Most of this week was one company. Firmus pulled what would have been the biggest ASX float since Telstra, and I’ll spend most of my time on that. The other thing worth a look is how much money is still going into the private side of the market, with Square Peg and AustralianSuper both putting numbers on it this week.
The Firmus week, as reported by the AFR, went like this.
Monday; the syndicate was telling fund managers demand was “well in excess” of the $7.9b (US$5.5b) on offer.
Tuesday; the book opened and CDC confirmed Project Southgate, the $73b, 1.6GW build announced in October 2025, was over after 42MW in Melbourne.
Wednesday night; the bankers were offering stock at $8.25 instead of $11, a 25% cut
Friday; the float was pulled.
Firmus say they’ll raise privately and consider another listing, which the AFR reports means the Nasdaq. I don’t think this is the AI trade ending; the OpenAI and Meta contracts are still there, and AirTrunk picked the same week to treble their Japan investment to as much as $43b (US$30b). What investors wouldn’t do is pay $44b (US$30.6b), ~600x FY26 revenue of US$50.8m, for a company with 46MW running and 865MW still to build, whilst 57.6% of the register could sell on day one. Australian Retirement Trust and UniSuper reportedly passed, and Airlie told their clients to think of it as a startup. The July terms are an interesting point to watch out for, as the AFR reported, NVIDIA, Blackstone and Coatue convert one for one if a listing is done by 30th November; if it slips six months they get 1.05 shares for every one they hold, 1.15 if it slips further, plus top up shares if their returns miss the targets, all of it diluting the founders and the early investors. The clauses can be renegotiated if both sides agree, but the private round Firmus are now talking about has a deadline attached, and whoever writes that cheque will know it.
Away from the ASX the private markets are continuing to move. Forbes Australia reports Square Peg has closed more than $1b across two funds, roughly 40% for early stage and 60% for the Opportunities fund that does bigger bets in and beyond the portfolio, their largest raise yet and the second $1b+ fund this year after Blackbird’s $1.05b in August. AustralianSuper say they’ve now committed more than $1.5b to Australian VC, up from ~$600m five years ago, and by their count have backed seven of the nine current unicorns. Heidi Health, 15 days after their $140m Series C, are about to take discounted compute from Innovation Victoria and ResetData in exchange for equity, which Capital Brief says is believed to be an Australian first. None of that depended on Firmus listing. The Heidi deal is the one I’m interested in seeing how it plays out; paying for compute with equity rather than cash is not something I’ve seen in Australia yet, and if it works for Heidi I’d expect other AI companies to ask for the similar terms.
What will be interesting to see is whether Firmus get a private round done before 30th November and at what valuation, and whether Swipejobs, which was in front of the same fund managers last week testing a $2b float on $753m of first half revenue, still gets a hearing. I’d expect the window isn’t shut, just that the next company through it gets priced on revenue it already has rather than speculation, hype and a good PR campaign.
News
M&A, IPOs & Exits
Firmus has pulled its $44b ASX float after CDC ended their $73b Project Southgate partnership and the $7.9b (US$5.5b) book-build fell short at $11 a share; it will now seek private funding and reportedly a Nasdaq listing (AFR)
Unless Firmus lists by 30 November, its July terms give Nvidia, Blackstone and Coatue 1.05 to 1.15 shares for each they hold plus top-ups if returns lag, diluting founders and early investors (AFR)
MUFG, the Japanese bank, has won ACCC approval to acquire Grow Inc, the AirTree-backed super administration platform behind HESTA’s botched system switch, at a $78m valuation, down from $250m last year (AFR)
Software Combined, the aggregator that buys and holds B2B software businesses, has acquired Acendre, the recruitment and onboarding platform used by more than half of Commonwealth agencies, from US owner HireRoad for undisclosed consideration (BNA)
Swipejobs, the AI job-matching platform, told fund managers first-half revenue hit $753m as it road-tests a $2b ASX float, leaving them unsure whether to value it as labour hire or an AI native (AFR)
Capital Markets
RocketDNA, the ASX-listed drone-in-a-box data company serving miners including BHP Mitsubishi Alliance, has raised $2.23m in a placement at a 2.4% premium, with major shareholder Daniel Narayan lifting his stake to 19.5% (BNA)
Partnerships & Deals
Arkeus, the defence sensor startup, has won its first Australian Army order for Warden, its AI-powered optical radar that lets Integrator surveillance drones detect and track objects day and night; value undisclosed (Startup Daily)
Commonwealth Bank has become the first major corporate to pay for Australian news content used in workplace AI tools, signing a Copyright Agency licence covering prompts and summaries by its 50,000-plus staff (The Australian)
Electro Optic Systems, the ASX-listed maker of remote weapon and counter-drone systems, has signed a conditional $700m (£370m) contract - its largest ever - for a nationwide counter-drone system in an unnamed Gulf state (BNA)
