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- Aussie Startups Pulse Check - May 2024 💓
Aussie Startups Pulse Check - May 2024 💓
Ft. the first ever Funding the Balance Investor Leaderboard 🏆 Which funders will take out the top spot!? 👀
Welcome to the May edition of Pulse Check! 💗
A huge welcome to the 136 new subscribers who’ve joined us since last edition! 👯
If you’re new here, you’ve joined for a very special edition, featuring the first ever “Funding the Balance: Investor Leaderboard”, where Kirstin Hunter and Preethi Mohan have crunched the data on which investors are leading the way on allocating funding to gender-diverse founders, based on the raises announced in 2024 so far. 🏆️
What is Pulse Check?
Pulse Check is an initiative of Overnight Success (OS), powered by an amazing team of volunteer writers (“correspondents”) who have each contributed their own insights to bring you a comprehensive overview of what’s happening in many corners of the Aussie ecosystem.
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Inside this edition… 👀
⚡️ Industry Insights
| 🔥 Hot Topics & Trends
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🥇Diversity Leaderboard🥇
We are pleased to share the April Funding the Balance: Investor Leaderboard. 🎉
These investors have been leading the way in the first four months of 2024 when it comes to putting their investment dollars where their diversity targets are.
Our methodology considers the overall number of investments into teams with at least one gender-diverse founder. When the number of investments is equal, a tiebreaker is used to rank investors by the proportion of their reported investments that include at least one gender-diverse founder.
⚖️ Funding disaggregator ⚖️ - Gender Penalty Greatest in Mixed Gender Teams
The cumulative funding results for the first 4 months of the year shows a continuation of the trend that stories published about all-male founder teams report higher fundraising amounts compared to mixed gender and gender minority teams. Interestingly, the gender penalty appears to be impacting mixed-gender teams to a greater extent than gender-minority-only teams, with mixed-gender teams representing 24.7% of published stories yet only 11.9% of dollars.
At Funding the Balance we also disaggregate funding raised by mixed-gender teams, reallocating that funding to either “gender minority” or “man” based on the gender breakdown within that team.
So far in 2024, 86.1% of funding has been allocated to men.
To get in touch with Preethi Mohan or Kirstin Hunter, send them a message on LinkedIn.
May Munchies
I wrote an article last week on the scalability of the music industry and in it I touched on the revenue I have seen through my own project purely from ‘the product’ (the music) over the last decade. I thought it would be an interesting share to help paint the picture of the music industry from the artists' side.
Currently, we (YesYou) find ourselves in the top 5% of artists worldwide on Spotify with 50k monthly listeners. In terms of publishing, our music has landed one major sync ($60k) and several smaller totally $15k. This again places us in the top percentage of artists who have been fortunate enough to score a sync.
Adding in some APRA royalties, we've made roughly $120k from our music alone over the last 10 years.
My point? If this is an example of an artist's project that lands within the top 5-10% of the industry, is that really a great model?
So, how do we create a better model? The answer lies in new pathways for technology creation and adoption and more investment in scalable solutions.
Around the grounds
The market for Gen Ai in media and entertainment is set to rise from 1.9 bil in 2024 —> 16.8 by 2033
The Olympics will use AI to improve viewing experience and judging
May MVP
Secondz - changing restaurant recommendations from people you don’t know to people you do. You may have caught Secondz on socials, if you haven’t they are 100% worth a follow. You get some wicked recommendations from chefs around the country.
To get in touch with Gav Parry, send him a message on LinkedIn.
Optimising for creativity
As founders or startup operators, we can be obsessed with being productive. We want to be more streamlined, organised, efficient, prepared and capable. We want to do more, more, more. But having such a single-minded focus on productivity can actually lead to less momentum.
When this happens, it’s useful to shift the focus from productivity to prolificacy. Prolificacy is all about creating the space for ideas to burst into our brains, weaving together disparate concepts (songs, books, videos, businesses, history) to create something unique, and doing this on repeat.
Productivity and prolificacy are subtly different; while both are about quantity, productive optimises for efficiency, whereas prolific optimises for creativity.
If you want to become more prolific, test out these two creative practices, and then read Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way.
Morning Pages:
“In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness. All that…stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.”
