News
M&A, IPOs & Exits
Dragonfly, the AI holding company that buys services businesses and rebuilds them on a shared AI platform, has acquired its first strata manager for undisclosed consideration, with two or three more under term sheet (Capital Brief)
Five V Capital, the Australian private equity firm, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in First AML, the New Zealand anti-money-laundering compliance software company, for undisclosed consideration, giving early backer Blackbird a payday (AFR)
Capital Markets
NextDC has lost about $3b in value after Jemena suspended the power line works feeding its M3 Melbourne campus amid community protests, cutting FY27 revenue and EBITDA guidance by about $140m each (AFR)
Zip shares fell about 30% after it disclosed a coordinated US fraud event costing $10.1m, even as first-quarter income rose 17% to $373m and it reaffirmed FY27 guidance of $340m cash EBITDA (Capital Brief)
Partnerships & Deals
Ansarada, the virtual data room for M&A and capital raising, has integrated with Legora so deal teams can pull data room documents into the AI legal platform for due diligence and drafting, in beta (LinkedIn)
Firmus has signed Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab as a third anchor customer while confidential documents show OpenAI can terminate if its Malaysian data centres are materially delayed; Nvidia is weighing hundreds of millions more (AFR)
Acusensus, the ASX-listed maker of AI cameras that catch phone use, seatbelt and speeding offences, has won a five-year ACT enforcement contract worth about $63m, rising to $210m with two extensions (BNA)
Product Launches, Milestones and Expansion
Hooops, a tool from recruiter Lookahead that sends each candidate a private careers page briefing them on the role before they reply, has launched in private beta (LinkedIn)
Canva has launched Craft, its first in-house image model, which it says ranks fourth on Design Arena behind only OpenAI - built in six months after frontier-model costs forced it to delay its AI products (AFR)
Venture Capital & Other Funding
Australian dealmakers and families have backed Astor, a new European data centre developer run by former Global Switch executives, with €200m ($323m) - half equity via Conrad Lucas’s Margaux Platforms, half debt from Intermediate Capital (AFR)
Xsights, the agtech whose XioT Tag tracks pig health in real time across 12 markers, is raising $10m at a $135m valuation through Reach Markets, which has tipped in $5m, Street Talk reports (AFR)
JET Charge, the EV charging company, has won a $4m ARENA grant to deploy up to 130 bidirectional chargers and electric vehicles across the ACT government fleet, Australia’s largest commercial vehicle-to-grid trial (Direct)
Seek will sell about $1b of non-core Seek Growth Fund stakes, targeting $840m of liquidity over five years ($700m to Seek); the fund manager earns carry only if that threshold is met (Capital Brief)
Airtree’s stake in Swedish legal AI company Legora has jumped 57% on paper after a $782m (US$550m) Series E valued it at US$8.8b, seven months after Airtree joined the Series D at US$5.6b (AFR)
Coherence Neuro, the US brain-implant company co-founded by Australian Elise Jenkins to track and electrically treat cancer, has raised $65m (US$45m) in a Series A co-led by Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund (AFR)
Innovation Victoria has doubled the Alice Anderson Fund with another $10m - the sidecar fund co-invests alongside angels and VCs in women-led Victorian startups and has put $9m into 46 companies, drawing $64m alongside (Startup Daily)
Government, Policy & Regulation
OpenAI has appointed Ray Griggs, Johanna Weaver and CyberCX’s Alastair MacGibbon to an independent Australian taskforce on AI incident notification, and committed $14m (US$10m) in credits to harden Australian agencies’ cyber defences (Capital Brief)
Independent senator David Pocock has proposed a 5% levy on the revenue of data centres above 5MW from 2027, which he says would raise $500m over four years from an AI ‘gold rush’ (InnovationAus)
OpenAI has told parliament’s AI inquiry it could ‘potentially’ pay into a fund compensating Australian creators for training data, subject to scope, opt-outs and fees; its Australian arm booked $3.86m of revenue in 2025 (Forbes Australia)
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will put the startup tax bill to Parliament next week: the widened CGT concession (three-year holding, no $10m cap), R&D tax incentive changes from July 2028 and ESVCLP caps lifted to $270m (Startup Daily)
An Israeli company, Discover-Tech, used online ads to attack Australia’s nuclear science agency ANSTO, other government agencies, critical infrastructure and the ABC with zero-click spyware (ABC)
Ecosystem & Hubs
Innovation Victoria is offering researchers $150k via convertible notes to spin their work into startups - applications for the July 2027 cohort close 2nd April; this year’s fellows include APRM Technologies, LocalPharm and Poly Motion (Startup Daily)
People Moves & Spotlights
Cicada Innovations, the deep tech incubator, has appointed professor Rob Gorkin and ex-CSIRO Sam Bruce as venture growth experts, while warning the R&D tax incentive’s proposed 10-year company age limit would hurt deep tech (Startup Researcher)
Swipejobs founder and chair Katrina Leslie has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2026; the AI hiring platform, now road-testing an ASX float, made close to $1.7b of revenue in FY26 (SmartCompany)
Others News & Updates
ASIC is making routine inquiries into the failed Firmus IPO but has not opened a formal investigation, its enforcement chief told parliament’s AI committee, after Senator Dave Sharma asked it to examine investor disclosure (Capital Brief)
HiveKeepers’ Micro Honey Harvester, a countertop spinner that extracts honey from small cassettes without uncapping, and Silicon Quantum Computing’s Watermelon processor have made TIME’s 300 best inventions of 2026 (SmartCompany)
WeAre8, the ‘ethical’ social media app founded by Australian Zoe Kalar and backed by Simon Rothery and Anthony Miller, is in US Chapter 11 and asking investors for US$15,000 each to fund a rescue consortium (AFR)
MinterEllison has filed Australia’s first social media harm class action against Meta in the Federal Court, on behalf of eight plaintiffs who say Facebook and Instagram exposed them to harmful content as children (InnovationAus)
Funding Rounds
Syncrowin, an industrial AI platform that combines sensor and maintenance data for energy and manufacturing operators to cut breakdowns and downtime, has raised $3m in a Pre-Seed round from Collide Capital, Hustle Fund, POV Ventures, Co Ventures, Ventari and Angel Investors (Syncrowin | Capital Brief)
Willed, an online estate planning platform for Australians to write wills and organise probate and funeral arrangements in one place, has raised ~$10m from Equity Trustees, Ellerston Capital and Angel Investors (EQT | AFR)
Accretion Bio, a BioTech whose imaging platform tracks disease proteins inside living neurons to inform early drug discovery for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, has raised an Undisclosed amount from Antler Australia (The University of Queensland)
Sparc Hydrogen, a green hydrogen developer building a solar reactor that splits water into hydrogen using sunlight to cut production costs, has raised $1.3m from Sparc Technologies, Fortescue and Adelaide University (Australian Manufacturing)
Cuttable, an AdTech platform that turns a brand’s own photos and videos into AI-generated ads and learns from results to recommend what to run next, has raised $20m in a Series A round from AirTree Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Rampersand and Glitch Capital (Capital Brief | SmartCompany)