🇦🇺 This Week in Australian Startups #170, 19th July 2026
$606m raised across 7 rounds, Heidi lands largest procurement deal in the history of the NHS for 70,000 clinicians, Canva releases Code 2.0, Albanese announces a new Office of AI
A much later send than usual, apologies for anyone who missed your morning Sunday read! I moved houses on Friday, and what should have taken 3-4 hours turned into 10+ hours and the rest of the weekend spent living amongst boxes…
A huge week for funding - $606.5m across seven rounds, the biggest week I've tracked in 2026 and the biggest since December 2025. it's really a story about two rounds though AdvanCell $450m (USD $315m) Series D and Cover Genius $143.3m (USD $100m) making up 97.8% of the total raised this week. The other five rounds total $13.2m, and there wasn't a single round between $6m and $143m.
Albanese has also announced a new Office of AI inside his own department, large data centres required to add as much power to the grid as they use, and a world first copyright rules giving artists control and payment. Anthropic is pressing from the other side, tying its potential US$15b local investment to copyright clarity. Add the continuing industry sentiment over the proposed startup CGT concession and this was a week where Canberra looked to take back control of the narrative.
News
M&A, IPOs & Exits
Qoria delists from the ASX on July 20 after completing its $1.7b merger with US digital safety group Aura; the merged company trades as AXQ, with shares down about 30% since Aura’s listing (BNA)
Verona Capital, the Perth family office of Craig Burton, has acquired a controlling stake in Dredge Robotics, whose robots clean water infrastructure for BHP and Rio Tinto, for undisclosed consideration; seller Acorn Capital books a 3.4x return (Startup Researcher)
Capital Markets
Firmus backer Tectonic marks up its stake 59% to match the AI data centre group’s $12.2b pre-money valuation from its $2.9b raise; shareholders vote July 31, with an ASX float tipped for early October (AFR)
Xero shares fall 4.3% after CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy sells her entire $2.2m direct stake, citing tax; the stock is down 60% over 12 months (Capital Brief)
Ceretas, a UQ spin-out developing portable ultrasound devices to treat brain conditions like Alzheimer’s, raises $8m at an $18m market cap and fast-tracks its ASX debut after strong IPO demand (AFR)
TechnologyOne lifts FY26 guidance to 18-20% profit growth and creates four new executive roles; CFO Cale Bennett will move across to lead its regulated industries division (Capital Brief)
Partnerships & Deals
AI scribe Heidi named sole supplier of ambient voice technology under an NHS England Midlands framework covering up to 70,000 clinicians; it’s the largest procurement of its kind in NHS history (LinkedIn)
Product Launches, Milestones and Expansion
Defence sensor maker Arkeus unveils an advanced manufacturing facility at Ormeau on the Gold Coast to lift production 20-fold, backed by $1.48m from the Queensland government’s Sovereign Industry Development Fund (BNA)
Immutable, the Ferguson brothers’ Web3 gaming company and Australia’s fourth-largest private tech firm, is now calling itself an AI-marketing platform, with new filings revealing the retreat from its NFT roots (Rampart)
Canva releases Code 2.0, generating websites 75% faster and letting users vibe code inside existing designs, betting its design pedigree can save businesses from the generic ‘vibe coded’ look (SmartCompany)
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins launches the Global Goals Platform, applying Canva’s user-feedback playbook to democracy; Wollongong’s 220,000 residents get first access from July 24 (The Age)
Dovetail, the Sydney-founded customer intelligence platform, moves its AI Agents into general availability with customer ‘digital twins’, and launches Channels 2.0, turning customer feedback into a pull request in one click (LinkedIn)
Solid rocket motor maker Black Sky Industries spins out Spinifex Space to operate its south-west Queensland ranges, offering suborbital launch campaigns, private range access and test and evaluation services (LinkedIn)
Liquid Instruments launches GenInst Studio, which turns plain-English prompts into custom test instruments on its Moku hardware; it follows April’s $US50m Series C co-led by Keysight and the National Reconstruction Fund (SiliconANGLE)
Venture Capital & Other Funding
