A quantum startup cofounded by three former PhD students just nine months ago has raised $2 million in a pre-Seed round to develop faster and cheaper fault-tolerant architectures for quantum computing. The raise for Iceberg Quantum was led by Blackbird, supported by UK-based LocalGlobe. CEO Dr Felix Thomsen cofounded the Sydney startup with Larry Cohen,… Read more »
Sydney retail technology startup Hivery was handed to administrators last week after nine years and nearly $63 million in venture capital. The books for Red Analytics, trading as Hivery, were handed to Christopher Johnson and Andrew McCabe at Wexted Advisors in Sydney on November 6. A first meeting of creditors is scheduled for Friday, November… Read more »
The worth of SafetyCulture has become a game of snakes and ladders, with the 20-year-old workplace checklist app developer taking a $200 million drop in its valuation to $2.5 billion as VC AirTree becomes a late-stage convert in a $75 million raise. Just over 12 months ago, the scaleup’s valuation jumped $600 million for a… Read more »
Neither Canva nor Leonardo.AI or its backers wanted to talk about the dowry paid for their marriage, but documents from key investor Blackbird Ventures suggest the acquisition deal cost is north of $320 million. Details are beginning to emerge about what when down following the surprise announcement this week that the Sydney-based generative AI startup… Read more »
TL;DR The last decade has been the ‘heyday’ for horizontal SaaS, and vertical SaaS has been comparatively quiet. What has held vertical SaaS back is simple: bad customers. Go-to-market motions in vertical SaaS have been stuck in clunky enterprise mode, while horizontal SaaS has consistently cracked product-led growth that has underpinned rapid and efficient scaling. AI is… Read more »
Blackbird partner Phoebe Harrop will take the helm of VC fund’s Kiwi out as its founding head, Samantha Wong, returns to Australia pending the birth of her second child. Wong announced the move back across The Ditch on Blackbird’s blog, saying “I’ve decided this is the right time for me and my family to move… Read more »
Much of life is about pedigree. It’s why parents pay insane amounts of money for private schools (aka the old school tie), why VCs back founders 2nd time around (even after previous failures), royals marry other royals, and why a co-owner of champion racehorse Winx paid $10 million for her filly at auction this week.… Read more »
A vector search startup for ecommerce, founded by a former Amazon robotics scientist and engineer, has raised US$12.5 million (A$19.4m) in a Series A, just six months after banking A$8.1m in a Seed round. The fresh raise for Marqo, was led by Lightspeed, with support from Blackbird, January Capital, and Chronosphere founder and CTO Rob… Read more »
Venture fund Blackbird has surveyed its investment efforts in 2024, and deployed almost the same amount last year as it has annually, on average, since 2020. Blackbird’s annual year in review reveals they deployed $229 million across 20 new and 30 follow-on rounds in 41 companies. That’s an increase on the 38 cheques in 2023,… Read more »
If you’ve ever stared at your fridge contents like a Masterchef mystery box, wondering how to turn it all into dinner, then a new recipe platform, which just scored $4.15 million in Seed funding from the likes of Blackbird Ventures, could be the answer. Called Clove, it’s been developed by two former Canva employees, the… Read more »
A generative AI content production platform that has created more than 700 million images, and trained more than 470,000 custom generative AI models, since launching a year ago has raised $47 million, The next level version of OpenAi’s DALL-E, Leonardo.Ai was backed by Blackbird, Side Stage Ventures, Smash Capital, TIRTA Ventures, Gaorong Capital and Samsung… Read more »
It seems all is not rainbows and unicorns in Australian venture capital. A bit of the green-eyed monster is emerging against market leader Blackbird Ventures, according to today’s AFR. The business paper has been talking to “industry sources”, anonymous founders and VC figures who won’t go on the record because they “need to eat”, painting… Read more »
New Zealand healthtech startup Carepatron has raised A$6 million in a Seed round co-led by existing backer Blackbird Ventures and US-based TQ Ventures: Carepatron, launched in late 2021 by David Pene and Jamie Frew. It practice management software helps healthcare practitioners deal with administration, cutting the time spent dealing with it by around 8 hours… Read more »
VC firm Blackbird Ventures has cracked open some of its golden eggs, offloading a small slice of its stake in design platform Canva at a US$25.5 billion (A$38.8bn) valuation in a secondary market sale to US investors. The deal with New York’s Coatue Management and San Francisco’s ICONIQ Capital is another step down the path… Read more »
 Sydney startup MagicBrief has raised $2 million in a pre-Seed round for its marketing platform which acts like the lovechild of Canva and Pinterest for advertising. The round was led by Blackbird with support from Archangel Ventures. Several individual founders also chipped in as angel investors, including Vimeo’s Zach Klein, UsTwo’s Matt Miller, Tim Doyle… Read more »
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.
