Less than three years after listing on the US Nasdaq, Brisbane-based electric vehicle charging company Tritium has been placed in receivership in a spectacular collapse for the 23-year-old business. McGrathNicol Restructuring has appointed partners Shaun Fraser, Katherine Sozou, Matthew Hutton and Jamie Harris as receivers of Tritium DCFC Ltd (Nasdaq: DCFC), less than a day… 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 »
Build Club, Australia’s largest AI engineer and founder community is partnering with AWS to launch an accelerator for technical AI founders. The Build Club Accelerator is for 15 Australian technical founders – AI engineer and researchers – and will give them a springboard into the US market. Build Club founder Annie Liao said her ambition… Read more »
One way South by Southwest (SXSW) Sydney is different to most tech and startup festivals is how it chooses its panels in a Survivor-meets-Eurovision way, with people asked to vote on the 1,100-odd submissions received to choose their favourite. The fortnight of voting in Session Select leads to LinkedIn being flooded with “please like me”posts… Read more »
Food distribution startup Prep has raised $200,000 from Melbourne VC Skalata to connect major food retailers, corporates and restaurants with emerging food brands. Prep enables food producers and brands to efficiently scale B2B distribution – anywhere – for a low margin. The platform integrates with a producer’s existing ordering systems, and is five times more… Read more »
One of Australia’s most-loved startup festivals _SOUTHSTART has forged a strategic partnership with the Adelaide Economic Development Agency to launch a new accelerator program. MASTERM!ND is a 5-month accelerator for up to 10 startups based in the South Australian capital. _SOUTHSTART co-director Danielle Seymour said the accelerator builds on the organisation’s commitment to catalysing innovation and… Read more »
Sydney startup Heatseeker, which uses AI to simplify business idea validation and market research, has launched the alpha version of its testing platform to help founders speed up the time to product launch. Heatseeker.ai was cofounded in 2023 by serial entrepreneurs Kate O’Keeffe and Fiona Triaca. They set out to develop a way to understand… Read more »
The latest Centauri-6 satellite developed by Adelaide mining tech startup Fleet Space Technologies is now in orbit after heading skywards aboard SpaceX’s Bandwagon-1 “ridesharing” mission. The Falcon 9 reusable rocket’s payload of 11 satellites took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week. The Centauri-6 microsatellite brings Fleet Space’s constellation of low earth… Read more »
Earlier this year, Neuralink implanted a chipinside the brain of 29-year-old US man Noland Arbaugh, who is paralysed from the shoulders down. The chip has enabled Arbaugh to move a mouse pointer on a screen just by imagining it moving. In May 2023, US researchers also announced a non-invasive way to “decode” the words someone… Read more »
The New York-based cofounder of New Zealand subletting startup Kiki, Toby Thomas-Smith, is blunt in his own performance assessment. “When we launched Kiki.nyc last year I fucked up,” he’s written on LinkedIn, after the business shuttered its New York launch after 3 months, only to revive it late last month amid controversy over plans to… Read more »
Demonstrably false claims and misinformation have been prominently featured on X, including by Verified users, following the Bondi Junction attack, as the social media platform again fails to grapple with a major breaking news story. Twitter was once the go-to platform for real-time, breaking news stories, often led by journalists boasting verified blue ticks. But… Read more »
US climate tech investor Sophie Purdom has made her first international investment via her New York VC fund Planeteer Capital, leading a $5.3 million Seed round. Purdom visited Sydney late last year as a keynote speaker at Climate Salad‘s Climate Tech Festival, which featured more than 50 Australian climate tech startups. The one she’s picked… Read more »
Ahead of Startmate Demo Day on May 2 in Sydney at Blackbird’s Sunrise, Startup Daily is profiling the 10 startups involved. Today it’s New Zealand startup Kiwifibre, which is hoping to build race cars from plants. KiwiFibre creates natural fibre composite materials from Harakeke – a natively grown New Zealand wonder plant, and one of the… Read more »
A startup turning agricultural waste into activated carbon, which is used to filter environmental toxins, has raised $2.6 million in a Series A. Government-backed investment fund Breakthrough Victoria chipped in $1 million, joined by VCs Alberts Impact Ventures, Investible, Artesian and Startmate. The funds will support the testing and establishment of Bygen’s large-scale production plant,… Read more »
Western Australian self-manage care platform PlanCare has topped up its Seed round to $2.5 million from existing backer Purpose Ventures. The new Perth VC originally backed PlanCare in July 2023, and the additional funding is the first follow-on investment from Purpose. PlanCare founder Dave Newman previously ran Morning Startup for more than a decade and… Read more »
‘Have I gone too far?’ How founders can beat their startup demons 
Smart hotels get even smarter: 72 Byte to launch in Australia with AI expert backing 
Tassie carbon accounting startup banks $5.3 million Seed round 
Eucalyptus head of growth Matt Rossi departs to launch his own marketing startup, Oodle 
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