Beaten Zone, Steve Baxter’s Brisbane-based defence tech VC, passes $20m committed for its debut fund after a record June, backing AI, autonomy, quantum and space startups aligned with AUKUS Pillar 2 (BNA)
NSW awards just over $1m in MVP Ventures grants of up to $75k to 22 startups from 322 applicants; roughly half the funding went to women-led, Indigenous and regional businesses (SmartCompany)
Giant Leap partner Rachel Yang argues women-founder programs keep teaching founders to navigate a broken system; she wants VC process redesign and public pipeline reporting instead (SmartCompany)
Government, Policy & Regulation
FinTech Australia warns almost all fintechs would be ineligible for the proposed startup CGT concession, calling it an ‘existential threat’ to a sector contributing $13.6b to the economy (Startup Daily)
Startup sector submissions reject the government’s proposed CGT concession as too narrow and complex, warning it ‘falls significantly short’ and could push founders offshore (Capital Brief)
Anthropic ties its potential $US15b Australian investment - 1.4GW of data centre capacity to train Claude - to copyright clarity, with CEO Dario Amodei pressing Treasurer Jim Chalmers for legal certainty (Startup Researcher)
Sharon AI CEO James Manning breaks with tech peers, arguing Australia doesn’t need copyright change to win data centre billions and citing Microsoft’s $25b commitment; his Nasdaq-listed neocloud plans an ASX float this year (Forbes)
Albanese ends Labor’s hands-off AI era: a new Office of AI in his department, legislated standards forcing large data centres to add as much power to the grid as they use, and world-first copyright rules giving artists control and payment (AFR)
AI founders and researchers urge the government to fund its sovereign AI ambitions, contrasting the UK’s £1b-plus packages with Australia’s $1b in NRF critical tech funding and a $50m AI research round (AFR)
FOI emails reveal officials planned to keep the Industry Growth Program pause quiet, preparing ‘if asked’ talking points and no proactive announcement after $102m was stripped from the scheme (SmartCompany)
The Victorian government will introduce laws making it easier to sue AI and social media platforms over psychiatric harm to children and to identify people accused of online vilification (Capital Brief)
People Moves & Spotlights
EVP promotes Mark Velik, 33, to partner - the $400m venture firm’s first new partner since 2019 - taking its partnership to five; Velik led its Splose and AutoGrab investments (AFR)
Other News & Updates
Atlassian shifts staff bonuses from all-equity to a performance-based cash-and-equity mix, and scraps lower pay for remote staff outside NSW, Victoria and the ACT, after its shares halved in a year (AFR)
Former Dovetail lawyer has discontinued her sexual harassment case against the startup and co-founder Benjamin Humphrey after an undisclosed out-of-court resolution (AFR)
Funding Rounds
AdvanCell, a radiopharmaceutical developer that delivers targeted alpha therapies for patients with metastatic prostate cancer to shrink tumours, has raised $450m (USD $315m) in a Series D round from Ally Bridge Group and Alpha Wave (Forbes)
Cover Genius, an insurtech distribution platform for digital companies to embed insurance to give customers purchase-time protection, has raised $143.2m (USD $100m) from Vista Credit Partners (Direct)
VXB, an aerospace platform that combines physics with material and cost data for engineers to shrink space hardware design cycles to days, has raised $5.72m (USD $4m) in a Seed round from Dauntless Ventures, Fulcrum Venture Group, Investible, Angel Investors (Direct)
Syngenis, a biotech oligonucleotide synthesis platform that makes custom RNA and DNA for pharma and research to accelerate genetic medicine development, has raised $4m in a Pre-IPO round (SMH)
BlueNexus, a no-code platform for non-technical creators and businesses to build, run and sell AI agents to automate workflows, has raised $2m in a Seed round from M31 Capital, Antler Australia, Eastend Ventures and inSilico One (EIN Presswire)
Rentsy, a rental marketplace app for Australians to hire local items and services from individuals and small businesses, has raised $800k in a Seed round from Admiralty Capital Group (Gold Coast Bulletin)
ESGAgent.ai, a software platform for heavy-industry operators to centralise ESG data and meet compliance and reporting requirements, has raised $725k in a Seed round from DNX Ventures and Angel Investors (Startup Daily)