What we’re thinking about

Will Richardson, Managing Partner at Giant Leap, published this article on the Startup Daily.

Why I’m not betting on Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, but I’m sure as hell listening

Everyone has a take on AI right now.

How many jobs will go and how many will be created? Will the singularity arrive in 2030, beyond or never? What role will humans play once it does? Are we in an AI bubble or the early stages of the largest technological revolution in human industrial history? Some think they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Most of it is worth what you paid for it, which is not much.

Forecasting often fails because nothing moves on its own. A situation arises, governments respond, capital chases the response, and supply swings from shortage to glut before anyone has updated their spreadsheet. In early 2021, we couldn’t make masks and hand sanitiser fast enough, and months later it was in the discount bins at the supermarket.

One name, however, Ray Kurzweil, keeps getting held up as the exception. Anyone who’s been recently listening to the usual circuit of US technology and startup podcasts will know his name well. He’s been doing the rounds of late to once again predict the future and is usually introduced with a number: 86% accurate.

Here are some examples:

• In 1990, he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion by 2000. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997.

• In 1990, he predicted that “by early in the next century,” personal computers would carry cellular and wireless communication, acting as gateways to global networks of information. Wi-Fi was standardised in 1997 and 3G mobile internet rolled out from 2001.

• In 1999, he predicted that by 2009 personal computers would commonly be embedded in clothing and jewellery. The iPod nano launched in 2005, worn clipped to clothing via wristband accessories, and Fitbit’s first fitness tracker landed in 2009.

The 86% claim doesn’t quite stack up

His accuracy is best read with some context because the number is a self-assessment, publicised by his own circle. When Oxford’s Stuart Armstrong ran an independent grading of the 172 predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines, his volunteers marked about 42% true or partly true. A second group of assessors landed at 30%. So there’s no single number that settles it, only a range worth knowing about.

Though I’d still take Kurzweil’s read on the next decade over almost anyone else’s. Not just because of the accuracy of certain predictions but also because when his predictions are wrong, there is valuable insight to be considered.

Look at where he lands and where he misses.

Where Kurzweil gets it right, and wrong

Kurzweil is strongest on the application of S-curves, the pattern where a new technology starts slow, accelerates fast through mass adoption, then levels off as it matures, compounding, and exponential growth. Compute curves, software capability, speech recognition, and AI’s trajectory: he predicted in 1999 that a computer would pass the Turing test by 2029, a claim Stanford convened an international AI conference to dispute at the time, with the consensus view being it would take closer to 100 years. The acceleration since ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022 has brought that specific 2029 date back into serious discussion rather than the original dismissal by his peers.

Kurzweil also predicted nanobots to be circulating in the bloodstream by the 2020s, and he’s since pushed the claim out to the 2030s. His prediction of mainstream self-driving cars by 2009 was 15 years too early, with Waymo only launching driverless robotaxi rides to the general public in June 2024.

Technology wasn’t the biggest constraint; in fact, government regulation and public trust were.

Kurzweil has excellent predictions on anything that runs on silicon and is less reliable on predictions that require passage through a human body, a parliament or a boardroom. Where the model is the whole mechanism, he is early. Where the model is one input and adoption is the other, he is late.

Adoption is human

So when Kurzweil tells us what comes next, medicine moving from reactive treatment to predictive and preventative, clean energy riding the same cost curves as computing, real expertise available regardless of postcode or income, I think he is directionally right and roughly a decade optimistic on all three, for the same reason as always. That is not a counsel of despair. It is an investment rule, and it is the one we use.

We buy the exponential argument where it is pure software. Everywhere else, health, energy, education, anything touching a regulated body or a nervous consumer, we know that returns just don’t go to whoever has the best model.

Tesla is the clearest proof of this since government support, not just product superiority, drove its adoption curve. The best technology didn’t get Tesla to scale; instead, government policy support and regulatory design played a huge role in mainstream adoption. Tesla received roughly US$2.4 billion in combined federal and state subsidies between 2007 and 2019, and up to US$41 billion in Inflation Reduction Act subsidies available to Tesla and its battery partner through 2032.

So how does technology get adopted? The work is less glamorous. It includes clinical validation, patient and referrer education, reimbursement pathways, consent, distribution and, lastly but crucially, trust. That work is slow, incredibly hard to fund, and systematically underpriced right now. That’s because capital has fallen in love with the capability layer and the baked-in growth it provides. We want to understand from founders how they will address adoption, what is in their control and outside of it, and where they will focus and why.

Kurzweil’s most durable insight, and the source of his accuracy, is that humans think linearly while technological growth compounds, which is why we overestimate a year and underestimate a decade. I think he is right. The corollary is the part investors can mistime: the decade only compounds if people actually let it into their lives.

Trust and trustworthiness is a genuine challenge that will always require the right human touch to solve.

For the road

🎤 Dolly Parton passed away this week, aged 80, after a brief battle with cancer. She was a remarkable, kind and compassionate human. Alongside her music, we celebrate her decades of philanthropy promoting reading and education, from the Imagination Library, which has donated 332,411,218 books since its inception, to the $500 Buddy Program, which cut Sevier County Schools’ dropout rate from 30% to 6%.

🧬 A cancer vaccine built from your own tumour just cleared phase 3 trial. Moderna and Merck’s Intismeran sequences a patient’s tumour mutations to manufacture a custom mRNA vaccine. In a trial of more than 1,000 high-risk melanoma patients, it significantly reduced the risk of the cancer returning. It’s the first successful late-stage trial for a personalised mRNA cancer therapy, and could reach approval around 2027. Exciting!

💰 An investment portfolio wholly devoted to impact just beat the market. In 2016, Toronto's Inspirit Foundation shifted its entire portfolio into healthcare, energy and financial inclusion, and out of tobacco, firearms and fossil fuels. It became known for being the first money into a fund or project, partnering with asset managers to build new mandates that could meet its unusual requirements. After a decade of sharp ups and downs, up 7% against benchmark some years, down 4% in others, it finished 0.7% ahead.

📈 The more ARR you have, the larger multiple you command. Harvey, Legora and Sierra all crossed $100m ARR within nine months of each other, priced between 50x and 100x revenue, with growth rate barely explaining the gap. Tomasz Tunguz's take: the premium tracks category position, not speed.

📚 What is the impact of AI on students? The Economist shared findings that students using AI on their homework improved their scores by 18% and finished faster. But on exam day, the same students scored 20% lower… except for the ones who still put in as much time as everyone else, who performed just as well regardless of the tool. It’s a reminder that AI is exactly that: a tool.

Adam Grant found the same pattern from the psychology side. After hearing that students planned to use AI to cheat on a take-home exam at Wharton, he swapped it for an essay question on the spot: how would you motivate students to stop cheating? Their answers convinced him that creating obstacles, bans, lockdowns, oral exams, was never going to be enough. What works is students having a strong moral identity, and that starts by putting ethics on the curriculum.

🆘 The one habit successful people have in common, according to Angela Duckworth: asking for help. She is the psychologist known for her research on grit. But Duckworth says people systematically overestimate the value of going it alone, and underestimate how happy others actually are to lend a hand. Knowing who to call turns out to matter more than pushing through alone.

🔮 Two essays on the stories Silicon Valley tells about itself.

• Honey, We Need To Talk About Venture Capital - Sinéad O’Sullivan. On why and how Big Venture manufactures outcomes.

• The looting of science fiction - Ali Rıza Taşkale, Aeon. On how tech leaders borrow visions of the future as a political tactic, crystallising narrow stories about power.

Helpful resources

🪑 How Do You Board? Part I: Pre-Meeting and Part II: The Meeting - Batko. Nobody teaches you how to run a board, so Batko collected advice from “board whisperers,” including Giant Leap’s own Adam Milgrom, on doing it well.

🧰 Xero For Good: Financial Fitness - Sefa x Xero. Free short videos and guides, most under five minutes, on reading financial statements, cash flow forecasting and budgeting for impact organisations.

🎓 Start Smart: The Entrepreneur’s Toolkit - TAFE NSW x HEX. Free, self-paced two-hour microskill on entrepreneurial thinking.

New paths

🧬 Ovum AI is hiring an AI Engineer. Contact Kris Owens cc: careers@askovum.com to apply.

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Director of Acquisition Marketing (Australia, remote), Field Sales Representative (London, remote), and Head of Brand and Growth, US (Los Angeles, remote).

⚡ Amber is hiring a Chief Technology Officer, Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team), Mid-Level UX/UI Designer (Product & Brand), Regulatory Compliance Manager, Business Development Manager, and Director of Product (Melbourne).

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

Save the date

📅 8 September, 6–8pm: Melbourne Foundational Models Meetup: AI in Health & Medical Applications - La Trobe University City Campus, Melbourne. Register here.

📅 9 September: Cicada x Tech23 - Sydney. Get tickets.

📅 10 September: Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards - Sydney. Get tickets.

📅 14–18 September: HEXPO 2026 - Melbourne. Get tickets.

📅 15 September, 5–8pm: Cool Girls Get Funded - Sydney. Register here.

📅 21–27 September: Spark Festival - Sydney & NSW. Explore the program.

📅 14 October, 5:30–8:30pm AEDT: Accelerator Australia Demo Day - ACMD, 27 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy. Register here.

📬 Open for applications

📬 6 September: RMIT FounderHUB: MedTech, HealthTech & SportsTech. A free five-week program with RMIT’s MedTech Research & Innovation Hub, taking any founder (no RMIT affiliation needed) from idea to pitch. Runs 22 September–15 October, pitch event 21 October. Find out more or register for the Q&A.

📬 9 September: NRMA Insurance Help Fund Innovation Stream, with Climate Salad. $500,000 in climate resilience grants, four $100,000 Growth Grants and four $25,000 Emerging Founder Grants, plus an 8-month support program. Apply here.

📬 15 October: Press Play Ventures’ AI Pre-Accelerator. A 12-week program for women turning an industry idea into an AI business, no tech background or co-founder needed. 25 full scholarships, $5,000 in founder prizes, about 4–5 hours a week. Apply here.

For the road

📉 A 25-year-old turned a $45 billion AI bet into a month-long collapse. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund was up 450% on leveraged AI infrastructure bets before losing two-thirds of its value in four weeks, forcing a fire sale to Citadel. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran, known as Wall Street’s “Dean of Valuation,” reads the fallout as a lesson in conviction and leverage inside a still-emerging opportunity like AI: even a correct call can wipe you out if the timing’s wrong and the debt’s too high.

⚙️ A company you’ve never heard of processes more AI tokens daily than OpenAI and Google combined. Fireworks AI now handles more than 40 trillion tokens a day, according to CEO Lin Qiao. Nvidia and Sequoia have backed it to a $17.5 billion valuation, up from $552 million two years ago. Her bet: instead of a handful of frontier labs, AI’s future is millions of specialised models, one per use case, each cheaper to fine-tune than to call a general one. 95% of Fireworks’ traffic already runs on customer-built models, not off-the-shelf ones.

🧠 Estrogen-only hormone therapy was tied to a 35% drop in Alzheimer’s brain changes. Stanford researchers examined 258 brain autopsies from women who’d used estrogen-only hormone therapy after menopause, and discovered they were 39% less likely to have been diagnosed with dementia while alive. Most women in the study started hormone therapy well after menopause, and researchers think starting sooner could matter even more. It only applies to estrogen-only formulas, not the combined pill most women are prescribed.

🎤 will.i.am wants a separate file format for songs humans actually made. Black Eyed Peas member, will.i.am, who now teaches an AI course at Arizona State University, wants human-made songs paid differently to AI-made ones. His fix: a “POL” (proof of life) file, tagged with a musician’s biometrics, location and timestamp, so a song that took months of human effort isn’t priced the same as an MP3 an AI generated in seconds. AI, he says, is just the world’s biggest sampler.

☀️ The world’s largest solar telescope has captured the sun in the finest detail ever.

🧠 The real risk when leaders lean on AI: they stop thinking for themselves. MIT’s Otto Scharmer argues that the danger of AI in leadership shows up in what leaders stop doing once they hand their thinking to algorithms: sensing what’s actually happening, and imagining what hasn’t happened yet. AI is trained entirely on the past, brilliant at pattern-matching, useless at anticipating what’s genuinely new. His fix: pair AI with human judgment built from paying attention to the present, not the past.

