🇦🇺 This Year in Australian Startups 2024

Welcome to the very first edition in a new annual series - This Year in Australian Startups.

This is a project I’ve been wanting to do for some time now, and excited that I’ve had time to do it this year.

Check out the video below on LinkedIn, and check out the links below to go deeper into all the companies and stories discussed.

Haris Qureshi

• Heading into a Golden Era of Startups & VC (Rampersand)

Chris Gillings

• Cut Through Venture’s Annual and Quarterly Reports (Cut Through Venture)

Ananya Sinha

• Massive Wealth Transfer Will Give Women $34 Trillion by 2030 (Bloomberg)

• Flavia Tata Nardini, Co-founder & CEO of Fleet Space Technologies (LinkedIn)

• Fleet Space Technologies raised $150m in a Series D round (InnovationAus | Capital Brief | Startup Daily)

Sachin & Adam

• Destined for growth: Healthtech startup Kismet adds $20 million to close $32.5 million seed round (SmartCompany)

Vinisha Rathod

• Tech whistleblowers urged to come forward and expose corporate wrongdoing (The SMH)

Chris Titley & Leila Oliveira

• Canva valuation jumps 23% to $49 billion following share trade (Startup Daily)

• Instant millionaires: Canva makes staff rich in $3.6bn share sale (The Australian)

• Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht confirms ‘investors should have their money’ as $1.6b share sale finalises (AFR)

Annie Liao

• Heffron AI - Never Miss a Call, Never Miss an Opportunity

• Curious Thing AI - Voice AI Assistant for Business Software & Solutions

Dickie Currer

• First Australian commercial orbital launch permit issued (Australian Space Agency)

• Gilmour Space receives first Australian launch permit for orbital test flight (Gilmour Space)

Abhishek Maran

• Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind automated digital advertising agency, has raised a $5.5M Seed round led by Square Peg with participation from Rampersand (SmartCompany | AFR | Jake White)

• Sam Kroonenburg, Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Cuttable (LinkedIn)

Preethi Mohan

• Canva acquires Leonardo.ai to boost its generative AI efforts (TechCrunch)

• Welcome to Canva, Leonardo! (Canva)

• Linktree acquires social media scheduler tool Plann (TechCrunch)

• Exciting news, Linktree acquires Plann (Plann)

Michael Batko

• Lyrebird - AI medical scribe for secure, comprehensive clinical documentation

• My all-time favourite story is how a Student met Sam Altman (Michael Batko)