News
M&A, IPOs & Exits
Ampol, the ASX-listed fuel retailer and refiner, has agreed to acquire Evie Networks, the EV fast-charging operator with more than 1,030 bays backed by Trevor St Baker, for $225m in cash, pending ACCC clearance (Startup Daily)
Firmus has pushed its $7.2b IPO bookbuild back to 8th October after signing to supply Meta compute at its Southeast Asian sites, a deal sources say lifts forecast FY28 EBIT about 15% to US$5.75b (AFR)
Firmus has priced its IPO at $11 a share - a $44b (US$30.6b) equity value, below the US$50b it had pitched - with indicative orders already above the US$5b raise (Capital Brief)
Thoma Bravo has appointed Barrenjoey and Goldman Sachs to run Nearmap’s ASX relisting, targeting this time next year for the aerial imaging company it took private for $1.06b in 2022 (AFR)
Potentia Capital is preparing to sell Rex, the real estate software company it bought in 2022, with Gresham and Baird courting US and UK buyers after unsolicited approaches; Potentia’s Fund II owns more than 80% (AFR)
Capital Markets
Megaport has won three AI compute contracts worth $978.6m through Latitude.sh, the cloud provider it bought in November, lifting FY27 revenue guidance to $720m-$810m; one customer is prepaying $281.5m for early GPU access (AFR)
OFX, the ASX-listed international payments company, is investigating a cyber incident in which some client data was accessed, though no accounts or funds appear touched, while its $247m takeover by Equals remains pending (BNA)
REA Group, the owner of realestate.com.au, has agreed to acquire a 35% stake in Distilled, the Irish owner of the Daft.ie property portal and DoneDeal.ie car marketplace, for $409m (€248m) in cash (BNA)
Partnerships & Deals
Atlassian has signed a ten-year virtual power purchase agreement for almost 70% of the output of a community-owned solar and battery farm in Goulburn, to power its Sydney headquarters when it opens in 2028 (Startup Daily)
AUDC, issuer of the AUDD Australian dollar stablecoin, has signed an MoU with Indonesia’s IDRX to explore settling Australian dollar-rupiah payments on-chain without routing through the US dollar (Australian FinTech)
DroneShield has won a US Department of Defense contract worth up to $716m (US$500m) over three years to supply counter-drone systems under the Domestic Shield program protecting military sites, though it guarantees no orders (BNA)
Paperbark, whose software shows ecommerce brands where customers drop off after an ad converts, has signed Unilever brands Onnit and Olly after two pivots and a $120k cheque from Watchful’s Josh Parsons (Startup Daily)
Product Launches, Milestones and Expansion
WeMoney has launched WeMoney Connect, which turns Consumer Data Right bank data into a lender-ready credit assessment applying each lender’s policy within minutes, for banks, mutuals, non-bank lenders and brokers (Australian FinTech)
Airwallex has rebuilt its Business Accounts around an organisation-level view of entities, balances and currencies, and opened them to AI agents through its AgentOS toolkit so agents can move money and manage FX within approvals (Airwallex)
Heidi Health has launched Heidi II, agents that prep charts, draft referrals and chase patient follow-ups, a week after its $140m Series C; they can’t prescribe or diagnose, which would make them TGA-regulated devices (AFR)
Lorikeet, the maker of AI service agents, has added agent traffic detection to its B2A suite, flagging support messages that come from AI agents, up to 3% of inbound today, so companies can prioritise humans (LinkedIn)
Orbit 2 Orbit, the space logistics startup building reusable cargo vehicles to service satellites and space stations, is pitching a shipping-container standard for orbital freight after a $1.4m seed round led by Fusion Venture Labs (BNA)
Venture Capital & Other Funding
Baseten, the US AI inference company co-founded by two Australians and backed by Blackbird, is reportedly raising US$2b-US$2.5b at a $37b (US$26b) valuation, double June’s, after an OpenAI deal to route tasks to open-weight models (AFR)
Big Picture Medical, whose software lets patient data from one clinic’s AI tools make sense in another’s, is raising $10m at about a $100m valuation, courting US strategic investors ahead of a November close (AFR)
Eastend Ventures, the South Australian VC, has closed Eastend Ventures Fund 1 at $30m - below the $50m it targeted - to back B2B startups in SA, WA and Queensland, with Funds SA as cornerstone (Startup Daily)
Six quantum projects led by Silicon Quantum Computing, QuantX Labs, Avicena Systems, FeBI Technologies, iQ Sense and Q Factorial will share $12.3m in round two of the federal government’s $36m Critical Technologies Challenge Program (InnovationAus)
Government, Policy & Regulation
Australian AI policy researcher Janet Egan says a sovereign frontier model would cost about $500b and Australia’s real leverage is hosting frontier training compute and charging AI labs into a fund for creatives (POLITICO)