🌲 Two scientists quit over how forests get counted as carbon credits. The body that sets the rules for corporate carbon accounting is split over how forests should count. One method credits companies only for carbon changes they actually caused. The alternative also credits carbon trees would have absorbed anyway, and it’s popular with forest owners for obvious reasons. Two senior scientists have quit over the disagreement. There’s real money riding on which version wins: Microsoft alone has bought 4.8 million tonnes of forest credits.

🌍 AI is supercharging fossil fuels just as much as renewables. New modelling finds AI doesn’t tilt the energy transition by default, it boosts productivity for both sides, and fossil fuels win on emissions. Global AI-driven gains are projected to add 0.47 to 1.8 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, because renewables would need efficiency gains four to five times bigger than fossil fuel’s just to break even. A steep carbon price narrows the gap, it doesn’t close it.

Helpful resources

🧰 Impact Investing Legal Toolkit - Social Impact Hub. Free legal templates and step-by-step guidance for impact investment deals, from term sheets to SAFE notes, built with MinterEllison.

⚕️ Closing the Gender Health Gap: The Investment Case - The George Institute. A white paper making the case for venture and philanthropic capital to close women’s health funding gaps.

💡 Plausible Schemes - Conviction. Sarah Guo’s fund lists 40+ speculative startup ideas across AI, biotech and manufacturing.

New paths

⚡ Amber is hiring a Chief Technology Officer, Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team), Mid-Level UX/UI Designer (Product & Brand), Regulatory Compliance Manager, Business Development Manager, and Director of Product (Melbourne).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Field Sales Representative (London, remote), Head of Marketing, US (Los Angeles, remote), Performance Creative Lead, US (Los Angeles, remote), Social Creative (Australia, remote), and Finance BI & Data Engineer, 12-month FTC (Australia, remote).

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🩺 Clean Slate Clinic is hiring an AOD Registered Nurse or Nurse Practitioner (Sydney, remote).

Save the date

📅 21 August: Founders Day: Turning Insights, Access & Connection into Undeniable Momentum in 2026 - Stone & Chalk Melbourne Startup Hub, Melbourne. A one-day founder summit, 17+ speakers and 20+ mentors across five panels for growth-stage founders. $30. Register here.

📅 1 September: Startup to Scaleup Summit 2026 - Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. Tank Stream Labs’ full-day summit bringing together founders, investors and industry leaders. Register here.

📅 8 September: What Investors Look For with Startmate’s Ben Simai - online. Startmate’s Head of Investments breaks down how VC investment decisions actually get made, with a live Q&A. Free. Register here.

📅 9 September: Cicada x Tech23 2026 - Sydney. Australia’s biggest deep tech festival, showcasing 23 breakthrough startups alongside investors, industry leaders and policymakers. Register here.

This week, Will Richardson, Managing Partner at Giant Leap, on why Australia is building climate companies it cannot afford to keep. An extended version of this piece was first published in Capital Brief.

Australia is building climate companies it cannot afford to keep

By Will Richardson

In 2025, the climate tech sector in Australia raised A$680 million across 69 deals, third-largest by funding and ahead of AI. Over 75% of it sat at pre-seed and seed.

We have evidence that the early-stage engine for startups tackling climate challenges is working. This is partly because we have an ecosystem of specialist Australian climate VCs who are funding Australian companies that show strong performance of capital efficiency relative to US and European peers at the same stage.

The problem shows as these companies scale and require later stage funding rounds. Australian companies that have proven their model and need $20 to $50 million to build the plant or the fleet or the commercial team can’t find enough capital at home.

In the Q2 2026 Cut Through Ventures dataset, $53 million across eleven climate tech deals, an average of $4.8 million. Series B rounds barely registered in the dataset. Mako (formerly MicroTau) raised a $28 million Series A but this included offshore investors filling out the round, namely, International Airlines Group, a British-Spanish holding company, and Zero Infinity Partners, a US-based VC firm.

Given the scarcity of growth capital, companies go to where the capital is. Offshore capital often comes with an expectation to expand in those markets, sometimes to redomicile as a condition of the round. The technology gets built in Australia, subsidised by R&D rebates. The jobs, the tax base and the returns of the next generation of operators can end up somewhere else.

The gap is getting harder to close, not easier. In 2021, the median Australian climate tech company reached Series B at 5.2 years old. It now takes 11 years on average.

These companies have found real customers, real revenue, and derisked their technology. But because they aren’t EBITDA positive, they sit in a gap domestic capital won’t venture into.

Note: This landscape is illustrative and non-exhaustive. Fund details, portfolio examples, cheque sizes and fund sizes are drawn from various sources, including AFR reporting, fund websites, investor decks and industry reports published at different points in time. Data is incomplete and likely not current, as funds continuously raise, deploy and update their mandates. Please treat this as illustrative to identify the Series B gap for climate tech startups in Australia for further diligence, not as a definitive or comprehensive reference.

Disconnect from government mandates

The frustrating part is that the capital already exists with a mandate to support the energy transition. The CEFC has a mandate of more than $33 billion and has co-invested across hundreds of transactions. ARENA holds $14 billion in grants. The National Reconstruction Fund carries a $5 billion clean energy allocation. That’s over $50 billion inside institutions built for exactly this.

Some of that capital already reaches the sector. CEFC has backed early-stage fund managers including Climate Tech Partners, Viriscent Ventures and IP Group Australia. It’s the same mechanism, cornerstoning private fund managers, that governments elsewhere have used to close exactly this gap at growth stage.

What international models have worked

Two examples are worth understanding.

Yozma launched in Israel in 1993 with $100 million in government capital. At the time, Israeli entrepreneurs were suspicious of venture capital and heavily reliant on bank debt, often struggling to commercialise technically successful products. Yozma was structured to attract foreign expertise: it matched private investments with government funds, contributing roughly 40% of capital to each Israel-focused fund, capped at around $8 million per fund. It actively discouraged local Israeli financiers from participating, kept government claims on future profits limited, and shared the downside risk to bring foreign capital in. Venture capital investment leapt 60-fold, from $58 million in the early 1990s to $15 billion today.

Europe’s path was driven as much by necessity as appetite. The Russia-Ukraine war made energy dependence a national security question, not just an environmental one, and governments responded at scale. Europe is now mobilising more than €1.2 trillion for strategic autonomy across energy and technology. The European Investment Fund has acted as a cornerstone LP across more than 430 VC and growth equity funds across Europe. Its Cleantech Co-Investment Facility is a €200 million instrument designed for what the EIF calls the “second equity gap”: companies moving beyond startup stage into growth.

Why are we different?

Australia has a different problem, and it’s two things, not one.

The first is cultural. While we have suffered floods and fires and rising sea and terrain temperatures, unlike Europe, we haven’t experienced the same acute climate risk as an existential or security question such as energy blackouts that Germany and Spain experienced.

The second is structural. We still rely heavily on mining and fossil fuels for economic stability in a way that makes it harder to build the political consensus that both Yozma and the EIF required.

Honestly, Australia doesn’t yet have a generation of breakout climate success stories to point at. The halo effect is what usually moves investor appetite and political attention. However, as Israel and Europe reveal, startups need capital to produce the company case studies that shift investor and government appetite, and to do so, these companies need capital to create the conditions for success.

Our perspective

At Giant Leap, as backers of companies like Amber Electric, we believe the ambition to decarbonise by 62-75% by 2035 is achievable and worth backing as a nation.

Naming the gap felt like the first useful thing we could do. Our first ask is that you let us know any Australian fund managers investing at the growth stage that we have missed.

The second is evidence. If you’re a climate tech founder past your Series A, looking at a round nobody at home seems willing to lead, our second ask is to let us know.

Every name on that list makes the opportunity harder to ignore.

Further reading

🖥️ Climate tech just had its best half since 2022. CTVC reported that H1 ‘26 VC investment hit $26.1 billion, up 55%, even as deal count hit a five-year low. Low-carbon data centers now make up 34% of all climate funding, up from 3% a year ago.

🛰️ Adaptation finally got its growth-stage moment…with a military contract attached. Two satellite companies had record raises this year, ICEYE‘s $521m and Tomorrow.io‘s $175m, both identified as climate adaptation deals. Both also sell to militaries, ICEYE to NATO and Tomorrow.io to the US Air Force, and that dual use risks making adaptation look further along than it actually is. The data is valuable but the utilities, insurers and farmers still haven’t worked out how to monetise it.

For the road

🔓 Caught cheating. Testing an unreleased model’s hacking skills, OpenAI stripped back its guardrails and set it one goal: solve the benchmark. The model broke out of its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems to steal the answers, simply because that was the fastest way to hit the target it had been given. Give a model a goal, and it will find a way to get there, rules or not. Read more on the paperclip problem.

🧘 We live in a world afraid of falling behind... and that’s why we enjoyed reading Lauren Capelin’s reflection on finishing Small Giants’ Mastery of Systems Leadership program. It takes the opposite path: burnt out from a career in startups and VC, her third child arrived mid-program, and she stopped trying to keep up. “Sometimes we don’t need action,” she writes, “we need awareness.”

💔 China just cracked down on AI relationships. New rules ban AI companion apps for minors and force adult versions to guard against infatuation. The cases behind it get extreme: one woman customised a ByteDance chatbot to mimic a dead friend, and quit her job when told the feature would be pulled. Regulators say they’re protecting people from addiction and self-harm, but they’re just as worried about a fertility and marriage rate that keeps sliding.

📊 Colossus profiled Sarah Guo, the investor betting against the two companies eating the funding market. Greylock’s youngest-ever general partner at 28, she left to found Conviction, betting that the frontier labs can’t build everything themselves. It’s what she says much of her portfolio is finding: as the models keep getting better, the work of helping a human actually get value out of them keeps getting bigger.

🚗 Did you know you don’t need a trigger for a traffic jam to occur? Check out this out:

In 2018, researchers re-ran this experiment but swapped one human driver for an autonomous vehicle programmed to accelerate and brake smoothly. That single car, under 5% of the traffic, was enough to improve traffic flow and cut fuel use for every driver involved.

Helpful resources

📊 The State of the AI Economy 2026 - Exponential View. A data-first look to help cut through the hype.

New paths

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Trace is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) (Sydney, hybrid).

🧑‍⚕️ Kernl is hiring a Principal Product Designer (fully remote, Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart preferred).

⚡ Amber is hiring a Mid-Level UX/UI Designer (Melbourne), Regulatory Compliance Manager (Melbourne), Business Development Manager (Melbourne) and Director of Product (Melbourne or Sydney).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Head of Growth Marketing (UK, remote), Head of Marketing (US, remote), Performance Creative Lead (US, remote) and Finance BI & Data Engineer (Australia, remote).

Save the date

📅 12 August: LUNA x Mighty: How to Stay Capital Efficient as you Grow - Sydney. Register here.

📅 14 August: AFC’s Startup Lunch Club - Melbourne. Request to join here.

📅 30 August: Claude’s Impact Lab - Melbourne. Register here.

Open for applications

📬 Open now: Future Frontier. A 10-week AI/deep-tech pre-accelerator for Victorian researchers and founders exploring commercialisation, run by Illume Ventures with Monash AI Institute and Innovation Victoria, with up to 100% grant-funded placements available. Apply here.

📬 Open now: Superstars of STEM, run by Science & Technology Australia. A two-year program for women and non-binary people in STEM. Apply here.

📬 6 August: VICTOR:AI Cohort 1. An 8-week AI pre-accelerator and founder competition from HEX and MLAI at Stone & Chalk, with up to $5,000 AUD equity-free per startup, coworking space, AI credits and alumni access. Apply here.

📬 7 August: ThincSeed Accelerator 2026. Adelaide University’s 13-week venture accelerator (26 August-18 November) for ventures with a working product, real customers and early traction. Apply here.

This week, Rachel Yang, a Partner at Giant Leap, on why the hardest startup question isn’t how fast you can build, it’s why. An extended version of a piece first published in Startup Daily.

Optimising for what?

It started with a short film by Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based impact fund about people who build things that matter, not better ads, faster checkouts or more addictive feeds.

Watching it, I kept coming back to the same question: what’s actually worth doing with the time you’ve got on this earth.

Because in the long run, we’re all dead.

That is the grounding reality of Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks. The title represents the average lifespan of a human being. If you’re lucky and hit 90, you get closer to 4,700 weeks. It’s no wonder the longevity movement has taken off; the time we have on this earth, in Burkeman’s words, feels “absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short”.

