Funding & Investment Milestones

Who raised, and from whom

The big three

Heidi Health — $475m package, $1.26b valuation. A $140m Series C led by Blackbird, plus a 1m to US$50m ARR in two years.

Firmus Technologies — up to $7b ASX IPO, listing 22 October. Not priced. ⚠️
Reported valuation anywhere from $50b to $84b depending on who’s talking. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, BofA and Morgans running it; Nvidia, Blackstone and Coatue already on the register; OpenAI signed as anchor customer and Meta named as cornerstone for Project Southgate. A separate 2.5b in the first half of FY27.

Gilmour Space — seeking US$200–500m Series E extension. Not closed. ⚠️
Riding the SpaceX IPO, targeting international institutions, with NRFC, Hostplus, Future Fund, Blackbird, Main Sequence, QIC, HESTA and ART already in. Last round before a US listing “as early as 2028.”

Growth and Series B

Amber Electric — $77m Series E, led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s 1GT climate fund with E.ON. Melbourne home-energy platform heading to Europe.

HEO Space — $37m Series B, led by Beaten Zone, with $10m from the National Reconstruction Fund (its second space cheque after Gilmour).

Gridsight — US36m) Series B, led by Insight Partners with Galvanize, AirTree, Energy Transition Ventures and Aera. AI grid-capacity software for utilities; US expansion.

Jet Zero Australia — $30m strategic round from POSCO, Airbus and Qantas, at a valuation of up to $500m.

Pearler — $16m Series A, led by Portage Ventures (Canada, repeat lead) with Eucalyptus co-founder Charlie Gearside, Chris Cuffe’s Partners Horizon Fund and Altered Capital. Closed after a year-long process; $3.5b in client assets.

Innovaero Technologies — $40m ASX IPO, listed 18 September. Autonomous defence drones.

Seed and early stage

Apate.AI — US11.4m) seed, led by Lobby Capital with OIF, Investible, Concept and Baobab. AI agents that engage scammers. Reincorporated in Delaware; R&D stays in Sydney.

Metacognition AI — $10m, Main Sequence as sole investor. Anton van den Hengel’s Adelaide “operating system for AI agents and robots.” Research-first, no revenue model yet.

First Table (NZ) — $10m, Altered Capital, K1W1 and Icehouse. Off-peak restaurant bookings. CEO’s line on the market: “it’s soft if you’re not AI.”

Medcast — $5.4m private round, Best Practice in for $1.5m. AI clinical search.

Medow Health AI — $3.5m seed extension from existing doctor-investors. AI scribe for specialist clinics; revenue up 300% in 2025.

ReFresh — $2.5m seed, led by Black Nova with Antler and Archangel following on.

Elita — $1.9m seed, led by Boost VC (US) with Gandel Invest, Artesian, Touch Ventures and M8 Ventures. Closed in three weeks.

OpenDebt — $2m pre-seed, Blackbird and Antler. AI debt recovery.

Drumbeat (NZ) — NZ$2m seed, Icehouse Ventures.

Quillio — $1.3m ($775k SAFE from law-firm principals plus $500k venture debt from Mighty Partners). Legal AI at breakeven with $1m ARR; founder openly sceptical of VCs.

GonGlobal — $1.2m, Innovation Victoria, RMIT and a private investor.

Evatto — A$1.02m pre-seed, Purpose Ventures.

Azonic (NZ) — NZ6.1m, Blackbird with Antler.

Dela — “more than $1m” seed, single private investor.

Non-dilutive and government

Hysata — up to $49m from the Future Made in Australia Innovation Fund via ARENA, toward a $98m electrolyser line at Port Kembla.

Element Zero — up to $26m from the same fund, first green-metals investment, for a $53.6m pilot.

Global Resource Recovery — $55m senior debt from the NRFC.

ENA Respiratory — $2.98m from the MRFF (part of $10.48m across six biotechs).

Seven dementia-tech startups — $15.6m federal funding, shared.

CSIRO quadruples its backing of Main Sequence’s Atmosphere pre-seed fund to $20m.

Funds and vehicles

TPG TECA closed above hard cap at $1.85b (PE, not VC).

Significant Ventures Fund IV — $18m committed of a $50m target.

Tall Order Ventures (formerly Skalata) Fund III — $50m target, AI-native seed fund after buying out co-founder Paul Little.

Main Sequence Fund 4 — registrations of interest open; raise expected late 2026 or early 2027. Firm now above $1b AUM.

AirTree moves its Frontier residency to San Francisco (US$250k SAFE per founder) and has extended its 2014 Fund I to 2028 to keep holding Canva.

Airwallex Latitude 37 — ten AI startups get $100k each, equity-free.

Exits, and the other kind

Expert360 sold to Swipejobs for around $16m (founder disputes the figure) ⚠️ against more than $30m raised. Only Series C preferences paid; AirTree recovered about 36 cents in the dollar, Rampersand 17, and founder Bridget Loudon-Harris nothing.

Grow Inc taken over by MUFG for around $78m, against a $250m valuation last year. Series A through D holders receive no cash.

AMSL Aero for sale after a failed $30m Series B; headcount down from about 70 to 6, more than $50m raised historically.

Telix Pharmaceuticals acquires ITM (Germany) for US$1.65b.

Netwealth buys Paradino for $20m plus up to $9m earn-out.

Buildkite surfaced a $21m convertible note raised in January via ASIC filings; FY25 revenue $43.2m, net loss $28.4m, founder Keith Pitt has left leadership.

IPO pipeline talk: Swipejobs (~$2b), Nearmap relisting, Canva hiring for a 2027 US IPO, Kelly+Partners to Nasdaq.

What we’re seeing

Locally. The month has a barbell shape you can draw with a ruler. At the top, Heidi’s $475m and Firmus’s 2.5b of negative cash flow in Firmus’s. At the bottom, more than fifteen rounds under $3.5m, many of them AI, many led by angels, doctors, law-firm partners and family offices rather than institutional funds. What’s thin is the middle: strip out the three headline deals and only six Australian or NZ equity rounds cleared $10m all month, and every one of them was led from offshore, by Insight, Morgan Stanley’s 1GT, Portage, Lobby Capital, Boost. The best Australian companies are now being priced in New York and Toronto.

Two other things stand out. Government is behaving like a lead investor, with the NRF inside HEO’s Series B and ARENA writing $49m and $26m cheques, at the same moment the Australian Economic Accelerator has been axed and Breakthrough Victoria faces abolition if the Coalition wins in November, so non-dilutive capital is large and politically exposed. And the first properly documented wipe-outs of this cycle landed in the same week: Expert360 and Grow Inc both sold for a fraction of capital raised with founders and early investors at zero. Those are the scar-tissue stories, and they’re being told in public now.

Almost no local VC fund closed in September, a sharp change from August’s run of Blackbird, Galileo and GD1. Capital is flowing into companies and IPO preparation, not into new managers.

Internationally. The AI concentration is now extreme enough to be the whole story. Anthropic is preparing a US2 trillion with Nvidia anchoring; OpenAI is in early talks at US48b in three months; Mistral raised Europe’s largest-ever round. PitchBook puts year-to-date VC deal value at US1b for the first time since 2015. The market is paying almost anything for frontier AI and almost nothing for the SaaS generation before it. That’s the moat question, priced.