Innovation Bay Horizon – Deal Flow Update | July 2026

This month has been all about data, and niche but important issues. We have been seeing products ranging from AI vision models to improve compliance in construction, to hardware changing the game for elite swimming athletes. What we have noticed that AI is impacting how and, more importantly, why we collect data.

This value isn’t going unnoticed on the global stage. Startups like Shift will clean your home for free. The cost: data captured by a camera the cleaner wears, which will be used to train humanoid robots. “Tomorrow’s robots learn from today’s work,” says the startup. This momentum is only becoming exponential and we can really feel that this is a direction that is heading with our recent deal flow. 

The niche problem solvers

Alongside the headline tech, we are increasingly excited by a different kind of founder: one who has spent years deep inside a broken industry and decided to fix it themselves.

This month we reviewed companies taking on the paperwork that teachers drown in, the compliance burden that keeps insolvency practitioners up at night, and the operational ceiling that stops rental company owners from scaling without headcount. These are not glamorous problems. They are not the kind of pitches that win startup competitions. But they are exactly the kind of problems that generate sticky, high-retention software. This is because the people experiencing them feel the pain every single day and will not leave a solution that actually works.

News on the global stage

Supabase raised US$500M at a US$10.5B valuation in a Series F led by GIC, with Accel, Y Combinator, Stripe, and Coatue participating. The New Zealand-born, open-source backend platform has become foundational infrastructure for the vibe coding movement, and this round cements its position as one of the most important developer tools companies in the world.

Neura Robotics raised US$1.4B in a Series C led by Tether at a US$7B valuationThe German company builds “cognitive robots”, designed to perceive, reason, and act in unstructured human environments, rather than repeat fixed motions on a factory line.

Dentroid raised approximately A$32M at a A$265M valuation. The Canberra medtech is tackling one of dentistry’s oldest problems: roughly 30% of Australians avoid dental visits due to fear of needles. Their device, Nuralyte, uses a proprietary blend of light wavelengths to penetrate hard and soft tissues, interacting with light-sensitive molecules within the mitochondria of pain nerves to induce analgesia… without the needle.

Very excited for what’s next!

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