has as little as a 1-in-5000 chance of being funded in Australia according to the latest analysis of investment data from Blackbird. The VC fund released details on its efforts to close the gender investment gap for the 2025 financial year (FY25), with head of impact, Kate Glazebrook, saying “the last… Read more »
The recent quarterly figures on the Australian startup scene finally put numbers to what everyone has been feeling in their bones for months: the vibes are off. Venture capital investment plunged to an 18-month low, with Q2 2025 clocking in as one of the weakest funding periods in recent memory. This is a major reversal… Read more »
The fact that less than 3% of women founders secure venture funding is a reminder of the deep-rooted gender inequality in Australia’s startup ecosystem. Astraeus Labs founder and principal consultant, Beau Ushay is hoping to take action to change that. and hopes to shift the dial on several fronts Astraeus Labs works with investors, M&A… Read more »
Storm Menzies knows better than most about the challenges of finding funding to back women-led startups. The founder of accessible beauty tools startup ByStorm Beauty set out to help more than 700 million women globally living with a disability to look and feel good, launching last month. Menzies has mild cerebral palsy, and after breaking… Read more »
When Victoria Minell, founder of Recipes by Victoria first shared a video of sushi rice sizzling in a waffle maker, she wasn’t thinking about virality. She was just having fun. That video didn’t just go viral – it exploded, inspiring thousands of recreations and paving the way for her next sensation: sushi muffins. “That one landed me… Read more »
Brisbane patient experience software provider Five Faces, has raised $1 million in a Series A. The round was led by Utiliti Group, with support from Queensland Government initiative, the Female Founders Co-Investment Fund. It’s the first external round for Alphalitica (trading as Five Faces), which will use the capital to develop new digital health solutions… Read more »
Listen to your gut and trust it, says Bree Kirkham from F5 Collective, a venture firm backing women-led startups. Kirkham, who worked for pioneering tech brands including ClassPass, Uber and Airbnb, had plenty to say about women in tech on episode 18 of Startup 360 this week. Cohost Simon Thomsen asked the mother of two… Read more »
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.