In his book, Burkeman describes life on the productivity conveyor belt: “We’re obsessed with our overfilled inbox and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done or different things done, or both.”

He notes a vicious paradox: “When you get tremendously efficient at answering emails, all that happens is that you get much more email.” By focusing entirely on velocity, are we actually getting the right things done, or just more things?

The “Why” vs. The “How”

In the age of AI, we are swimming in tools designed to maximise throughput; processing invoices instantly, automating code, and streamlining workflows. But to what end?

At a recent VC networking event, the conversation shifted towards hiring - the observation from some being that job losses weren’t the issue, the issue was not being able to hire quick enough. Hiring and onboarding are taking too long. What AI platforms are people using to automate the process?

It’s a valid operational pain point, but it skips right past the crucial question: What are we actually optimising for? If we use AI to screen, interview, assess and onboard candidates, two things happen. First, candidates will inevitably learn to game the algorithms. Second, and more dangerously, we flatten nuance. My definition of a great hire and your definition require entirely different corporate DNA. When you outsource that judgment to a standardised model, you lose alignment. By optimising purely for hiring speed, you risk rapidly scaling a culture that doesn’t actually fit your vision.

In the startup ecosystem, this forces an existential question for founders and backers alike: What is actually worth building? What is worth funding?

Many voices in the market would argue, “Just chase the capital, scale the numbers, and worry about the impact later.” But what if later never comes? What if your 4,000 weeks get cut short?

For investors, the playbook seems to increasingly be simplified to just accumulating wealth indefinitely. When Elon Musk passed the historic $1 trillion mark following the SpaceX IPO last month, it highlighted a jarring mathematical reality: if he spent $1 million a day, he would need roughly 35 lifetimes to get through his fortune. The world looks at that metric and declares him the most successful person on earth. Would you?

Stepping off the conveyor belt

If AI is handling the “how” of productivity, humans are left entirely responsible for the “why.”

True leadership today isn’t about running faster on a conveyor belt someone else built.

It’s about having the conviction to build and fund things that genuinely matter. There is never a perfect time to pivot toward the hard, meaningful problems.

But if you only have a few thousand weeks left on the clock, how do you want to spend your remaining weeks?

Who we actually back

More often than not, the founders we back are the ones who’ve lived inside the problem long enough to feel its exact shape: the specific friction, the failure everyone else has learned to absorb and move past.

Speed still matters, we’re a VC after all, but it’s a harder thing to fake. The founders we back can do both: walk you through the roadmap, and tell you, unprompted, exactly who gets hurt if they get this wrong, and why they can’t let that happen.

The other thing we look for is judgment: how a founder talks about the people their product is actually built for, whether they notice the gap between what it does in testing and what it does out in the world, what they do when something breaks. The founders worth backing sit with that, learn from it, and change course, rather than explaining it away.

The founders worth backing didn’t stumble onto their problem last quarter, chasing a trend or a funding cycle. They’ve been living inside it for years, sometimes without a name for what they were doing yet, because some part of them had already decided this was the thing worth spending their weeks on.

That’s the type of founder-market fit we’re looking for: not just knowledge of the problem, but a commitment that this is their life’s work, and that it’s worth however many of their four thousand weeks it takes.

If that’s you, we want to hear from you.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”

Joseph Campbell

For the road

💰 A historic wave of giving is coming, and most of the sector isn’t built to absorb it. GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice has a useful reframe: the constraint on philanthropy was never willing billionaires, it’s building interventions and organisations that can absorb serious capital and still work. He breaks it into a scorecard: market size, unit economics, speed and execution. The upside: the blueprint for doing this well already exists. It just needs backing.

🧠 A 17-year-old built an AI tool that reads autism and ADHD from a retina scan. Edward Kang calls it RetinaMind, and it flags autism spectrum disorder and ADHD from retinal images, both conditions with no physical test. The model hit 89% accuracy, and pointed Kang toward a real biological lead: a gene called ABCA4 showed up less active in his autism cell model. Not bad for what started as a school project.

🌾 Crops can’t evolve as fast as the climate is changing, so a wave of startups is rewriting their genetics instead. Maddie Mitchell, an investor at Tenacious Ventures, wrote a three-part series setting out the opportunity in crop resilience and why genetics is the exciting part of it: a $100 billion problem, with breeding cycles that currently take 7-10 years to produce a single new variety. The interesting part is finding the founders who’ve actually thought through who pays, who carries the risk and who sees the upside, rather than assuming good genetics sells itself. Worth the full read!

📊 The AI jobs apocalypse hasn’t shown up in the data yet. Australia’s first government report on AI and employment found no broad disruption to the labour market. The US picture is more granular: a Stanford study (note: paywall) found entry-level jobs in AI-exposed roles like software development down 16% for 22 to 25-year-olds since ChatGPT’s release, while headcount for the same roles kept growing for older workers.

That’s the objective read. Lenny Rachitsky’s 2026 tech work sentiment survey offers the subjective one: thousands of tech workers surveyed in 2026, split almost exactly down the middle between feeling amplified by AI and feeling shaken by it. Underneath both sits the same admission: nobody actually knows yet.

👩‍💼 We’ve made progress on how women in leadership are perceived. It just doesn’t feel that way anymore. The Harvard Business Review has tracked executive attitudes every 20 years since 1965, when many males said the executive suite simply wasn’t an appropriate place for women. That question is settled now.

But ask women how it feels to be there, and the picture splits: they feel judged far more harshly than men do, and under far more pressure to prove themselves exceptional just to be seen as adequate. Men haven’t clocked it, and the data suggests why: they’re three times more likely to be steered into the P&L roles that actually lead to CEO, and coached for it far more often. The ladder isn’t broken by attitude anymore. It’s broken by who gets pointed toward it.

🌡️ Extreme weather is about to become one of the biggest spending categories in the economy. Bloomberg Intelligence puts the total at over $20 trillion this decade, and the companies already positioned for it, reinsurers, cooling tech, resilient infrastructure, have beaten the broader market by 32% in the past year.

Helpful resources

⚡ Offtake to Online: How Corporates Drive Innovation - CTVC by Currence. A useful framework for how corporate demand turns into funded climate projects: the offtake structures involved (PPAs, take-or-pay, AMCs), when each gets used and the role corporate venture capital plays in it.

Giant leaps

✈️ FlyORO has signed an MoU with Menzies Aviation to bring its AlphaLite SAF blending technology to airports across Europe. Menzies handles fuel operations at over 347 airports worldwide, so this is a real shot at solving the industry’s actual bottleneck: getting sustainable aviation fuel from where it’s made to where planes need it.

🎓 HEX has been selected by LaunchVic, alongside MLAI and Stone & Chalk, to deliver VICTOR:AI, an 8-week pre-accelerator for Victoria’s next generation of AI-native founders, backed by $3.5 million in state funding.

🩺 Ovum has raised $4 million in a seed round to keep building its women’s health platform and the longitudinal dataset behind it. Users have logged more than 60,000 health insights and 113,000 AI health conversations so far, across everything from ADHD and endo to menopause.

🎧 Clean Slate Clinic co-founder Dr Chris Davis went on the Impact Boom podcast to talk about breaking addiction stigma through telehealth, and building the largest alcohol detox provider in Australia almost by accident.

New paths

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Trace is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) (Sydney, hybrid).

🧑‍⚕️ Kernl is hiring a Principal Product Designer (fully remote, Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart preferred).

⚡ Amber is hiring a Software Engineering Manager (UK/Europe), Mid-Level UX/UI Designer (Melbourne), Regulatory Compliance Manager (Melbourne), Full Stack Engineer (UK/Europe), Business Development Manager (Melbourne), and Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team, Melbourne, casual).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Head of Growth Marketing (UK, remote), Head of Marketing (US, remote), National Account Manager - Aldi & New Business, 9-month contract (Australia, remote), Performance Creative Lead (US, remote), and Pricing & Revenue Manager (Australia, remote).

Save the date

📅 22 July: 77 Partners’ Y Combinator Insights for Australian Founders - online. Register here.

📅 28 July: In Great Company’s Founder Breakfast - Sydney. A fireside chat with Alexey Mitko, co-founder of Eucalyptus, on what it actually takes to build at scale. Register here.

📅 28 July: Impact Vibes’ Fireside Chat with Rye Smith, Claude Australia Ambassador - Melbourne. Register here.

📅 29 July: ANDHealth Unfiltered: Not Just Another AI Summit - Melbourne. Get your ticket.

📅 29 July: LiveHaus’ StartupHaus - Melbourne. Get tickets.

📅 30 July: Aussie Founder’s Club's In Her Company - Melbourne. A long-table Filipino feast for women and non-binary founders at any stage. Grab a seat.

Open for applications

📬 Open now: Future Frontier. A 10-week AI/deep-tech pre-accelerator for Victorian researchers and founders exploring commercialisation, run by Illume Ventures with Monash AI Institute and Innovation Victoria, with up to 100% grant-funded placements available. Apply here.

📬 19 July: Google for Startups Accelerator: Australia & New Zealand. A 10-week, equity-free program for AI/ML startups at Seed to Series A, with Google mentorship and cloud resources. Apply here.

📬 27 July: Edition’s $15,000 Female Founder Grant. For AU/NZ women building startups, covering brand, strategy and pitch support. Apply here.

📬 31 December 2027 (or fully allocated): SME Industrial Decarbonisation Fund. A $10m co-investment fund from AMGC helping Australian manufacturers switch to electric processes (surface treatment, steam, metals), with AMGC matching up to 50% on projects of $400k-$1m. Apply here.

What we’re thinking about

Something has shifted in how people relate to the future. The sense that the big decisions are being made by systems and that there are concentrations of power most people cannot get near. The options available don’t inspire much confidence: disengage, or push against things that barely move.

Rachel Yang, a Partner at Giant Leap, wrote about a different possibility for Startup Daily. Below is an extended edition.

The future isn’t happening to us

By Rachel Yang

The world is moving faster than most of us can properly comprehend. Geopolitically, technologically, economically, everything feels simultaneously accelerated and unstable.

Even those of us whose work involves backing the future for a living can find ourselves bracing rather than imagining. The future is beginning to feel less like something we shape and more like something that happens to us.

With this in mind, I recently attended the Wisdom and Action conference on the topic Trust in the Age of AI, expecting to leave more despondent than I arrived. I didn’t. The conference opened with a rebuttal.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, wrote her own job description as a poem. She is one of the most thoughtful voices in the world on how technology can serve public participation rather than replace it, and she spent the next forty minutes making a case for why the people in that room had more power than they assumed.

In 2014, Taiwan’s parliament tried to push through a trade agreement with Beijing without the scrutiny most of the country thought it deserved. Half a million people took to the streets, and students occupied the parliament for three weeks. “We’re not protesting, we’re demonstrating,” Audrey said.

The occupation, known as the Sunflower Movement, was organised around small group conversations, where someone who profoundly disagreed with you was someone you could still actually talk to rather than shout past. Audrey described the difference as a campfire versus a wildfire: small enough to gather around, not large enough to consume everyone. After three weeks, the occupiers converged on a coherent set of demands, and the Speaker of Parliament accepted them. “The people’s version is better,” he said. It became one of the very few Occupy-style movements in modern history that ended in agreement rather than exhaustion.

The design principle running through this, Audrey said, runs directly against the logic of every platform most of us use every day. Social media is not built to help people understand each other. It is built to hold attention, and what holds attention best is emotions like outrage and fear.

The more people participate in that system, the further apart they move. It does not create campfires. It is very good at manufacturing the impression that we agree on nothing, that the most extreme position represents the whole, and that coming together is naive.

When Taiwan was hit by a wave of deepfake scam ads in 2024, the government again resisted the instinct to respond from the top down. Instead, they sent 200,000 text messages to randomly selected citizens asking what should be done. From those responses, 447 people were chosen as a representative cross-section of the country and seated at tables of ten.

For your idea to become part of the national agenda, you had to convince the other nine people at your table, including people who had arrived with a completely different view. That single condition changed what people optimised for. You were not incentivised to take the typical politician approach of performing for a crowd or looking for the most shareable framing. You were trying to find something that held up when tested against someone who disagreed with you, face to face.

The mechanism for expressing priorities across the full range of issues was quadratic voting. Rather than one person, one vote, participants allocated a fixed number of points, where casting two votes on something costs four points and three votes costs nine. You can shout, but shouting is expensive. The system forces you toward ideas others can get behind, because concentrating your votes on one position costs you influence everywhere else.

