Australian startups closed 2025 with a war chest most founders thought belonged to a different decade. According to Cut Through Venture, local companies raised A$5.48 billion across 390 deals, a 31% jump on the prior year and the third-biggest funding year on record. The money did not spread evenly. The top 20 rounds soaked up 58% of all capital, and artificial intelligence overtook fintech as the single most-funded sector for the first time. That concentration tells you something important about which Australian tech startups deserve your attention in 2026.
This is a working list, not a hall of fame. Some of these names are household brands with multi-billion-dollar valuations. Others are still proving a thesis. What they share is momentum heading into 2026: real revenue, fresh capital, or a technical lead that competitors will struggle to copy. We have stuck to publicly reported figures throughout, and where a number is fuzzy we say so rather than guess.
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Why 2026 is a pivotal year for Australian tech
The headline figure hides a sharper story. Deal count actually fell roughly 20% year on year, even as total dollars climbed. Investors wrote bigger cheques to fewer companies. The final quarter of 2025 alone delivered more than A$2 billion, the strongest single quarter since the 2021 peak, which suggests the cautious mood of 2023 and early 2024 has well and truly lifted for category leaders.
Geography shifted too. Victoria pulled in A$2.2 billion across 134 deals and overtook New South Wales for the first time, a milestone largely driven by Melbourne fintech and AI infrastructure plays. Sydney still anchors design, gaming and health AI. The practical takeaway for anyone tracking the sector: the gravity of Australian venture capital is no longer pinned to a single postcode.
The 2025 funding scoreboard at a glance
Before the company profiles, here is where the capital actually landed. The sector split below comes from Cut Through Venture’s annual report and frames everything that follows.
| Sector | 2025 capital raised | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial Intelligence | ~A$1.0 billion | 1 |
| Fintech | ~A$868 million | 2 |
| Biotech / Medtech | ~A$829 million | 3 |
| All sectors combined | A$5.48 billion (390 deals) | – |
Note that AI’s billion-dollar tally undercounts its real influence. By Cut Through’s reckoning, well over half of all capital flowed to companies that bake AI into their product or operations in some form. The sector lines below are about primary classification, not the full reach of the technology.
Canva: the anchor tenant of Australian tech
You cannot write about Australian startups without starting in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Canva is no longer a scrappy upstart, but it remains the company every other founder measures against. An August 2025 employee share sale valued the business at roughly US$42 billion, and co-founder Cliff Obrecht has said annual recurring revenue reached US$4 billion by the end of the year.
The more interesting 2026 angle is Canva’s quiet reinvention as an AI company. Analysis from US venture firm a16z ranked it among the world’s most-used generative AI web products by monthly active users, sitting behind Google Gemini and ahead of several pure-play chatbots, with a reported 265 million monthly users. Its 2024 acquisition of image-generation startup Leonardo AI gave it serious model muscle, and a new suite of agentic design tools landed in early 2026. For a company widely tipped as an IPO candidate, proving it is an AI winner rather than an AI victim is the whole ballgame.
Airwallex: fintech’s runaway leader
If Canva owns design, Airwallex owns the money rails. The cross-border payments company, founded in Melbourne in 2015 and now headquartered in Singapore, had a 2025 that bordered on absurd. It raised a US$466 million Series F in May, lifting its valuation to US$9.36 billion, then came back six months later with a US$498 million Series G that pushed the figure to US$12 billion. Combined, that is the largest fundraising effort by any Australian startup last year.
Airwallex sells global payment and treasury infrastructure to businesses, the unglamorous plumbing that lets a Brisbane Shopify seller collect euros and pay suppliers in yen without a traditional bank bleeding them on fees. Co-founder Jack Zhang has also started writing personal cheques to the next generation, launching a program that hands A$100,000 to young AI founders. That is the behaviour of someone playing a long game across the whole ecosystem, not just one company.
Harrison.ai: diagnostic AI going global
Healthcare is where Australian AI has a genuine shot at exporting world-class IP, and Harrison.ai is the clearest example. The Sydney company landed a US$179 million Series C in February 2025 to scale its clinical diagnostic platforms internationally. Its radiology product, Annalise.ai, reads medical imaging to flag findings for clinicians and is now deployed across more than 1,000 healthcare facilities in 15 countries.
The pitch resonates because it attacks a real bottleneck. Radiologists and pathologists are scarce and overworked, and Harrison’s tools act as a second set of eyes rather than a replacement. Regulatory clearances in multiple markets give it a moat that is hard to replicate, since approval cycles for medical AI run for years. Expect 2026 to be about depth of deployment in existing markets rather than a land grab into new ones.