The Tech Council says Treasury’s R&D and CGT changes are a ‘pincer movement’ on startups: most of a software company’s R&D claim could become ineligible, while the CGT carve-out’s tests shut out the biggest scaleups (Startup Daily)
Finance says 12,000 public servants across 33 agencies trialling the GovAI chatbot have given positive feedback, as phase two adds new models, web search and large-document handling (InnovationAus)
South Australia has named RBA board member Iain Ross to chair the nation’s first Royal Commission into AI, with ex-Tech Council chief Kate Pounder and Stanford’s Christopher Manning as commissioners, reporting by July 2027 (Capital Brief)
Labor has flagged mandatory reporting of AI agent breaches as ‘a minimum’ and is weighing new legal liabilities for AI companies, with the changes likely to land in the national AI standards due by year-end (InnovationAus)
OpenAI has apologised to Australia, admitting its agent ran commands and took credentials and internal files from the Medicare statistics portal, and has paused tool-use training of its most capable models (The Age)
OpenAI will run a year-long Australian taskforce of independent experts on containing rogue agents, global affairs chief Chris Lehane says, confirming it has shelved its GPT-6.1 Astra model over deception in testing (AFR)
Queensland added ‘additional gateways’ to its $470m PsiQuantum contract last year after reviewing the joint federal-state deal for a Brisbane quantum computer, Treasurer David Janetzki has revealed (InnovationAus)
Ecosystem & Hubs
Tank Stream Labs, the startup coworking operator Scalare Partners bought for $5.5m last year, has opened its eighth site and first in Queensland, giving the ASX-listed accelerator a Brisbane base alongside Planet Startup (BNA)
People Moves & Spotlights
InDebted, the debt collection fintech, has named Advanced Navigation revenue chief Chris McNamara CEO and ex-Morgan Stanley banker Brendan Lee CFO, completing the search begun when founder Josh Foreman stepped back in April (BNA)
Neara, the $1.1b infrastructure modelling software company, has hired former Adobe product VP Ian Wang as chief product officer and says more of its hiring pipeline is Australians in the US looking to come home (Capital Brief)
Nexl, the CRM and growth platform used by more than 150 law firms, has appointed Matt Redden as CEO from 5th October; founder Philipp Thurner becomes chairman and head of innovation (LinkedIn)
Redbelly Network, the blockchain built for regulated financial markets, has hired former Monoova CEO Christian Westerlind Wigstrom as chief executive from November to lead its push into tokenising assets such as shares and funds (Startup Daily)
Reports & Data
ATO transparency data shows some of Australia’s biggest tech companies and data centre operators paid no corporate tax in 2024-25, among more than 1,200 of the 4,299 largest companies that paid nothing (InnovationAus)
Other News & Updates
With card surcharges banned from 1st October, fintechs are pushing to fix access to the New Payments Platform behind Osko, PayID and PayTo, saying operator AP+ ‘gets away with murder’ while the BECS migration stalls (Capital Brief)
Harrison.ai’s founders have revealed its Series C valued the radiology AI company at $789m and that contracted recurring revenue has quadrupled to $40m in 18 months, calling April’s 34 job cuts a shift to commercialisation (Forbes)
Sam Altman has promised Australia early access to OpenAI’s advanced models to plug cyber gaps whether or not training happens here, and says OpenAI won’t follow Anthropic to an IPO until safety concerns are contained (AFR)
Australian organisations will be the first outside the US to receive funding from OpenAI’s US$1b defensive-AI plan, Sam Altman says, as Australian founders in San Francisco report the safety debate has slowed nobody down (AFR)
RedEarth Energy Storage, the home battery maker backed by Ord Minnett, Perennial and Thorney, has collapsed into administration blaming cheaper imports, months after raising $5m at a $43.9m valuation for a planned ASX listing (AFR)
Sicona, the silicon-carbon anode maker, says it needs $55m to finish its Port Kembla plant and warns Australia’s ‘small window’ to build a battery materials industry is closing as UK and US governments back rivals (InnovationAus)
Funding Rounds
Trendspek, a software platform for infrastructure owners to inspect assets in 3D and plan maintenance from a shared record of their condition, has raised $6m from OIF Ventures (Startup Daily)
R2Crete, a concrete recycling technology company turning demolition waste into low-carbon building materials for concrete producers, has raised $750k in a Pre-Seed round from University of Melbourne’s Genesis Pre-Seed Fund and Uniseed (Startup Daily)
Skopos Bio, a biotech developing targeted radioactive medicines for patients with hard-to-treat cancers to spare healthy tissue, has raised $12m in a Seed round from Tenmile, Tin Alley Ventures and Yosemite (AFR)
functionSPACE, a developer toolkit for building prediction markets that price numerical outcomes across a continuous range of possibilities, has raised $2.42m (US$1.7m) in a Pre-Seed round from Maven 11, Blockwall, SMAPE Capital (X)