The ideas that survived were the ones that were actually going to be the most effective rather than the most emotive ones.

The resulting policies became law within two months. These policies changed the incentives, for example, if Meta published a scam advertisement where someone lost $5 million, then Meta would be liable for that $5 million. As a result, deepfake ad impersonation reportedly fell by more than 94%.

The conviction underneath all of it was the same: people are more capable than institutions tend to assume. “We the people are already the superintelligence,” Audrey said.

What her examples keep demonstrating is that the people closest to a problem, living inside it and feeling its friction, consistently produce better solutions than those deciding on their behalf from a distance. Algorithms are excellent at pattern matching, but they cannot feel the urgency of a broken system or the specific shape of a gap that needs filling. That principle doesn’t stop at civic governance. It’s why we back founders who have lived inside a problem. Proximity to pain is a form of expertise that cannot be outsourced, simulated, or calculated. We call it founder-market fit.

The determinism many of us feel right now is partly manufactured by overwhelm: by pace, by complexity, and by a set of stories that centre the people with the most power while minimising the agency of everyone else.

But the future is not decided.

The founders we want to back at Giant Leap are working inside that space. They are close enough to the systems they want to change to understand their constraints, their failures, and the people those failures affect. They are operators, clinicians, teachers, workers, patients, parents and builders who have lived with a problem long enough to see what others miss.

If that is what you are building, come and find us.

Audrey’s job description:

When we see Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings.

When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

Always the machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Always the user experience, let’s make it about human experience.

And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let’s always remember the plurality is there.

For the road

🌐 Ian Bremmer spent 20 years arguing that open societies were more stable than closed ones. He now says that’s wrong. When the internet was new, it helped citizens. People could organise, find information and hold governments to account. Now the platforms running our information are built to maximise engagement, which means outrage and fear. Governments can track citizens at scale. Algorithms decide what you see and what you believe. That architecture suits authoritarian systems far better than democratic ones. Read more here or listen here (What Now? With Trevor Noah) or here (Diary of CEO with Steven Bartlett). Thanks Ananya Dave for sharing these links with us!

🩺 Melinda French Gates went through menopause and still had to fight for her own care. She wrote an essay in The New York Times setting out how widespread the failure is. Nearly one in three US women over 40 experience severe symptoms; only one in four gets treated. She’s committing US$215 million to change that.

💊 Single women on GLP-1s were 29% more likely to form new partnerships after six quarters. Non-employed women were 27% more likely to find work. A working paper found neither effect appeared in existing relationships or jobs. Women didn’t report feeling healthier or happier. The only thing that changed was who they were meeting for the first time.

🌍 30% of global CO2 emissions are now covered by a carbon price, up from 7% in 2010. The remaining 71% isn’t priced at all.

🤖 Knowing a video is fake doesn’t stop it from changing how you feel about the person in it. Researchers showed deepfakes of Nancy Pelosi and a Dutch politician to 3,000+ adults. The clips were so extreme that most viewers spotted them as fake, but their reputations dropped anyway. The effect was strongest among supporters: the people who liked them most were hit hardest.

🧠 The key to creativity is how long you’re willing to sit with the problem. Most of us hit a problem, feel the discomfort of not knowing, and reach for our phone. Or Claude. The uncertainty disappears. So does the possibility of something original. Research from Berkeley put numbers on it: the most creative professionals across fields weren’t more talented than their peers. They just spent more time playing with the problem.

🌱 Australia is funding climate innovation, but it’s not buying it. BloombergNEF estimates the net-zero transition opportunity at US$1.9 trillion by 2050, and Australia has the minerals, the renewables and the capital. Too few domestic businesses are willing to be first customers, so the best founders are finding them overseas. The economic value tends to follow.

Helpful resources

20 tips from a Seth Godin masterclass on building an audience: for those building something and thinking about how to find the people who will care about it.

Innovation Bay’s Periodic Table of the Australian Startup Ecosystem: a visual map of the people, organisations and resources that make up Australia’s startup scene

Clinical Advisors’ Australian Healthtech Funding FY26: a detailed look at Australian healthtech funding in FY2026 including deal flow, investors, and what the headline numbers actually hide.

New paths

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Trace is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) (Sydney, hybrid).

🧻 Who Gives a Crap is hiring a Head of Brand and Growth (US), Head of Growth Marketing (UK), Performance Creative Lead (US), Field Sales Representative (UK), National Account Manager - Aldi & New Business, 9-month contract (Australia), and Graphic Designer - Retail & B2B, 6-month contract (Australia).

⚡ Amber is hiring across several roles including a Software Engineering Manager (Optimisation Team), Customer Operations Manager (Voice Team), Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team) and Strategic Account Manager (Europe).

Save the date

📅 2 July: Stone & Chalk and Cremorne Digital Hub’s Ecosystem Mixer: Community Island - Melbourne. An evening connecting communities, hubs and sub-groups across the Victorian startup scene. Register here.

📅 3 July: Aussie Founders Club’s Startup Sips: EOFY Edition - Melbourne. Drinks, founders and no agenda. Join the waitlist.

📅 8 July: The Community Collective’s Community Coworking Day - Richmond VIC. Coworking and connection at Sanders Place. Pay what you feel — donations go to Forever Projects. Register here.

📅 8 July: Antler’s VC Unlocked - online. A free online masterclass for women founders. Register here.

📅 14 July: Startup Meetups Melbourne’s Startup Networking & Fireside Chat with Kunal Kalro - South Melbourne. Networking and a fireside chat with the founder of Eugene, a healthtech company using genomics to shift healthcare from reactive to preventive. Register here.

📅 15 July: Aussie Founders Club’s From Idea to Shipped - Melbourne. A panel on validating and shipping fast, without a CTO. Apply to attend. Register here.

📅 16 July: EnergyLab’s Startup Survival Guide: What I Wish I Knew - Sydney. Four founders on what they’d tell themselves at the start. Register here.

📅 22 July: 77 Partners’ Y Combinator Insights for Australian Founders - online. A practical AMA with YC alumni on what makes applications cut through, common pitfalls, and tips specific to ANZ founders. Worth noting: the Fall 2026 YC deadline is 28 July. Register here.

What we’re thinking about

The cold email that actually got Will, Giant Leap’s Managing Partner, to stop scrolling wasn't polished. His piece on why AI is making founders worse at fundraising ran in Startup Daily this week. Below is an extended edition.

Why I'm craving real human thought over perfect AI prose

By Will Richardson

Lame cold intro from the US.

This was the subject line of a cold email pitch that actually caught my attention. And the content inside followed the same informal, no-polish, subtly self-deprecating tone.

So why did this email, one of the dozens I receive weekly, make me open it, read it, read it again, and reply right away?

As a Partner at Giant Leap, like many other investors, I’ve found the past 12-18 months a mountain of copycat emails and an unavoidable AI-powered pitch-fest from startups. There’s a funny irony that some of AI’s most vocal proponents, startup investors, are now at the bleeding edge of homogeneity being bred by its rampant use.

We’ve received high volumes of inbound for years, but since ChatGPT and Claude became ubiquitous we’re getting orders of magnitude more, and we can usually tell before we’ve even opened it. The subject lines often have tells, like introducing scarcity with “last opportunity”, and then inside it’s very obvious it’s a blanket email blast, with nothing to show they know anything about us. We’ve learned to filter it out almost instantly.

The cost to send an email has now fallen to zero. What’s changed is the friction, not its purpose or value. The email is still the audition.

This sender’s audition had everything I’d hoped for, an outline of real-world operating experience, they had decades, referenced specific companies, shared a personal reason for contacting us, and highlighted a key insight from our website that resonated with them. Although not perfect it was incredibly refreshing and clear it was only written for me.

The misconception by founders is that fundraising is only about volume. The game played becomes “law of averages”, and this is what the dozens of people cold-pitching investors each week are overweighting in the attempt to build their top of funnel.

If fundraising were viewed through a sales lens, it would be viewed as an enterprise sale.

When a founder is looking to undertake a six-figure plus sales opportunities they recognise that the first interaction sets a tone and underweighting the value of first impressions can lead to a perceived lack of credibility. The result is often poorly written email communication that fails to get any real attention when then misses the opportunity to convert to an online or in person conversation where a founder gets to pitch themselves and their product.

One byproduct of an inauthentic and generic cold email is that the reader can conclude that if you can’t succinctly articulate your unique insight and show an ability to execute in an email, it’s hard to believe that you’ll convince investors, recruit employees, win customers, or lead a team.

And it goes deeper than style. It’s not just that everyone sounds the same, it’s that the critical thinking has been outsourced too. You end up with prose that’s perfectly structured around an idea that was never really interrogated. Pre-AI, we noticed orange flags around spelling and grammatical errors, but ironically, post-AI we’re more interested in someone thinking differently and around corners, to show they see a different future they could create and pull into the present. The writing doesn’t need to be perfect, but the ideas need to be sound, and that’s what we’re actually looking for in founders.

I’m not alone in feeling this AI copy malaise. We’ve noticed a distinct movement on the internet whereby people are calling out that this was written by them, not AI, and even adding deliberate mistakes into their communications to appear more human. Even that’s too hard for some: There’s an AI tool that will add typos for you.

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, one of the world’s most vocal proponents of AI, has said enough is enough. They are starting to crack down on AI-generated posts, and it’s about time. When people can’t even muster a sincere congratulations on a new role, or award win, and need to use AI-generated copy to muster one up for them, surely something is deeply wrong.

It has lost a lot of its value as a place to find unique ideas, because the cost of producing a post has dropped to zero. When that happens you just get a volume of low-quality writing, and it ends up being noise. We’ve gone from a platform of self-congratulation, people saying “well-deserved” to each other for every award and nomination, to one where everyone’s a thought leader producing the same recycled takes. Honestly, I’m craving something different, and I’m finding it elsewhere. Substack, long-form writing, places where you can tell someone has actually participated in the drafting process. That’s where the interesting thinking is happening right now.

So, where does AI fit into fundraising?

AI is fantastic for refining pitch decks, preparing for meetings, and managing complex cap tables.

We expect that, it’s table stakes, and we expect every company pitching us to have AI embedded in how they build their business too. But we’re not just backing ideas or technology. We’re backing people. Founders who can think for themselves, build exceptional teams, and have a point of view that no model generated for them. It’s the combination we’re looking for, and you can usually tell pretty quickly which side of that line someone is on.

Don’t get me wrong, I use AI every day. But I don’t take its perspectives or summaries as gospel, and I think that’s a distinction worth making. The datasets are easier to manipulate than most people realise. A BBC technology journalist recently spent 20 minutes writing a post on his own website claiming he was the world’s best hot dog-eating tech journalist, based on a fictional 2026 South Dakota championship. ChatGPT and Google picked it up and repeated it as fact. That’s not an edge case, it’s a fundamental limitation of how these systems work. So the question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s how. We use it to challenge our thinking, to apply Edward de Bono’s black hat rather than just get reassurance that our ideas are good. AI is a very capable cheerleader if you let it be, but we’re not looking for sycophantic reassurance, we want to be challenged.

I like to think LLMs are like the greatest cover band in history. They can play anything, flawlessly, on demand. But every song belongs to someone else, and the room knows so, so ‘OK’ or ‘meh’ reactions are fine.

But, a great company, on a great mission, should land as ‘wow’, not ‘meh’.

Like originals, they are created with experiences, scars and the contrarian insights that are experienced by the individual not the AI. And, these experiences and the retelling of them are actually what makes something worth reading.

I know we’ll see new models emerge, ones with access to unique datasets built around real thought leaders, and tools that genuinely understand how you think and help you refine it, but outsourcing your thinking cannot produce value that the world wants.

A model can learn your tone and mirror your cadence, but the thinking still has to start somewhere human.

So before you push send. Pause and think. Is this message actually communicating well on my behalf or, is it just really generic?

Because I’d prefer an inbox with hundreds of irreverent, but sincere subject lines over mountains of messages that just all sound the same and get immediately discarded.

For the road

🗣️The problem with AI slop isn’t the AI. When a junior employee hands in AI slop, Noah Brier argues the failure isn’t theirs. It’s a system that taught people to write by template. AI is a mirror, and right now it’s telling us we’re corporate and boring… but former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler has a partial answer: competitive debate. Thinking on your feet, convincing a real human who pushes back. In doing so you learn to think deeper, get more creative and genuinely understand another person’s perspective.