Heidi Health: the breakout AI scribe
Melbourne’s Heidi Health was arguably the breakout story of the year. The clinical AI startup raised a A$98 million Series B in October 2025, taking its valuation to A$704 million, and topped the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 as the fastest-growing tech company in the country. Founded in 2019 by surgical resident Dr Thomas Kelly alongside Waleed Mussa and Yu Liu, it builds an AI medical scribe that turns a clinician-patient conversation into structured notes and follow-up paperwork.
The product now spans more than 200 medical specialties across 116 countries, which is a remarkable spread for a company barely six years old. The thesis is simple and addresses a problem every doctor complains about: clinical burnout caused by documentation. If Heidi can keep clinicians inside the tool for the high-stakes parts of a consult, the switching costs become enormous.
Relevance AI and Lorikeet: the agent wave
The most-hyped category of 2025, AI agents, has two strong Australian contenders. Relevance AI, split between Sydney and San Francisco, raised a US$24 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, taking total funding to US$37 million. Its product, Workforce, lets non-technical staff assemble teams of AI agents that collaborate like human employees on multi-step processes. The company says 40,000 agents were registered on the platform in January 2025 alone, which is the kind of bottom-up adoption curve investors pay up for.
Lorikeet takes a narrower, harder swing. The Sydney startup raised a US$35 million (about A$54 million) Series A led by QED Investors to build AI customer concierges that handle complicated, high-stakes support interactions rather than scripted FAQ chatbots. Notably, it became the first company since Canva to attract early backing from all three of Australia’s top venture firms, Blackbird, Square Peg and Airtree. When that trio agrees on a young company, it is worth a closer look.
Firmus and the sovereign AI bet
One name dominated the AI infrastructure conversation: Firmus. The company raised A$330 million in September and then a further A$500 million within months, making it one of the biggest single beneficiaries of the year’s funding surge. Originally a bitcoin mining operation, Firmus has repositioned around what it calls green AI factories, pitching low-emission, domestically controlled compute as both an economic and a national security question.
This sits inside a broader sovereign AI push that gained real political weight in 2025, with global chipmakers and hyperscalers courting Australian data-centre capacity. The argument is straightforward: if AI becomes critical national infrastructure, depending entirely on offshore compute is a strategic risk. Whether Firmus can deliver on the green part of its promise while scaling fast is the open question for 2026.
The big-money table
Here is how the largest reported 2025 rounds stack up. Figures are drawn from SmartCompany and Startup Daily reporting. Valuations move quickly, so treat these as point-in-time markers rather than today’s price.
| Company | Sector | 2025 raise (reported) | HQ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airwallex | Fintech | US$466m Series F + US$498m Series G | Melbourne / Singapore |
| Firmus | AI infrastructure | A$330m + A$500m | Australia |
| Harrison.ai | Health AI | US$179m Series C | Sydney |
| Heidi Health | Health AI | A$98m Series B | Melbourne |
| Morse Micro | Deep tech / semiconductors | A$88m Series C | Sydney |
| Lorikeet | AI agents | US$35m Series A | Sydney |
| Vaxxas | Biotech | A$49.2m Series D | Brisbane |
Deep tech: Morse Micro, Gilmour and Cortical Labs
Beyond software, a cohort of hard-technology companies is doing things that look like science fiction. These are the riskiest bets on this list and, if they work, the most defensible.
Morse Micro
Sydney chip designer Morse Micro raised an A$88 million Series C in September, including A$35 million from the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund. It builds silicon for Wi-Fi HaLow, a long-range, low-power wireless standard aimed at the Internet of Things. Designing competitive radio-frequency chips out of Australia is genuinely difficult, and government co-investment signals this is treated as strategic capability rather than a punt.
Gilmour Space Technologies
Gold Coast rocket maker Gilmour Space raised A$217 million in a Series E co-led by the National Reconstruction Fund and super fund Hostplus, becoming Australia’s first space-tech unicorn at a valuation above A$1 billion. Its debut Eris rocket launched in July 2025 but failed about 14 seconds after liftoff. That is a setback, not a death sentence. Every serious launch program has eaten early failures, and reaching the pad as a sovereign launch capability is itself a milestone. The 2026 story is whether the next vehicle reaches orbit.
Cortical Labs
The most unusual company here is Melbourne’s Cortical Labs, which launched the CL1 at Mobile World Congress in March 2025 and calls it the world’s first commercially available biological computer. The unit grows human neurons on an electrode array, kept alive for up to six months by an onboard life-support system, and sells for around US$35,000. A cloud version went live in early 2026, followed by a partnership to build a biological data centre in Singapore. The commercial path is still unproven, but the technical novelty is real and entirely Australian.