Heidi Health will soon finalise a deal to take discounted compute from Innovation Victoria and data centre builder ResetData in exchange for a stake in the company, believed to be an Australian first (Capital Brief)
Sea Forest, the ASX-listed maker of SeaFeed, a methane-cutting seaweed feed additive, has signed Teys Australia as exclusive beef distributor to 2030, targeting 480,000 head by June 2027 (BNA)
Stakk, the ASX-listed fraud detection software company, has signed IBM to deploy its AI document processing across Australia and New Zealand from October, following its Candescent and FBI wins; revenue is volume-based and undisclosed (Australian FinTech)
Product Launches, Milestones and Expansion
AirTrunk will treble its Japan data centre investment to as much as $43b (US$30b) and double its committed capacity there to more than 1GW, four months after committing US$30b to India (The Australian)
Airwallex has set up a global holding company in London, renaming its UK entity Airwallex Global, as it leans into Europe while US politicians attack its China links (Capital Brief)
Atlassian has rebuilt its MCP server so AI agents connect to Jira and Confluence on fewer tokens and added agent session tracking; Mike Cannon-Brookes expects customers to warm to Chinese open-weight models (AFR)
The ELO2 consortium has unveiled the latest prototype of Roo-ver, Australia’s first lunar rover, funded by a $42m Space Agency grant and bound for the Moon’s south pole in 2030 (The Australian)
Everlab, the preventive health startup, has launched OrganAge, a blood test that estimates the biological age of a member’s heart, brain, kidneys and other organs, live now for its Diagnostic and Protocol members (LinkedIn)
Maincode, the Australian AI lab, has released Matilda-K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model post-trained in Australia on Chinese lab Moonshot’s open-weight Kimi K3 to hold its own identity and give balanced political answers (LinkedIn)
Marbles, an AI-native accounting platform for Australian SMEs built on its own ledger, has launched from stealth with a 15-minute Xero migration tool and a Claude integration that reconciles the books (LinkedIn)
Trellis Data, the Main Sequence-backed AI developer, says it is profitable and will ship its own large language model within a month, arguing Australia can build competitive models without weakening copyright (Capital Brief)
Venture Capital & Other Funding
Nicola Forrest’s Coaxial Foundation will put $20m into Antler’s third Australian fund, which is raising $70m, and fund a $10m program giving women founders two $60k grants and 15% of their next round (Startup Daily)
AustralianSuper has committed more than $1.5b to Australian VC, up from about $600m five years ago, backing 250-plus startups and seven of the nine current unicorns through Blackbird, Square Peg and AirTree (Australiansuper)
Diraq, which builds quantum computers on standard silicon chips, has reached the final stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative - the US defence program testing whether a useful quantum computer can be built by 2033 - unlocking up to US$300m ($430m) in R&D funding (Forbes Australia)
H2X Global, the hydrogen fuel cell truck maker, is seeking $6.1m to fund a comeback on five staff and $70k a month, and deliver its first vehicles to Swedish waste collector Renova (AFR)
Australian founder Loong Wang’s US startup Metal has raised a US$32.5m ($46m) seed round co-led by Airwallex and its venture arm Capital 49, building blockchain rails to settle stablecoins and tokenised assets for banks (AFR)
Square Peg has closed more than $1b across two funds, its largest raise yet - 40% for early-stage Fund 6, 60% for Opportunities Fund 3 for bigger bets in and beyond its portfolio (Forbes Australia)
Government, Policy & Regulation
The Industry Department gave Anthropic its draft data centre guidelines while negotiating the April MOU that binds it to them, FOI documents show; Anthropic denies influencing the final rules (The Age)
Anthropic is finalising a deal letting Australia’s AI Safety Institute independently evaluate its frontier models, and told the inquiry it has found no sign its models breached Australian government systems (Forbes Australia)
Labor senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah has broken ranks over the budget’s R&D tax changes - cash refunds cut off for older companies - as 20 research bodies warn clinical trials will move offshore (AFR)
Kmart has pulled its $89 Anko camera glasses from sale online as the Privacy Commissioner opens an investigation into Shenzhen Qingcheng, the Chinese company behind their HeyCyan app (The Age)
Australia’s national AI standards will make companies responsible for building their products safely rather than impose prescriptive rules, Assistant Minister for Science and Technology Andrew Charlton says, as consultation closes Friday (InnovationAus)
OpenAI and Anthropic told parliament’s AI inquiry copyright licensing costs will decide whether they invest here, as OpenAI’s Jason Kwon called its Medicare breach response ‘not good enough’ and backed mandatory reporting (AFR)
Funding Rounds
Lubdub, a MedTech home cardiac kit that combines dry-electrode ECG, saliva biomarker test and handsfree ultrasound for people to detect heart disease, has raised $6m in a Seed round from Angel Investors (Business News)
Energy Bay, an energy platform that builds and operates rooftop solar and battery embedded networks for property owners to cut power costs, has raised an Undisclosed amount from Pacific Equity Partners (AFR)