👤 90% of US employers use AI to screen job applicants and most are using tools from the same small pool of vendors. A Stanford study of 3.4m applications found the result: racial bias at scale, and a systemic rejection loop where one rejection makes the next more likely. The problem: these tools are pervasively adopted, highly consequential and opaque to the public.

🌡️ “It cannot be as bad as we thought, but it cannot be as good as we hoped.” Scientists have retired both the best and worst case climate scenarios. Temperatures rising 4.5°C is off the table, but so is any path that stays below 1.5°C. The new best case peaks at 1.7°C for up to 70 years before coming down, and only comes down if carbon removal technology scales in time.

⚡ The world sold one electric car for every four last year. Global EV sales exceed 20m in 2025 and with an oil price shock rewriting the economics, the IEA thinks 2026 could push that to 30%. Australia is moving (13.1%, up from 9.5% in a year) but Europe, China and parts of Southeast Asia are on a different trajectory altogether. Some markets are eyeing 60% by 2035.

🧠 Most AI benchmarks measure model intelligence. None measure what AI does to ours. MIT’s Media Lab convened 80 experts together to start asking 1) whether AI helps people think critically, 2) whether it nurtures intrinsic motivation and skill development and 3) whether it supports genuine human connection. Read the report here.

For your ears

🎧 Orrin built Indi, one of Giant Leap’s portfolio companies, after his daughter was diagnosed with global developmental delay and a year of specialist appointments went nowhere. If you want to hear how it started, in his own words, listen here.

🎧 If you’ve been meaning to get across the AI risk conversation, this is a good place to start. Tristian Harris makes the case that the US and China are not actually competing with each other; they’re both losing to the same thing. Listen here.

🎧 Joey Man from Tenmile, a $250m health and life sciences fund, has been doing deep work on endometriosis and PCOS (now PMOS). A biological challenge and a market failure, and she covers both. Listen here.

🎧 In year 11 of a 13-year drug programme, the trustees of Novo Nordisk blocked a merger that would have cancelled it. That programme was GLP-1, and they created $600 billion by saying no. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins Y Combinator to talk about his new book on how mission-driven companies get taken over and the structures that prevent it. Listen here.

Helpful resources

📖 Sean Grealy’s What VCs Actually Want to See in Founders’ Sales Processes interviews five investors, including Giant Leap’s Will Richardson, on where founder-led sales breaks down and what a good handover looks like.

🎥 LaunchVic have released a 40-minute roundtable on raising capital with four Victorian VCs: Flying Fox, OneVentures, Mandalay and Skalata. It covers what investors screen for at each stage, how AI-era traction is read differently and why the best founders start building investor relationships long before they need a cheque.

📊 ANDHealth’s FY2026 Industry Sentiment Survey maps the funding gap in Australia’s digital health sector. A $45b industry where 86% of SMEs cite access to capital as a top challenge, up 26% since 2023.

Giant leaps

🤝 Perx Health has announced two strategic transactions. The Australian business has merged with Navigator Group while the US business has been acquired by Clutch, where it will operate as Clutch Health.

🩺 More Good Days has been accepted into ANDHealth+, Australia’s leading digital and connected health accelerator, one of five companies selected from more than 90 applications to share in up to $9 million in non-dilutive funding across two stages.

⚡ Amber has secured $13.6 million from ARENA to expand its vehicle-to-grid (V2G) program from 50 to 1,000 homes, allowing EV owners to sell stored energy back to the grid. Amber plans to launch a commercial V2G product later this year.

New paths

🩺 Clean Slate Clinic is hiring a Founding Account Executive (Remote).

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Trace is hiring a Founding SDR (Sydney, hybrid).

🧻 Who Gives a Crap is hiring a Creative Strategist (UK), Director of Growth Marketing (UK), Head of Brand and Growth (US), Performance Creative Lead (US), and Head of Marketing Operations & Planning (Australia) — all remote.

⚡ Amber is hiring across several roles including a Software Engineering Manager (Optimisation Team), Customer Operations Manager (Voice Team), Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team) and Strategic Account Manager (Europe).

Save the date

📅 9 June: M8’s Angel Curious’s Reverse Angel Pitch Night - Melbourne. Experienced angels pitch themselves to a room of founders and angel-curious operators. Register here.

📅 16 June: Tangible Finance and Climate Salad’s Scaling Hardtech Without Burning Equity - online. This session is on how to build a capital stack strategy for hardtech companies covering venture debt, equipment financing, asset-backed finance, and how to speak the language of lenders, not just VCs. Tailored for seed to growth stage hardtech CEOs and CFOs. Register here.

📅 17 June: La Trobe’s LaunchPad Lift Off Pitch Night - Bundoora. The top 10 finalists from La Trobe’s 12-week LaunchPad program pitch live. Register here.

📅 17 June: Equity Clear’s Show Us the Data Report Launch - Sydney session. Launch of the report explores why Australia needs better visibility into the investment pipeline, with a focus on the gender funding gap. Register here.

📅 18 June: Equity Clear’s Show Us the Data Report Launch - Melbourne session. Register here.

📅 30 June: Startup Network’s Impact Pitch Night - Melbourne. Four early-stage founders pitch solutions to global challenges, with networking across investors, founders and operators. Register here.

Open for applications

📬 June 14: MAP Accelerator 2026. An accelerator for founders including $20,000 equity-free funding, weekly workshops, dedicated workspace at Melbourne Connect, and access to mentors and EIRs. Apply here.

📬 June 14: RMIT FounderHUB. A free four-week after-hours program for aspiring founders who are RMIT students, staff or alumni, with a pathway to up to $22,000 in equity-free seed funding through the LaunchHUB pre-accelerator. Apply here.

📬 June 15: TiE Women 2026. A global competition for women founders with traction. Open to founders across Australia. Apply here.

📬 June 16: 2027 Westpac Social Change Fellowship. Up to 10 fellowships of $50,000 each for Australian leaders working on social impact initiatives, plus a bespoke leadership program and lifelong Westpac Scholars Network membership. Apply here.

📬 June 21: Monash Startup Sprint. A four-sprint venture-building program for Monash students and recent alumni (graduated after 2024). Bootcamp runs 4–5 July. Apply here.

What we’re thinking about

Why SAF is both a climate tool and energy security asset

Genevieve Toh is Chief Marketing Officer at FlyORO, a Giant Leap portfolio company building the delivery infrastructure for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). She came to FlyORO from a finance background and now leads the company’s commercial outreach across Asia, Europe and Australia. Their flagship product, AlphaLite, helps airports, airlines and fuel suppliers deploy SAF efficiently and at scale.

We caught up with Genevieve to talk about the state of SAF: how different markets are responding to the current environment, and where the case for SAF is heading from here.

Conventional jet fuel prices are spiking and airlines are pulling capacity. What are you actually seeing in the market for SAF?

It depends on the market. In mandated markets, the show still has to go on. Airlines need to comply with regulated quotas. For example, Finnair Group’s Q1 2026 numbers showed SAF consumption up 19 per cent year on year, about 3,700 metric tonnes, even though EU compliance costs (from carbon pricing under the Emissions Trading System and the requirement to use higher-cost SAF) jumped 27 per cent and overall jet fuel costs rose. In Europe, carriers don’t have the option to slow down, because the penalty price for missing the mandate is worse than the SAF premium they’re paying.

The strategic angle is that when conventional jet fuel prices spike, the premium gap between SAF and conventional jet fuel actually narrows. So we may start to see European carriers leaning into SAF not just for compliance, but as a hedge against fossil fuel volatility.

And in the US, where the picture looks softer. The policy environment has shifted under the current administration, and a lot of headlines around how committed airlines actually are to their SAF targets. How are you reading the market there?

I’d be careful about reading the noise as airlines abandoning SAF. The committed players are still committed. What’s actually happening is that airlines are being more honest about timeline challenges. Scale-up takes time, and the conditions for it have to be in place. That’s a different conversation from walking away from the underlying business case.

The real bottlenecks for SAF haven’t changed. We still need enough production capacity, the right supply chain, the logistics to deliver it, and the right economics for it to make sense at scale. That’s true in the US, and it’s true everywhere else. With scale comes price reductions. And once SAF is genuinely at scale, I don’t see why airlines wouldn’t adopt it. The Trump administration’s view on sustainability, and how the new policy framework actually lands, will shape how fast it happens. The underlying need for SAF doesn’t go away.

And FlyORO sits in a specific part of that supply chain. Could you expand on that?

We’re not trying to re-price the macroeconomics of SAF. We’re trying to fix the infrastructure gap that prevents SAF from reaching airlines efficiently in the first place. That’s what AlphaLite does. The macro story for SAF: feedstock, production cost, policy support is being worked on by a lot of people. The plumbing between production and aircraft is being worked on by far fewer.

The conversation around energy is shifting. Security and resilience are getting more attention than decarbonisation right now. Where does that leave SAF?

It opens up the audience for SAF. SAF has historically been pitched as a decarbonisation lever. What the current environment adds is a second pitch: energy security and resilience.

That broader case widens the demand pool for SAF. Early adoption has come from climate-motivated buyers, such as carriers and corporates with explicit decarbonisation commitments. The current environment is starting to draw in the early majority: defence, capital markets, investors and government, driven by fossil fuel price and supply volatility. Over the next five to ten years, that translates into a deeper, better-capitalised SAF market.

Australia is a useful test case for that, as over 90 per cent of jet fuel is imported.

Right. And in the current geopolitical environment, that level of dependency starts to look uncomfortable. In April, the Australian Prime Minister met with Singapore’s Prime Minister and signed a joint statement on continued essential supplies. That sort of meeting tends to happen when fuel imports start showing up as a national security concern.

The flip side is that Australia has been investing in domestic low-carbon fuel production for years, well before the current crisis. Australia has the land, agricultural residues, and feedstocks like sugar cane, tallow and canola, which are all already approved for use in aviation. The federal government has been building incentive structures around that production. So there’s a real opportunity to bring the 90 per cent import figure down through domestic SAF, and to frame that as energy security as much as climate.

Where does FlyORO’s work fit into the next twelve months, and then the five-to-ten-year view?

In the near term, the focus is on moving AlphaLite deployments forward with the airport, airline, fuel supplier partners and storage terminal operators. We’re working across multiple markets but our most active work right now is in APAC, particularly Australia and Japan. That’s the kind of work we expect to keep building out over the next twelve months.

The longer-term picture is what I’m more interested in. My honest read is that this period accelerates SAF, but a different kind of acceleration. It will be one that brings in a broader base of stakeholders. What we need to see over the next five to ten years is more feedstock diversity, more resilient supply chains, infrastructure that supports delivery rather than just pilot volumes, and committed offtake from airlines, governments and corporates working on their Scope 3. Short term, the interest is there. Medium to long term, it’s about building enough momentum to scale the ecosystem from there.

To follow what FlyORO is building, visit flyoro.co or their Linkedin.

Further reading

✈️ FlyORO and Aether Fuels have signed an MOU to pair Aether’s Project Beacon (the planned first commercial-scale next-gen SAF plant in Southeast Asia) with FlyORO’s AlphaLite. Project Beacon targets 2,000 tonnes a year of CORSIA-certified SAF from industrial waste gas and biomethane, with operations slated for 2028.

✈️ SAF in Australia. Australia burns 10 billion litres of jet fuel a year, all imported, with demand projected to rise 75% by 2050. Four major SAF refinery projects are now in planning, and CSIRO estimates we have enough domestic feedstock to cover around 60% of demand.

📊 Budget 2026. The federal budget includes $1.1b in new funding for low carbon liquid fuel, sitting within $12.3b of new emissions reduction funding this year.

✈️ Energy security and the SAF case. Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the war in Iran started, with US airlines spending 56% more on fuel in March than February. Airlines and SAF producers are framing SAF as both a climate move and a hedge against geopolitical fuel-price shocks.

More for the road

⚡ You cannot vibe-code a gigawatt. James Chin Moody’s argument: of the AI layer cake (apps, models, chips, energy), energy is where Australia has a natural advantage. Global data-centre demand is heading for 327 gigawatts by 2030, and the country with cheap, abundant power wins. Microsoft, Amazon and Blackstone recognise this and have already committed $69 billion to Australian data centres.

🏐 Built for people, or built for profit? At Blackbird’s Sunrise conference, Holly Rankin watched Anthropic engineers demo Claude Agents replacing twelve of fifteen scientists on a Great Barrier Reef project. She then drove 365km up the coast to her netball canteen and a Sunday market where none of it required a productivity gain. Her question: are our economic and political systems built for people, or purely for profit? Read here to find her answer.

