Northern NSW subscription butcher service Our Cow has snapped up the brand and other assets of failed Sydney grocery delivery startup Voly. The deal was finalised before Christmas, ahead of a second Voly creditors meeting on December 23. Our Cow bought the database, app and brand, hoping to grab a bigger slice of capital city… Read more »
Stock theft – more organised crime than Jolly Swagman – costs Australian farmers more than $100 million a year. But a Melbourne software startup is hoping to address rustling, and other problems with livestock identification with a unique facial recognition system for animals. Z Ware has developed cattle recognition technology, called Stoktake, to not only… Read more »
Perth veterinary tech startup Vedi has raised $3 million as it looks to become the pet version of the federal government medical database My Health Record. The funds came from two international investors, with MSD Animal Health, a division of Merck & Co., once again backing Vedi, joined by pet-focused New York VC Companion Fund,… Read more »
Australian-born US-based solar panel design and sales platform OpenSolar has raised US$15 million (A$22m) in a Series B. Telstra Ventures led the round, announced last month, with support from sustainability fund 2150 and existing investors including Jeff Tannenbaum’s Titan Grove and solar entrepreneurs Alec Guettel and Howard Wenger. The funds will be used to expand… Read more »
A newly developed text-to-speech language model from Microsoft can mimic a person’s speech from as little as three seconds of sample audio – but the tech giant is keeping its tech under wraps for now so it is not misused. One of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) research teams published a paper about its model for text-to-speech… Read more »
Leading law firm Herbert Smith Freehills advises some of Australia’s most successful tech companies on investment deals, including Atlassian, Mr Yum, Carma, Sonder, Culture Amp, Linktree, Who Gives A Crap, :Different, Pearler and Instant Checkout. After the dramatic shift in venture capital in 2022 following an exuberant two years during the pandemic, HSF venture capital… Read more »
If share price is anything to go by, Tesla is in trouble. The market capitalisation of the electric vehicle (EV) company has fallen by 73% from its record high in November 2021, causing concern for investors. On the face of it, there is no crisis. The cars are still the benchmark for performance. The underlying… Read more »
Richard White, the Sydney-based billionaire founder of ASX-listed freight logistics business WiseTech Global, has acquired recently delisted data services company Kyckr. The deal is worth around $43.5 million, and was made throughWhite’s personal investment vehicle RealWise KYK AV Pty Ltd. Kyckr provides real-time Know Your Customer (KYC/KYB) and and Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) data from… Read more »
A $30 billion project to send solar-generated power made in Australia to Singapore has been placed in voluntary administration (VA) amid a reported falling out between its key backers, the tech and mining billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Dr Andrew Forrest. Cannon-Brookes and Forrest are cornerstone investors in Singapore-based Sun Cable – the Atlassian co-founder through his private… Read more »
A company that created a hands-free walk-talkie replacement for outdoor adventurers has raised A$12 million in a Series A, just months after shipping its first product. Loose Cannon Systems was founded by Peter Celinksi, the former CTO at Denon & Marantz, and was previously the founder of Avega Systems, which sold to Altec Lansing in… Read more »
In August 1955, a group of scientists made a funding request for US$13,500 to host a summer workshop at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. The field they proposed to explore was artificial intelligence (AI). While the funding request was humble, the conjecture of the researchers was not: “every aspect of learning or any other feature of… Read more »
A University of Sydney Professor developing cutting edge solar technology has received $2.78 million in research funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to commercial the idea in a partnership with Sydney startup SunDrive. Professor Ho-Baillie, the John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience at the university’s the School of Physics and Sydney Nano Hub, is… Read more »
Financial contagions can be triggered easily, if conditions are right. First one financial institution falls and then others follow, like a chain of falling dominoes. The cinder that sparked the global financial crisis in 2007 is considered by many to have been a March 14 briefing by executives of the Lehman Brothers’ investment bank. Under… Read more »
In this essay, we are imagining a pitch from an early stage deep tech company, probably still working inside a university. An investor red flag might not be obvious to a founder. Why would it? They build up over years as signals of weakness and they are best avoided. Knowing what they are makes it possible to… Read more »
Melbourne clothing tech statup Bodd has raised $5 million, as it looks to use its 3D body scanning technology for advanced manufacturing. The round. announced on Christmas eve, was led by retail entrepreneurs Candice and Nick Hirons, supported by a range of family offices and high-net worth figures. Bodd’s executive chairman, Tim Allison, who is… Read more »
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