The Artist’s Date:
“An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you pre-plan and defend against all interlopers. ”
To get in touch with Anna Mackenzie, send her a message on LinkedIn.
Goterra’s Founder on going against the grain
In her keynote address at the April FutureAg Expo, Goterra Founder Olympia Yarger hit on the tribalism holding the industry back from innovation.
“In Ag, we are a tribal industry,” she told the crowd. “You are where you live. Your passion is your home. Your business is your life.”
That’s why agritech innovation is so challenging.
You’re not just asking people to adopt a new piece of tech into their workflow; you’re talking about very literal disruption to their homes, their livelihoods, and their constantly changing forecasts of the future.
Connect with AgTech Investors
Join the Australian Agritech Association for the 2024 Australian Agritech Investor Showcase on Thursday 6 June.
AgTech Startups can book 1:1 meetings with active investors in an engaging, full-day event that promises some seriously unparalleled networking opportunities. Learn more.
Startup to Watch: Pairtree
Cattle rustling (the act of stealing livestock from private property) might sound like something straight out of a spaghetti western film, but it’s very much a thing.
Enter Pairtree, a tool connecting on-farm data, so farmers can track their assets in a single source of truth. Check them out here.
A big thanks to FutureAg Expo for having me as a guest at the conference.
To get in touch with Holly Clark, send her a message on LinkedIn.
Spotlight: Western Australia backs venture studios to fast-track biodiversity, mining tech and clean energy initiatives
In a big win for cross-industry innovation, Western Australia welcomes two venture studios.
☀️ Curtin Venture Studio: clean energy
Curtin Venture Studio is the first venture studio in Australia to be embedded in a university.
Launched by Curtin University at the end of April, the $18.6 million studio will fast-track innovative solutions for the critical minerals sector.
The studio has already invested in pivotal technologies, such as RapidGraphite, which will potentially disrupt the global graphite shortage by producing synthetic, battery-grade graphite.
⚒️ Founders Factory: biodiversity and mining tech
Meanwhile, UK venture studio and accelerator Founders Factory has chosen Perth for its first Australian venture.
Armed with $7.2 million funding from the Cook Government, Founders Factory will offer a four-month Nature and Biodiversity Tech Accelerator program aimed at local founders and international founders operating in Western Australia.
The studio has also partnered with mining giant Rio Tinto to deliver a separate accelerator program for mining technology startups, in which Rio Tinto will invest $14.4 million.
The combined funding from both programs will support 72 startups over three years.
To get in touch with Berenice Chong, send her a message on LinkedIn.
Dyeing for sustainability
With more than 100 billion garments produced each year, the global apparel industry has a massive problem: the dyeing process alone produces an astonishing 20% of the world’s wastewater and 3% of global emissions. During production, chemical dyes and finishing agents are mixed with 150 litres of water to dye just 1 kg of fabric. The resulting wastewater, which usually ends up in natural waterways, severely degrades both biodiversity and fresh water for human consumption.
Last week it was announced that Xefco, an Aussie deep tech startup, has raised a $10.5 million seed extension led by Main Sequence.
According to Main Sequence’s investment note, Xefco ‘has developed a novel dye and finishing technology called Ausora that consumes no water, few chemicals, and significantly less energy compared to the incumbent processes.’ ‘The plasma-based deposition technology combines the entire dyeing and finishing process into one sleek [modular] machine compatible with common fabrics and pigments.’
Climate & nature tech roundup
The Future Made in Australia policy announcement made waves and received some criticism.
Want a career in climate tech? Applications to Econome’s Climate Stream cohort 2 are open until 30 May.
Solar power startup Raygen closes $51 million Series D with support from Breakthrough Victoria.
Former unicorn and EV charging venture Tritium has collapsed into receivership.
To get in touch with Andrew Harding, send him a message on LinkedIn.
As Australia's interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology continues to grow, the Bitcoin halving presents exciting opportunities for the local startup ecosystem, potentially driving increased adoption and investment in the space.
So WTF is the Bitcoin Halving?
The halving event sees the reward for mining Bitcoin transitions cut in half.
This ultimately lowers the rate at which new coins are created, creating a crunch in new supply.
On the 19th of April, 2024, Bitcoin halved, resulting in a new reward of 3.125 BTC, down from 6.25 BTC in 2020.