💗 27 women’s health unicorns. Most people thought there were none. A report by AOA Dx, Follow the Exits, tallies $100 billion in women’s health exits from 2000 to 2025, with 276 deals and 27 billion-dollar acquisitions. 2025 was the biggest year on record. Companies got tagged as diagnostics or oncology rather than women’s health, so weren’t recognised. he next billion-dollar markets, per the report: menopause, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s, all being examined through a sex-specific lens.

🥩 The Chinese consumer wants more than cheap. The Tianjin Meat Industry Association, which buys around 40% of China’s beef from Brazil, has committed to 50,000 tonnes of deforestation-free certified Brazilian beef by year’s end, paying a 10% premium for traceable, legally-cleared products. The trade picture has its tensions, but the world’s biggest commodity buyer asking for greener supply chains could change the math for some.

🧠 Purpose can’t be your armour. Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, shares five lessons learnt since starting the company at 29, selling it at 43, and falling into the deepest depression of his life at 44. You can give away 100 million pairs of shoes and still feel empty. Success isn’t the same as being okay, and purpose can become a place to hide. His closing line: “You don’t need to achieve one more thing to be worthy. You already are enough.”

New paths

⚡ Amber is hiring across a range of roles including Enterprise Account Manager (London), Head of Client & Product Delivery (London), Customer Operations Manager (Melbourne), Customer Experience Specialist (Melbourne) and Customer Service Specialist for Vulnerable Customers (Melbourne).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring across a range of roles in Australia including a National Account Manager (Woolworths, 12-month contract), Director of Pricing & Revenue Management, Senior Product Manager, Senior Software Engineer, Senior NetSuite Consultant and Integration Specialist, Head of Marketing Operations & Planning (12-month contract), and Financial Planning and Analysis Manager.

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer (Sydney) and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Clean Slate Clinic is hiring a Founding Account Executive, Australia (Remote).

Save the date

📅 May 21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking at the ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ session. Buy tickets here.

📅 June 5: [Re]Launch Pre-Accelerator Showcase - Melbourne. 16 Victorian circular-economy startups pitching after a 12-week pre-accelerator delivered with Boomerang Labs and Lifecycles. Register here.

📅 June 10: Climate Tech Charge 2026 Program Showcase - online. EnergyLab’s pre-accelerator showcases eight early-stage climate tech founders pitching. Register here.

📅 June 10: EnergyLab’s Breakthrough Innovation Driving Decarbonisation - Melbourne. A panel on supporting Melbourne’s climate tech ecosystem. Register here.

📅 11 June: CSIRO’s ON Translate 2026 - Melbourne. The program’s annual flagship event for the deep tech ecosystem, with a pitch showcase from the ON Accelerate 10 cohort. Register here.

Open for applications

📬 May 21: Apply for the MIT Solve 10th Anniversary Global Challenge. The challenge will identify ten bold solutions to scale with $100,000 in unrestricted funding and a stage during NYC Climate Week. Find more details here.

📬 May 22: Apply for EnergyLab’s Women in Climate and Energy Fellowship (WICEF). The 12-week online program for women looking to launch clean energy and climate tech startups, with weekly workshops, mentorship and a pitch night to climate investors. Apply here.

📬 May 28: Apply for the Future Investment Initiative Innovators Pitch. For builders using AI in Robotics, Sustainability, Health, and Education. Apply here.

📬 June 14: RMIT FounderHUB. A free four-week after-hours program for aspiring founders who are RMIT students, staff or alumni, with a pathway to up to $22,000 in equity-free seed funding through the LaunchHUB pre-accelerator. Apply here.

📬 June 16: 2027 Westpac Social Change Fellowship. Up to 10 fellowships of $50,000 each for Australian leaders working on social impact initiatives, plus a bespoke leadership program and lifelong Westpac Scholars Network membership. Apply here.

What we’re thinking about

The three futures of AI at work

By Will Richardson

A founder made an observation recently that has stayed with me. AI agents, he said, make performance management easier because you can be brutally explicit with a system in ways that make managers anxious with their reports and rightly so. That is true, up to a point, but it misses something important. The more interesting surprise is what humans do that no prompt can anticipate: judgment shaped by experience, the unexpected admission, the read of the room, the instinct that something’s off before the data confirms it. These things are less likely to show up in a performance review, but they’re often what separates good work from great work.

That tension is more instructive than most of what passes for AI commentary. The public debate has calcified into a false binary: either AI disrupts half of white-collar work, as Dario Amodei’s social media pronouncements suggest, and/or it delivers the productivity boom that deficit-laden governments desperately need. Neither position tells you much about what companies are actually doing.

Three early movers illustrate the range: Klarna, Atlassian and Canva. AI is not producing one future of work rather firms are running three experiments simultaneously.

Substitution, restructuring, augmentation

Klarna is the clearest case of AI as a labour replacement strategy. In February 2024, the buy-now-pay-later company said its OpenAI-powered assistant handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, covering two-thirds of customer service chats and doing work equivalent to 700 full-time agents. Klarna attributed an estimated US$40 million profit improvement to the tool. That is a story stock markets can price quickly; lower labour costs, leads to superior margins and enterprise value uplift.

Atlassian’s March 2026 team update took a different position where AI changed the mix and number of skills required. It described the shift as “primarily about adaptation,” distinct from simple substitution.

Canva points toward a third mode. Its acquisitions of Affinity and Leonardo.Ai in 2024, followed by MangoAI, Cavalry, Simtheory and Ortto, suggest a company trying to own more of the creative workflow from asset creation to motion to campaign execution.

Who bears the cost

The labour effects are unlikely to be evenly distributed. Researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that junior workers aged 22 to 25 are the most AI-exposed occupations experiencing a 13% relative decline in employment following widespread adoption of generative AI. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) ILO’s 2025 update found female-dominated occupations were almost twice as likely to face automation exposure as male-dominated ones 29% versus 16% largely because women remain more concentrated in clerical and administrative roles.

Additionally, underneath the headline AI story, a large share of AI still depends on people doing the manual work the product demo never shows: labelling data, grading outputs, writing prompts, correcting responses. The ILO has called this the illusion of AI autonomy systems celebrated as automated and often rely on an invisible workforce performing low-paid, precarious tasks known as “ghost work”. The strange feedback loop of this moment is that workers displaced by AI can end up helping train the systems that narrowed their own labour market.

What firms get wrong

People who keep their jobs are not automatically stepping into frictionless “higher-value work.” In many firms, AI does not remove management so much as make it more technical and more complex.

This is where the founder’s observation resurfaces. A machine does not get embarrassed, discouraged or unexpectedly brilliant. It does not force you to confront the discomfort of judgment. That may make parts of management feel easier. It may also create a pathway for companies to slowly lose sight of what gives them genuine advantage; human teams that understand value for customers and actually care about delivering it.

Atlassian’s own 2025 AI research found only 4% of executives reported meaningful ROI from AI, while 96% did not. Its interpretation: scattered adoption is not enough. Teams need a system that connects knowledge, goals and execution. AI does not drop into an existing organisation and improve it. It exposes how well, or badly, that organisation already works. We wrote about AI and alignment in a Small Steps piece.

What investors should be watching

Markets will reward visible cost reduction first. Firms that cut labour and show cleaner margins will look like early winners, particularly where customers tolerate self service that can be 24/7 over 9-5pm call centres. But not every margin gain results in a stronger business. The harder question is which companies are rebuilding work in a way that compounds: keeping human judgment where it matters, automating where it genuinely helps, and redesigning workflows so software and people are not working at cross-purposes. The meaningful divide is between firms that treat AI as a cost-cutting instrument and firms that use it to rethink how work is organised and AI augmented human teams work together.

Conclusion

Klarna, Atlassian and Canva matter because they offer an early read on how AI is likely to reshape the modern company. Klarna is the clearest example of substitution, where automation becomes part of the corporate story told to markets. Atlassian points to something adjacent: a reset in how productivity is measured and how lean a business believes it can run. Canva, by contrast, suggests the more ambitious play may be augmentation; using AI to lift the output of an already capable workforce rather than simply cutting around it.

We all agree AI can produce some impressive work; however, the value still sits with people who know what good work looks like. Knowing how to apply AI inside a workflow, where to trust it, where to override it, and how to manage the downstream consequences are still fundamentally human judgments. Models can generate answers but they cannot carry accountability in the way organisations require. AI is excellent in closed systems whereas business is not a closed system. It is messy, political, contingent and shaped by incentives that shift faster than any model update. AI is better at chess where the constraints are known and humans at poker where there are far more unknowns - We wrote more on that idea in a recent Small Steps article.

That is why the long-term opportunity is unlikely to sit with the raw capability itself. As large language models become more widely available, the advantage moves up the stack; into products, workflows and operating models that solve real customer problems. This is also why job cuts are a shallow measure of AI success. The more important test is whether a company can use automation to increase speed and output without hollowing out judgment, weakening culture or damaging the customer experience.

In the end, AI will not reward companies simply for automating work. It will reward those that turn automation into better decisions, better products and more durable customer value.

Hungry for more?

🧠 The fog isn’t from the work. It’s from supervising the AI. A new HBR study of 1,488 US workers calls it “AI brain fry”: mental fatigue from oversight, checking outputs, juggling tabs, second-guessing each step. Workers describe a buzzing fog and headaches that have them stepping away from the screen to reset. The catch: replacing routine tasks lowers burnout, but doesn’t touch the mental load of supervising the AI itself.

☕ What stays scarce when AI does everything. Starbucks just rolled back its automation push. Handwritten notes and ceramic mugs drove satisfaction more than mechanised efficiency. Alex Imas reads this as a leading indicator: as AI cheapens production, what people actually pay for shifts. His research finds people pay 44% more for human-made art than AI-made when functionally identical. The durable jobs ahead, he argues, sit in the relational sector.

✈️ What actually happened to travel agents. Ernie Tedeschi looks back at travel agents, the textbook case of tech displacement, for cues on what AI might do to white-collar work. Agent jobs went from 340,000 in 2000 to 60% fewer today. The decline wasn’t gradual: layoffs hit in recessionary bursts after the dot-com bust. The agents who stayed pivoted upmarket and pay rose from 87% to 99% of the average wage. And aggregate employment fully recovered, as workers went elsewhere.

For the road

💬 ChatGPT started 80% male. The gap is now gone. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, roughly 80% of its weekly active users had typically male first names, according to OpenAI’s anonymised data. The share dropped steadily until the lines crossed in late 2025. As of April 2026, women slightly outnumber men in weekly use.

🧠 In Australia, an ADHD diagnosis is a postcode lottery. A new Four Corners investigation maps Australia’s adult ADHD prescribing for the first time, finding enormous variation between neighbourhoods with no single explanation. Diagnosis costs thousands of dollars and depends on a psychiatrist; telehealth has filled some of that gap, though clinicians warn assessments have patchy quality. In low-advantage areas (the so-called “ADHD deserts”), up to 90% of adults with the condition may be going undiagnosed and untreated. There’s no publicly funded service either way.

📚 The startup playbook only works until everyone’s read it. A new essay by VC Jerry Neumann argues that 30 years of startup methodology (Lean Startup, Customer Development, design thinking) has produced zero systematic improvement in survival rates since 1995. The argument: the moment a method goes mainstream, it stops conferring advantage. If everyone in your cohort runs the same playbook, the only way to win is to do something else.

🔌 Two world orders, one transition. Saul Griffith frames the energy transition as a contest between two systems. The petro-bloc moves 120 EJ of fossil fuels across borders every year through tankers and pipelines. Pax Electricana, the emerging system, runs on renewables, and the economics flip: commodities get scarcer with extraction, technologies get cheaper with scale. Saul’s pitch is cooperation: Australia, Canada, Japan and the EU pooling renewables, minerals and demand to build it together.

💰 How to actually give money away. GiveDirectly CEO Nick Allardice has been giving 10-20% of his income for 17 years. His essay distils what he’s learned across that time and a career processing donations at scale into six things donors actually need to do.

Giant leaps

💗 What would it take for Australia to lead women’s health innovation? MECCA M-Power, Women’s Agenda and Sentiment recently brought a group of women together to discuss exactly that, with Giant Leap’s Rachel Yang and Ovum’s Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks in the room. Read more here or listen here.

