Blackbird partner Phoebe Harrop will take the helm of VC fund’s Kiwi out as its founding head, Samantha Wong, returns to Australia pending the birth of her second child. Wong announced the move back across The Ditch on Blackbird’s blog, saying  “I’ve decided this is the right time for me and my family to move back to Sydney where my extended family live”. Blackbird’s new New Zealand head Phoebe Harrop Harrop, who joined the VC after moving from London amid 2021’s lockdowns, where she worked as an investment director at Al Gore’s growth stage firm, Generation, will take charge on May 1 ..read more

Build Club, Australia’s largest AI engineer and founder community is partnering with AWS to launch an accelerator for technical AI founders. The Build Club Accelerator is for 15 Australian technical founders  – AI engineer and researchers – and will give them a springboard into the US market. Build Club founder Annie Liao said her ambition is to unearth and nurture AI talent to succeed in a highly competitive sector, but warned it’s only for founders with absolute determination and grit. “We want to find undiscovered talent in universities, academia and big tech and give them the opportun ..read more

One way South by Southwest (SXSW) Sydney is different to most tech and startup festivals is how it chooses its panels in a Survivor-meets-Eurovision way, with people asked to vote on the 1,100-odd submissions received to choose their favourite. The fortnight of voting in Session Select leads to LinkedIn being flooded with “please like me”posts from those with ideas they hope will make the cut when SXSW returns in October. This year Startup Daily’s editor Simon Thomsen is among them – although with just four days to go before voting closes, he’s resisted LinkedIn posts in favour of having a who ..read more

Food distribution startup Prep has raised $200,000 from Melbourne VC Skalata to connect major food retailers, corporates and restaurants with emerging food brands. Prep enables food producers and brands to efficiently scale B2B distribution – anywhere – for a low margin. The platform integrates with a producer’s existing ordering systems, and is five times more scalable. Cofounder Sean Miller, a former restaurateur, said focus for Prep is smaller producers such as bakers, brewers and specialist growers along with subscription boxes and meal kits.  “The problem is that these businesses are ..read more

One of Australia’s most-loved startup festivals _SOUTHSTART has forged a strategic partnership with the Adelaide Economic Development Agency to launch a new accelerator program. MASTERM!ND is a 5-month accelerator for up to 10 startups based in the South Australian capital. _SOUTHSTART co-director Danielle Seymour said the accelerator builds on the organisation’s commitment to catalysing innovation and driving tangible change. “While our annual festival has solidified its status as a flagship event, MASTERM!ND signals a strategic expansion of _SOUTHSTART’s influence beyond the confines of ..read more

Sydney startup Heatseeker, which uses AI to simplify business idea validation and market research, has launched the alpha version of its testing platform to help founders speed up the time to product launch. Heatseeker.ai was cofounded in 2023 by serial entrepreneurs Kate O’Keeffe and Fiona Triaca. They set out to develop a way to understand different markets, at a glance, in real time, and based on actual customer interactions.   The result is what they describe as “growth-hacking-as-a-service”, with a focus on the US and Australian markets. The platform offers founders and growth market ..read more

The latest Centauri-6 satellite developed by Adelaide mining tech startup Fleet Space Technologies is now in orbit after heading skywards aboard SpaceX’s  Bandwagon-1 “ridesharing” mission. The Falcon 9 reusable rocket’s payload of 11 satellites took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week.  The Centauri-6 microsatellite brings Fleet Space’s constellation of low earth orbit satellites to seven. They’re used for minerals exploration as well as building capacity to deliver advanced satellite communications capabilities. Fleet cofounder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini sa ..read more

Earlier this year, Neuralink implanted a chipinside the brain of 29-year-old US man Noland Arbaugh, who is paralysed from the shoulders down. The chip has enabled Arbaugh to move a mouse pointer on a screen just by imagining it moving. In May 2023, US researchers also announced a non-invasive way to “decode” the words someone is thinking from brain scans in combination with generative AI. A similar project sparked headlines about a “mind-reading AI hat”. Can neural implants and generative AI really “read minds”? Is the day coming when computers can spit out accurate real-time transcripts of ou ..read more

US climate tech investor Sophie Purdom has made her first international investment via her New York VC fund Planeteer Capital, leading a $5.3 million Seed round. Purdom visited Sydney late last year as a keynote speaker at Climate Salad‘s Climate Tech Festival, which featured more than 50 Australian climate tech startups. The one she’s picked as her first offshore bet is Tasmanian carbon accounting startup Sumday. The round was also supported by existing backers Blackbird, Possible Ventures and Wedgetail Ventures, as well as Canva cofounder Cameron Adams. Sumday previously raised $2 million i ..read more

Ahead of Startmate Demo Day on May 2 in Sydney at Blackbird’s Sunrise, Startup Daily is profiling the 10 startups involved. Today it’s New Zealand startup Kiwifibre, which is hoping to build race cars from plants. KiwiFibre creates natural fibre composite materials from ‍Harakeke – a natively grown New Zealand wonder plant, and one of the world’s strongest natural fibres. From snowboards to satellites, the fibre-fuelled startup, helmed by a couple of 20-year-olds, has created a fibreglass replacement that is healthier, more sustainable, and superior in almost every way to its fossil fuel ..read more