The halving occurs after 210,000 blocks are mined, roughly every 4 years. The final halving is tipped to occur in 2140, when the number of Bitcoin in circulation will reach the maximum supply of 21 million.
We don’t know much more about why this specific formula of halving was chosen, because Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, disappeared roughly two years after the currency’s creation. We are also unaware if Nakamoto is an individual or a team.
Within a year of previous halvings, we have seen Bitcoin’s price take a bull run. In July 2017, it rose by 284%, and by 559% in 2020. In saying this, just because previous halvings have resulted in a bull run, does not mean we can expect this from the 2024 halving.
To get in touch with Erin Howell, send her a message on LinkedIn.
Australian Innovation punching way above its weight
AirTree Partner James Cameron’s recent article, backed by stats from Dealroom, shows that the Australian startup ecosystem is the 2nd most capital-efficient in the world, with 1.7 unicorns per US$1B of VC investment. That’s 2x the UK and 2nd only to Norway.
Despite making up just 0.6% of the world’s population and receiving a mere 1% of global VC investment, Australian businesses are defying the odds. I personally couldn’t think of a better example of Aussie underdog culture, as discussed in a recent post.
A future made in Australia
The Albanese government’s $15B National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), announced late last year, is the biggest investment in manufacturing in Australian peacetime history.
Last week, the Labor Government proposed a new fund, as part of the NRF. That will support projects that create secure well-paid jobs, drive regional development, and invest in national sovereign capability, broadening and diversifying Australia’s economy.
This includes big green subsidies which would be a huge win for the climate sector as we move toward net-zero transformation.
However, the proposition is not short of its critics, most notably the Productivity Commissioner who has doubts that more government intervention is the best pathway to achieve that net-zero future.
To get in touch with Dickie Currer, send him a message on LinkedIn.
From early employee to millionaire? Yes, please!
Canva's recent $1.6 billion share sale is not only a big milestone but also a testament to the potential for early employees to get significant rewards. As the startup’s valuation skyrockets to $3.6 billion, it's clear that investor interest is robust, hinting at a promising IPO ahead.
Beyond financial gains, this success story shows once more the role of startups in driving Australian innovation and the wealth generated paves the way for the next generation of Australian entrepreneurs and investors.
Bae Juice raises $1M to Tackle Hangovers Abroad
After Bae Juice's recent buzz and seeing it daily on my local Woollies, I had to chat with founder Tim O'Sullivan about how the investment happened and lessons learned along the way:
Tell EVERYONE you’re raising. Your friends also have friends (hopefully) and they’re all potential investors
Take the pressure out of the first call and just talk about how unique your product is
By balancing their eagerness with putting time pressure on investors, the founders had money in the bank just three months after their first conversation
Key partners including their lawyer and visual merchandiser invested which was seen as a positive signal to potential investors.
A compelling founder story and a dedicated team can still make or break your startup, even during a downturn.
To get in touch with Leila Oliveira, send her a message on LinkedIn.
🌍 From Oz to Everywhere
Gecko, the easiest way to run your rental business, is moving to SF!
I asked Founder & CEO Ben Kennedy about the move:
“We want to impact billions of people so global from day one was very clear.”
Why the Bay: Kennedy saw first hand the power of connections during a 3-month SF stint in early 2022. He knew boots on the ground would increase Gecko’s surface area for luck.
“San Francisco, in terms of talent, fundraising, everything - it’s a melting pot for serendipity.”
Takeaway: Don’t go in blind, spend time in your expansion city before your move.
📣 Global Voices
Maxine Minter, founder & General Partner of Co Ventures, Australia's first dedicated pre-seed fund (run by a solo female GP) has lived bicontinental, between the US and Australia since 2017.
We chatted about educating Aussie founders on going global (love to see it).
“My aim with Co Ventures is to propel Australian founders building global companies from day one,” she told me (love to see it).
A key piece of knowledge: Different markets = different pitches.
“We encourage founders we work for to be bilingual in the way that they pitch, and to try and work out what are the ambition norms are of the investor they are pitching to.”
My take: Understanding the differences in pitch expectations, funding rounds and risk appetites is paramount when raising capital overseas.
To get in touch with Lea Rausch, send her a message on LinkedIn.
What did you think of this edition of Pulse Check? |
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‘Til next time,
The Pulse Check Team 💗