Wrap 104: Billions & brain chips
Have we entered a new era of brain-chip implant spatial computing? Atlassian reported its first ever US$1bn revenue quarter. But trillions is the new billions.
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Local deals and dollar-y doos
The year that was. Cut Through Venture released The State of Australian Startup Funding. Compared to the heights of 2021, the figures for 2023 venture-backed startups are pretty depressing. However if you remove the free money-era (2021-22), we’re trending up. Just.
VC Elaine Stead argues the data actually illustrates that the ecosystem is operating well. Perhaps except for the dismal gender diversity stats - a whopping 78% of total capital went to all male founding teams.
If you’re a woman in Vic with a startup idea, but don’t know where to start check out Flying Fox’s free pre-accelerator program - apply here.
1 billion dollars. Atlassian reported its first ever US$1bn revenue quarter, while operating losses were cut in half YoY to US$49m.
Blackbird’s Nick Crocker dug up this 2006 Channel Nine interview with fresh-faced 26-year old Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, whose big hairy goal was to reach “50,000 customers.” Atlassian now has 250,000 customers.
Undisclosed. Open banking startup Adatree was acquired by payments fintech Fat Zebra for an “undisclosed sum.” We’ve seen quite a few “undisclosed” exits recently, which is usually code for “not a big payday.” Likely many more to come as capital continues to dry up and customers tighten their wallets.
After Afterpay. Afterpay’s brand will be discontinued in the U.S. later this year. As part of it cost-cutting drive, Afterpay’s parent company Block has also laid off more than 1,000 staff globally.
Capital Brief this week reported that former staff were concerned about Afterpay's future beyond Australian shores following a clumsy integration into Block after a $39 billion sale to the US company in 2022.
“Ambitious CEO” Airwallex is on a bit of a PR rampage, including this mammoth (paid) piece in The Generalist. Maybe an attempt to turnaround its rather dire employer reputation as it continues to ramp up hiring this year (and prepares to IPO)?
Bureaucracy loopholes. The CSIRO has sold the employment company it set up for Main Sequence Ventures Fund to members of the investment team so they can pay “market” rates for VCs.
Hack the hacker. One of the alleged ringleaders behind the Medibank hack (which stole data on nearly 10 million customers) has been exposed and sanctioned - 33-year-old Russian man, Aleksandr Ermakov. The allegations against Ermakov mark the first time Australia has sanctioned a cybercriminal. The sanctions may be the least of his worries though. Security experts say the allegations put a target on his head - Russian gangs (and the government) now knows he likely possesses large sums of cryptocurrency.
Trending in venture: health & climate tech
Healthy. LaunchVic says Victoria’s startup ecosystem has grown to more than $100bn in value. HealthTech and BioTech were the most funded sub-sectors in 2023.
So much going on in this space, including these four digital health startups who received funding via the Australian government’s Medical Research Future Fund:
Baymatob developed a wearable monitor for pregnant women.
Macuject uses AI to analyse macular scans for early detection of preventable vision loss.
Neurotologix is pioneering remote assessments of dizziness and vertigo.
WeGuide has developed a no-code platform to make it easy to roll out digital health apps.
For all the goings on in Aussie health tech, see What the Health and Talking HealthTech.
Green. (Almost) every current funding announcement is in climate tech:
CarbonHQ raised $600k to bring transparency and accountability to carbon credits.
Electric vehicle charging startup EVOS Energy received an export grant to break into India.
Power retailer Amber Electric raised $29m to take its battery and EV automation software offshore.
Yume raised $2m to address food waste by connecting food manufacturers with surplus stock with businesses and charities that can use it.
Plant-based leather substitute startup Alt. Leather raised $1.1m.
National Renewable Network raised $10m to roll out retail solar and battery infrastructure.
Kiwi startup NovoLabs raised $1m for what it bills as a cheaper, greener and more effective way to treat wastewater.