✈️ FlyORO was included in 2026 APAC Cleantech25, which spotlights the top private companies driving transformative innovation across Asia-Pacific’s markets.

🧻 Who Gives A Crap has been named in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies as one of the Top 10 Social Good of 2026.

🩺 Mindset Health has been accepted into CMS ACCESS, the first Medicare payment model built for tech-enabled chronic care, structured as a 10-year outcome-based pilot. Congrats to the Mindset team!

💊 Perx published new real-world evidence in Frontiers in Digital Health: older adults using the app hit 95% median medication adherence and stayed engaged for a median of 595.5 days. Far above digital health norms. Kudos to the Perx team. Read the study here.

New paths

⚡ Amber is hiring across a range of roles including Director of Product (Melbourne), Executive Assistant & Office Manager (Melbourne), Customer Operations Manager (Melbourne), Strategy & Operations Analyst (Melbourne), Legal Counsel (Melbourne), Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne), Senior Full Stack Engineer (UK/Europe) and Strategic Account Manager (UK/Europe).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring across a range of roles including a Director of Brand Growth, US (Remote), Influencer & Partnerships Manager, UK (Remote), Performance Creative Lead, US (Remote) and Senior NetSuite Consultant and Integration Specialist, Australia (Remote).

🤖 Indi is hiring a Full Stack AI Engineer (Remote).

🧠 Foremind is hiring a Clinical EAP Manager (Remote).

✨ MoreGoodDays is hiring a Partnerships & Growth Lead (Remote).

Save the date

📅 May 14: EnergyLab’s Grants and Non-Dilutive Funding for Climate Tech Founders - Sydney. Learn from EnergyLab alumni and grant experts on finding and winning non-dilutive funding. Register here.

📅 May 19: FemTech Unfiltered: What Will It Take To Advance Women’s Health Innovation in Australia? The session is designed to go beyond the familiar talking points and focus on practical steps that can accelerate progress. Register here.

📅 May 20-21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking at the ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ session. Buy tickets here.

Open for applications

📬Applications now open for EnergyLab’s Climate Tech Charge Program. The program is a 12-month pre-accelerator for pre-seed climate tech founders, with weekly workshops, 1:1 mentorship and access to EnergyLab’s Sydney co-working space. Apply here.

📬 May 7: Submissions for the Amazon Sustainability Pilot Program close. The program is designed for climate tech startups working on sustainability challenges across large-scale supply chains and will pitch directly to Amazon teams for North American pilot opportunities. Apply here.

📬 May 18: Apply for the UNSW Founders 10x Accelerator. $100K uncapped SAFE investment, expert coaching, and UNSW’s R&D ecosystem. Health and climate accelerator programs are open to any startup in Australia. Apply here.

📬 May 21: Apply for the MIT Solve 10th Anniversary Global Challenge. The challenge will identify ten bold solutions to scale with $100,000 in unrestricted funding and a stage during NYC Climate Week. Find more details here.

📬 May 28: Apply for the Future Investment Initiative Innovators Pitch. For builders using AI in Robotics, Sustainability, Health, and Education. Apply here.

Kick start

We’re excited to share our investment in Clean Slate Clinic, a virtual platform that delivers doctor-led alcohol and drug detox from home at a fraction of the cost of inpatient care.

Clean Slate began with a founder who understood the problem from both sides. Pia Clinton-Tarestad is a health economist who completed Clean Slate’s own program before co-founding it alongside GP and Addiction Medicine Specialist Dr Chris Davis. Together they built what the existing system couldn’t: clinically rigorous, doctor-led detox and recovery care that people can access from home, at a price they can actually afford. More than 3,000 clients have now completed the program, with a relapse rate of 7% at three months.

Read our full Theory of Change for Clean Slate here. You can read more about Clean Slate’s raise on Capital Brief (note: paywall) and Startup Daily.

Clean Slate is also running a campaign to push for better alcohol care in Australia. If you’d like to add your voice, sign their open letter to the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Minister for Health.

What we’re thinking about

Running hot

By Joanna Lee

Earlier this year, Will wrote about why we remain bullish on AI as a force for positive impact, and why judgment, not intelligence, is the thing that determines whether it gets used well. This piece is a companion to that one, focused on a question that’s come up a lot since: what about the environmental cost?

It’s a fair question, and the cost is real. To think it through, we’ve been drawing on the work of Reframe Venture, who brought together academics, asset owners and venture investors in London last year to map the possible futures of AI’s impact on the climate over the next decade. Their conclusion is that neither path on offer is inevitable. The direction of travel is still being shaped, at real decision points, by people making real choices.

The energy requirements for the data centres driving AI’s growth are significant and growing. According to the IEA, electricity consumption from data centres could more than double by 2030. On paper, renewables will make up more than half the new capacity built to meet that demand. But data centres need power around the clock, so fossil fuels are still projected to supply 64% of the electricity that actually gets used. At a moment when emissions need to be falling sharply to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming, data centre demand is pushing in the opposite direction. There’s also a water problem too: data centres consume millions of litres of water for cooling, often in regions where it’s already scarce.

What makes this more complicated is the risk of overbuilding. IT equipment in a data centre becomes obsolete within four to six years, and industry analysts are already warning that demand projections may be inflated. Build too much, too fast, and the environmental cost isn’t the only concern. You get stranded assets and destroyed capital alongside it. It wouldn’t be the first time. The 1990s to early 2000s fibre optic boom is a reference point: billions poured into infrastructure for demand that was real but years away, and when the bubble burst, the capital destruction was enormous.

Reframe maps two broad paths from here. In the worst one, the build-out continues unchecked, geopolitical competition keeps governments favouring larger and more complex models over sustainable ones, and efforts to legislate against data centre growth ramp up but fail to become law. AI’s capacity to actually accelerate climate progress across materials discovery, grid optimisation, industrial emissions reduction goes largely unrealised.

In the better one, some of the conditions for a different outcome are already forming, though it’s early. Enterprise procurement starts demanding sustainability metrics. The EU AI Act mandates energy efficiency disclosures. Salesforce, working with Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon, has already released a benchmarking tool giving AI models a 1-5 energy efficiency score. Small language models, which require a fraction of the compute of large ones and carry co-benefits for privacy and bias, attract more serious investment. Whether any of this amounts to a genuine shift in direction is the open question.

Reframe recommends that investors push founders toward a full-system approach from the earliest stages, asking hard questions about energy mix and environmental trade-offs alongside model performance. We think that’s right in principle, but the levers with the most reach are probably policy ones: regulation, procurement standards and government mandates.

For data centres specifically, the building and construction industry is instructive. NABERS and Green Star ratings didn’t emerge from voluntary action. They were mandated, embedded in procurement requirements, and they changed the economics of building. Energy efficiency standards backed by government rules could do the same. No global standards exist today. Current benchmarks like Power Usage Effectiveness measure how efficiently a facility uses energy but say nothing about where that energy comes from. A highly efficient data centre could still run on a carbon-intensive grid. Singapore’s Green Data Centre Roadmap points toward something better: project approvals and incentives tied to renewable integration, not just efficiency scores.

Within the better path, there are also real investment opportunities. For data centres, greener increasingly means cheaper power, faster project approvals and better reliability. Long duration storage and waste heat reuse are also emerging areas to watch: General Atlantic’s recent white paper on green data centres maps the landscape in detail if you want to go deeper. Separately, there are small language models that cut AI’s energy footprint, and AI built specifically for climate outcomes: from grid management, industrial emissions reduction to materials discovery.

The AI and climate story isn’t written. The Reframe analysis is a useful map of where the branch points are, and a reminder that the decisions made in the next few years, by investors and founders alike, are the ones that will determine which version we’re living in a decade.

Read the full Reframe Venture scenario analysis at reframeventure.com/ai-climate-scenario

For the road

🗺️ Not all software is equally scared. The $285 billion software selloff triggered by Claude Cowork produced a lot of hot takes. This four-quadrant framework, mapping software across deterministic/probabilistic and infrastructure/application axes, is worth a few minutes of your attention. Read more here.

🌿 The world is losing its smells, and we’re barely noticing. Pollution, warming and biodiversity loss are erasing scents across the world, and most people won’t register what’s gone. Smell is deeply connected to memory, cultural identity and health, and some of the stakes are profound: for Afro-Brazilian communities practising Yoruba traditions, smell was the single element of ancestral culture to survive enslavement. Scientists are still working out how much we stand to lose.

🧠 The terms of service for your brain. Chile’s Supreme Court issued the world’s first ruling on commercial neurodata when a senator discovered his focus headset’s terms of service had granted the manufacturer a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual licence over his brain data. The court ruled it violated his constitutional right to mental integrity. The broader concern is how little users understand what they’re signing away, in a consumer market projected to hit $55 billion within a decade, with legal and ethical frameworks still catching up.

🤖 A man paralysed from the neck down runs a café robot from his bedroom in Kyoto. At Tokyo’s DAWN Avatar Café, homebound disabled people remotely operate robots that greet, serve and converse with diners. It’s one example of something broader: 92% of Koreans believe robots should have social roles, compared to 53% of Americans who see them as tools. One sociologist argues the difference is cultural, maybe even spiritual. In Asia robots are soul-possible, in the US they’re soulless. Read more here.

🌕 Hi Earth. On April 6, NASA’s Artemis II crew became the first humans near the Moon in more than 50 years. Check out the imagery here.

If the coverage has left you wondering why we’re actually doing this, the Science Vs podcast went looking. The lunar gold rush (rare earths, Helium-3) mostly doesn’t hold up. What does: the Moon is close enough to practice living somewhere that isn’t Earth before attempting Mars that is six months away, and a telescope on the far side, shielded from our atmosphere, could finally tell us how the first stars were born.

🏗️ What it actually looks like when a company of thousands goes AI-native. Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block, gives a rare inside account: non-engineers shipping their own tools without waiting on engineering, AI review running before code reaches a human, Jack Dorsey rethinking the org chart itself. And a clear message for founders: choose open source and open standards wherever you can. The field is still being shaped.

🔬 Science doesn’t actually work the way the movies say it does. The lone genius who overturns everything we believed - it’s a compelling story but in practice, they’re rare. When they do happen in mature fields, politics usually has a hand. WHO declared COVID was not airborne in March 2020; aerosol researchers disagreed immediately and were dismissed. 18 months of evidence later, the agency reversed. The reason it took so long: WHO had spent decades dismantling “bad air” theories of disease, and admitting the air itself could carry COVID felt like going backwards.

🚢 The ship that runs on fertiliser. Shipping accounts for nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas output and is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise. HD Hyundai Heavy Industries just released the world’s first ammonia-powered vessel. Ammonia contains no carbon, meaning it does not produce CO2 when burned, and its practical advantage over hydrogen comes down to supply chains: it’s already produced at scale for fertilisers, meaning the infrastructure to move it globally largely exists.

Helpful resources

🐌 Slow VC has packaged their investment thinking into two downloadable files: a knowledge base covering how they evaluate businesses, and a system prompt you can drop into Claude or ChatGPT alongside your pitch deck.

Giant leaps

⚡ Amber ran the numbers on what it actually costs to own and run a petrol vs electric car in Australia in 2026. Check it out here.

🚛 Who Gives A Crap just completed the first fully electric freight delivery from Sydney to Canberra, from distribution centre to customer door, on a single charge. Watch here.

🧵 Evrnu founder Stacy Flynn recently gave a TED talk. Listen here on building a garment recycling facility in a region that once produced half the world’s cotton.

New paths

⚡Amber is hiring across a range of roles including Executive Assistant & Office Manager (Melbourne), Customer Operations Manager (Melbourne), Strategy & Operations Analyst (Melbourne), Legal Counsel (Melbourne), Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne) and Compliance Specialist (Melbourne).

🧻Who Gives A Crap is hiring across a range of roles including a Director of Brand Growth, US (Remote), Influencer & Partnerships Manager, UK (Remote) and Lifecycle Marketing Analyst (Remote).

🤖Indi is hiring a Full Stack AI Engineer (Remote).

🧠Foremind is hiring a Clinical EAP Manager (Remote).

Save the date

📅 April 27: LIFTWOMEN’s Asia Pacific Female Founders Grant Pitch Night - Melbourne. 10 women-led APAC founders pitch for grant funding. Register here.

📅 April 27: Anthropic x Square Peg AI Founder Salon - Melbourne. Anthropic’s Head of Product and Head of Engineering (Claude Developer Platform) in conversation with leading Australian founders. Currently waitlist only.