SaaS and gaming: the steady earners
Not every company worth watching is chasing a frontier. Several Australian software and gaming businesses have built durable revenue and global customer bases.
- Octopus Deploy (Brisbane) automates software deployment for enterprise engineering teams and was last valued around A$882 million after a 2024 raise. It is a textbook example of a bootstrapped-then-funded SaaS company solving an unsexy but universal problem.
- SafetyCulture remains one of the country’s quiet success stories, selling workplace inspection and operations software used by frontline teams worldwide.
- Immutable (Sydney) is the blockchain gaming unicorn behind Gods Unchained, and it co-launched the US$100 million Inevitable Games Fund with King River Capital and Polygon Labs. It has also restructured hard over the past year, trimming staff as the web3 cycle cooled, so 2026 is a test of focus.
- Zeller (Melbourne) provides payments and banking tools to more than 100,000 Australian businesses and reached unicorn status back in 2022.
What the smart money is signalling for 2026
Read the 2025 data as a set of bets, and three themes jump out. First, AI applied to a specific, painful workflow beats general-purpose tooling. Heidi, Harrison and Lorikeet all attack a concrete bottleneck rather than selling horizontal magic. Second, government co-investment through the National Reconstruction Fund has become a real force in deep tech, backing Morse Micro, Gilmour and others where private capital alone is too skittish. Third, the sovereign AI debate has moved from think-tank panels to nine-figure cheques.
The risk worth flagging is concentration. When 20 deals capture nearly 60% of all capital, the median founder is not living in the same market as the headlines suggest. A great year for Airwallex and Firmus does not automatically mean an easy raise for a seed-stage team in Adelaide. The ecosystem is healthier at the top than in the middle.
How to track these companies yourself
If you want to follow this beat rather than rely on year-end recaps, a few sources do the heavy lifting. Cut Through Venture publishes the most-cited funding data in the country, with quarterly and annual reports. Startup Daily and SmartCompany run weekly round-ups of who raised what. For deeper company financials, the official sites of the businesses above usually post funding announcements first.
More from Tech Insider
For deeper coverage of the technologies powering these companies, explore our reporting on AI and machine learning, the latest software and SaaS developments, the data-centre and cloud computing infrastructure behind the AI boom, and the hardware and chips that make deep tech possible.
Frequently asked questions
How much did Australian startups raise in 2025?
Australian startups raised A$5.48 billion across 390 deals in 2025, according to Cut Through Venture. That was a 31% increase on 2024 and the third-largest funding year on record, even though the total number of deals fell by around 20%.
Which sector attracted the most funding?
Artificial intelligence was the top-funded sector for the first time at roughly A$1.0 billion, ahead of fintech at about A$868 million and biotech/medtech at about A$829 million. Counting companies that use AI in any part of their product, the technology touched well over half of all capital raised.
What is the most valuable Australian startup?
Canva remains the most valuable, with a roughly US$42 billion valuation from an August 2025 employee share sale and around US$4 billion in annual recurring revenue. Airwallex is the most valuable fintech, last reported at about US$12 billion.
Which Australian startups are leading in AI agents?
Relevance AI and Lorikeet are the two standouts. Relevance AI builds a no-code platform for teams of collaborating AI agents, while Lorikeet focuses on AI customer concierges that handle complex, high-stakes support cases. Both raised significant rounds in 2025 from top-tier investors.
Are Australian deep tech startups actually viable?
Several are reaching real milestones. Morse Micro ships Wi-Fi HaLow chips, Gilmour Space became the country’s first space unicorn despite an early launch failure, and Cortical Labs is selling a commercial biological computer. Federal co-investment through the National Reconstruction Fund has been important in backing these capital-intensive bets.
Why did Victoria overtake New South Wales for funding?
Victoria attracted A$2.2 billion across 134 deals in 2025, overtaking NSW for the first time. The shift was driven largely by Melbourne-based fintech and AI infrastructure companies, including Airwallex and Heidi Health, pulling in outsized rounds during the year.
Where can I find reliable Australian startup funding data?
Cut Through Venture publishes the most widely cited funding reports, on a quarterly and annual basis. Startup Daily and SmartCompany run weekly funding round-ups, and individual company newsrooms usually announce raises first. Cross-checking these sources is the best way to avoid relying on a single estimate.
Is now a good time to join an Australian startup?
For the category leaders profiled here, hiring is strong and capital is plentiful heading into 2026. The caveat is concentration: a small group of companies captured most of the funding, so conditions for early-stage teams outside the top tier remain tougher than the headline numbers imply. Do your own diligence on a specific company’s runway before signing.