In VC land, Tan Kueh is Grok Ventures’ new CEO. Virescent Ventures is aiming to raise a new $200m fund targeting technologies that action and enable decarbonisation across transport, electricity, food and agriculture.
Thinking of raising a seed? Crunchbase shared: Lower Valuations, Higher Bar: What It’s Like To Raise A Seed Round In 2024.
Billions & Big Tech
Apple shipped the Vision Pro (in the US). Take a look at what’s inside the hardware. Have we entered a new era of spatial computing? Is it the next smartphone? The next platform? Aussie startups like JigSpace hope so, but the jury’s out for now. What’s clear is the tech still has a long way to go before it can reach that point:
Most of the volunteers experienced discomfort, such as headaches or nausea. Wearing computers strapped to their faces, they found that other humans seemed fake… Bailenson said bringing a fork to his mouth took effort and often wound up short of the target.
Not sure how this reconciles with our new right to disconnect:
Massive results announced for AI behemoths.
Meta delivered a 25% jump in revenue to $40.1bn and $14bn profit for the December quarter, fuelled by strong advertising and device sales. It will pay its first dividend, and authorised a $50bn share buyback program. The Reality Labs division made its biggest lost yet - $4.65bn. Threads has more than 130m monthly active users and is “growing steadily”, according to Zucks.
Amazon beat expectations, with sales of $170bn. It’s AWS cloud business reached $24.2bn.
Arm shares shot nearly 50% higher on Thursday after it reported revenue of $824m (a 14% increase) for the December quarter.
Microsoft had its biggest growth spurt in nearly 2 years thanks to its bet on AI. Quarterly revenue increased 17.6% YoY to $62bn. Net income was $21.8bn. Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 30%. It now has 53,000 Azure AI customers, with one-third of them being new to Azure in the past year.
Share prices might be up, but it’s not all rosy in the industry. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and others have been on a big layoff spree. Also, Snap missed quarterly revenue estimates, sending its shares plunging by 30%.
LLMs IRL. VentureBeat on how enterprises are using open source LLMs: responding to HR queries, screening messages for inappropriate content, creating marketing content, summarising articles, customer support.
Roblox is rolling out a real-time, AI-powered translation that works across 16 languages. Its quarterly bookings hit $1.13bn - the company’s highest ever.
Big dealz. Disney acquired a $1.5bn stake in Epic Games to build an 'entertainment universe' with Fortnite. U.S. data security software firm Cohesity has agreed to acquire Veritas' data protection business in a deal that values the combined entity at $7bn.
There’s a chip for that. Elon Musk says Neuralink implanted its first ‘brain-reading’ device into a live human’s brain, with the ultimate aim of allowing a person with severe paralysis to control a computer, robotic arm or other device. Scientists are “cautiously excited,” but also concerned about the lack of transparency.
Security training needs to level up. Someone transferred $25m of company funds to fraudsters after joining a video call with fakes of his CFO and other colleagues.
X’s nonconsensual pics problem. Elon Musk slashed X's once-robust trust and safety workforce. Now it has a big moderation problem. Not that it cares. On Wednesday, downloads of X’s mobile app surged to the top of the charts after a video that is speculated to be the rapper Drake half nude and engaged in a sexual act spread across the service. This comes shortly after sexually explicit, AI-generated images of Taylor Swift flooded X:
One of the most prominent examples on X attracted more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks before the verified user who shared the images had their account suspended for violating platform policy. The post was live on the platform for around 17 hours prior to its removal… Many still remain up, and a deluge of new graphic fakes have since appeared.
Microsoft's free generative AI tool Designer (currently in beta) reportedly created the T Swift images. Microsoft says it has since strengthened its safety systems to prevent this type of misuse.
Tips: What to do if someone makes a deepfake of you.
He’s back. In the wake of WeWork’s bankruptcy, co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Neumann is trying to buy back the company.
Trillions is the new billions.
That’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed it.
Bex, Gavin and the team at Ignition Lane
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