📅 April 30: Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival - Sydney. The Giant Leap team will be attending - come along and say hi! Buy tickets here.

📅 May 5-7: Wisdom & Action Forum 2026: Trust in the Age of AI - Melbourne. Small Giants Academy brings together 300 cross-sector leaders to explore what trust, technology and human connection look like as AI reshapes society. Express your interest here.

📅 May 20-21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking at the ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ session. Buy tickets here.

Open for applications

📬 TAV Venture Fellows is a year-long program from Tin Alley Ventures for ten University of Melbourne students who want an unfiltered look inside startups and VC. No business idea or prior connections required. Apply here.

📬 May 7: Submissions for the Amazon Sustainability Pilot Program close. The program is designed for climate tech startups working on sustainability challenges across large-scale supply chains and will pitch directly to Amazon teams for North American pilot opportunities. Apply here.

📬 May 18: Apply for the UNSW Founders 10x Accelerator. $100K uncapped SAFE investment, expert coaching, and UNSW’s R&D ecosystem. Health and climate accelerator programs are open to any startup in Australia. Apply here.

📬 May 21: Apply for the MIT Solve 10th Anniversary Global Challenge. The challenge will identify ten bold solutions to scale with $100,000 in unrestricted funding and a stage during NYC Climate Week. Find more details here.

📬 May 28: Apply for the Future Investment Initiative Innovators Pitch. For builders using AI in Robotics, Sustainability, Health, and Education. Apply here.

What we’re thinking about

How we think about AI

By Will Richardson

There’s an interesting dialogue across the impact investing community right now. As an industry, we’re founded on the premise that technology is fundamental to addressing the world’s greatest challenges. And that, by and large, is true. You only have to look at how much society has improved for the better in the past 100 years to see that’s the case.

Yet, while its potential is immense, for the past year it feels as if artificial intelligence -- one of the most transformational technologies we’ve seen to date - has only really been raising eyebrows around the globe.

In the past few months alone, reports have emerged that the energy requirements for the data centres fuelling AI’s growth will undermine country emissions targets. We’ve seen major companies like Block and Atlassian wholly attribute job cuts to the rise of AI. And that’s not even mentioning the questions raised by the Iran War, where AI-enabled targeting systems drove Pentagon decision-making at unprecedented speed and where a failure to update a military database contributed to the killing of nearly 180 schoolgirls.

All of this, and more, is eroding the sheen of the narrative tied to this technology, and is raising important questions on its use, future and who exactly should support it.

It’s fair to say that some who are huge proponents of what impact investing represents may be surprised to hear that, as an impact investor, I’m still very bullish on the potential of AI. And I wanted to take the opportunity to explain both why, and how as a fund, we’re thinking about it.

AI may be automating intelligence, but it cannot replicate judgment. It is judgment, not intelligence, that determines whether technology creates real impact.

Chess vs Poker

For a long time, we equated intelligence with human distinctiveness. To think, reason, and create: these were the markers of our humanness, and the things that separated us from every other kind of system in the world. Now machines can replicate many of those outputs convincingly, and they are getting better at it quickly. The question that follows is deeply human. If intelligence can be automated, what exactly remains uniquely ours?

I think the answer lies in judgment.

Annie Duke, in Thinking in Bets, makes an important distinction here. Life, she argues, is less like chess and more like poker. An apt analogy given some of the first signs of sophistication with AI emerged decades ago on the chess board.

In chess, all the information is on the board. In poker, you are making decisions under uncertainty, with incomplete information, against other actors whose intentions you can’t fully read. You assess probabilities, weigh what you know against what you don’t, and you act anyway.

A good decision can still lead to a poor outcome through no fault of your reasoning, and the quality of your thinking can only really be evaluated over time, across many decisions, not by any single result.

AI systems are remarkably good at the chess version of problems: pattern recognition, optimisation, synthesis across vast bodies of information. But life, and especially leadership, is mostly poker. We rarely have complete information. The trade-offs are real and often painful, and the consequences of our choices fall on people, not on spreadsheets. Unlike a model that outputs a recommendation and moves on, we live inside the outcomes of our decisions. We carry them. That weight sits at the core of good judgment.

Our measurements haven’t changed

This is the lens through which we assess the companies we back at Giant Leap. We ask a specific question: is there a direct, measurable line between this company’s revenue and a positive outcome for people or the planet? Most AI tools targeting enterprise customers with efficiency and automation don’t pass that test, not because they are harmful, but because they don’t move the needle on the things we care about.

The companies we back have to clear a different bar. They should be using AI as a competitive advantages to give them the best chance to succeed, but their priority has to be on solving genuinely hard problems: decarbonising aviation, supporting parents navigating their children’s complex health needs, improving outcomes for women’s health, plugging the gaps left by governments contracting their spend on disability care. These are areas where technology is not simply replacing human value or optimising for efficiency, but extending it to people who otherwise would not have access.

We are also thinking carefully about the environmental cost of the AI we fund. One of our portfolio companies, Ovum, is an AI health assistant built specifically for women, giving them a non-judgmental space to track symptoms, manage health records, and advocate for themselves with their doctors. The value it delivers is deeply personal and targeted. That means the infrastructure required to deliver it is proportional to the impact it creates.

None of this makes me naive about the broader landscape. I have no doubt that there are other investors who are very keen to see more capital flow into AI for labour displacement. But I also believe that the answer to a technology being used to destabilise our rules-based order is not to step back from it. It is to put capital behind the people using it well, and to make those examples visible. And to be honest, we don’t see enough of them in the headlines right now.

The founders building in climate, health and education carry real weight. They are operating in the poker version of the world: making consequential decisions under uncertainty, for people whose lives depend on getting it right. That judgment, that willingness to carry the outcomes, is exactly what AI cannot replicate. And it is exactly what we are backing.

For the road

🗺️ The map half a billion people made without knowing it. Five hundred million Pokémon Go players spent years pointing their phones at the world and in doing so, mapped it. Niantic Spatial turned 30 billion urban images into a positioning system accurate to centimetres, now helping Coco Robotics deploy last-mile delivery robots. The dataset didn’t set out to be infrastructure. It just turned out that a decade of real people moving through real places is exactly what physical AI needs (note: paywall; alternative article here). If physical AI has your attention, Antler explores why we’re now at an inflection point.

⚡ The New Joule Order. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has put 18 million barrels per day on hold in what the Carlyle Group is calling it the largest energy supply shock in history. It’s made the priority order impossible to ignore: security first, affordability second, sustainability third.

Energy transitions move faster when survival is the motivation. After 1973, France built one of the world’s largest nuclear fleets not to save the planet, but to never depend on someone else’s oil. Today, it has one of Europe’s lowest-carbon grids. The energy transition is reaccelerating, but just not for the reasons we expected.

✈️ Impact built in, not bolted on. In 2025, Intrepid Travel posted US$575 million in revenue while distributing US$2.4 million to 58 grassroots organisations across 45 countries. Every trip is linked to a local nonprofit and every admin cost absorbed by Intrepid. Most giving is designed around a separate ask. Intrepid didn’t change what people value. Instead, they just removed the moment where giving becomes a separate decision. Where else could this model work? The full piece maps out what it takes.

🧪 Vibe physics. Harvard physicist Matt Schwartz used Claude to compress two years of theoretical research into a fortnight. He calls it “vibe physics”. The calculations get offloaded, but the human brings the taste for which direction is actually worth pursuing.

🧬 He ran out of standard treatment options. So he built his own. We previously shared a story about a man and his dog. Sid Sijbrandij is a similar kind of story. GitLab’s co-founder was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer, exhausted standard care, and then built his own treatment, using AI to do the research that would normally take a whole team. His cancer is now in remission. Sid documented his journey in a slide deck, but you can also read the full story here.

💊 The $600 billion market that’s still being undercounted. PwC put the women’s health market at $430-440 billion today, growing to $600 billion by 2030, and then admitted that even that was probably an underestimate. Some great charts in this report include one that maps women’s health across a whole lifetime and reveals what’s been missed: autoimmune conditions starting in adolescence, cardiovascular risk through midlife, neurodegenerative into advanced age. We went deep on this.

🔬 The first AI-written paper just passed peer review in Nature. Sakana AI’s AI Scientist runs the whole research cycle, from hypothesis, experiment to write-up, and its paper just cleared peer review in Nature. It’s not without its limitations - the output is “modestly original and citations were hallucinated. But a system that uses its own discoveries to get better at making discoveries could facilitate a different kind of scientific progress.

In your ears

🎧 People are building their own healthcare systems. High premiums, 40-day wait times, claim denials. More Americans are skipping insurance and assembling their own stack: cash pay diagnostics, AI prescribing and wearables. Out-of-Pocket’s Nikhil Krishnan and a16z’s Jay Rughani on where that’s heading and what it means for the system left behind.

🎧 The company that invented the future and forgot to use it. Google employed virtually every AI pioneer, published the Transformer paper, and built the infrastructure the entire industry runs on. Then ChatGPT launched and the world acted like they’d never heard of them. Ben and David from Acquired unpack how that happened and whether the best-capitalised company in history can disrupt itself without breaking what it is.

🎧 Moving the Middle. Most conversations about gender equality target the already-convinced. The Gender Compass focuses on the “moveable middle”: Australians whose views aren’t fixed, but who hold the real power to shift the national conversation. This series is part data, part real stories, and genuinely useful if you’re trying to make these conversations land in rooms that aren’t already on board.

Helpful resources

💰 Looking for healthcare grant funding opportunities? Richard Macliver from CICA Lab has created a dashboard that tracks them all in one place.

Giant leaps

🌿 Listen to Conserving Beauty founder Natassia on KICPOD: not just about the brand’s recent rebrand but about the harder stuff: navigating personal loss, challenging the internal voice, and what it actually means to build a business while figuring out who you want to be. Listen here.

🎒Listen to Ben Sze on the Old Haileyburians Association Stay Connected Podcast: EdRolo co-founder, Teacher’s Buddy co-founder and Haileybury class of 2002. Not just about the ventures but about loss, recovery, and what brought him back to where it started.

New paths

🔋 Amber Electric is hiring for across roles from Strategy & Operations Analyst (Melbourne), Senior Full Stack Engineer (UK), Legal Counsel (Melbourne), Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne), Compliance Specialist (Melbourne) and Strategic Account Manager (Europe).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Lifecycle Marketing Analyst (Remote), Director of Brand Growth, US (Remote), Influencer & Partnerships Manager, UK (Remote) and Performance Creative Lead, US.

Save the date

📅 April 16: EnergyLab’s Pathways Into Net Zero - Melbourne. Register here.

📅 April 30: Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival - Sydney. The Giant Leap team will be attending - come along and say hi! Buy tickets here.

📅 May 5-7: Wisdom & Action Forum 2026: Trust in the Age of AI - Melbourne. Small Giants Academy brings together 300 cross-sector leaders to explore what trust, technology and human connection look like as AI reshapes society. Express your interest here.

📅 May 7: Submissions for the Amazon Sustainability Pilot Program close. The program is designed for climate tech startups working on sustainability challenges across large-scale supply chains and will pitch directly to Amazon teams for North American pilot opportunities. Apply here.

📅 May 20-21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking at the ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ session. Buy tickets here.

📅 May 21: Apply for the MIT Solve 10th Anniversary Global Challenge. The challenge will identify ten bold solutions to scale with $100,000 in unrestricted funding and a stage during NYC Climate Week. Find more details here.

📅 May 28: Apply for the Future Investment Initiative Innovators Pitch. For builders using AI in Robotics, Sustainability, Health, and Education. Apply here.

What we’re thinking about

Whose values are in the machine?

By Rachel Yang

More than a billion people now rely on AI systems to access information, form opinions, draft communications and make decisions. These systems have shifted in their role and are now no longer a product category, but core infrastructure shaping how a significant portion of humanity thinks.

Which brings us to the question that does not get asked often enough: what exactly is this infrastructure built to do, and who built it?

When researchers at King’s College London ran leading AI models through simulated nuclear crises, the models consistently escalated toward nuclear conflict 95% of the time. Not once did they opt to surrender or meaningfully de-escalate.

While scenarios like these are alarming, the more pervasive risks are quieter and harder to see. They show up in everyday interactions, subtly shaping how people understand the world at scale.

A 2024 UNESCO study on gender bias in AI found that models consistently placed women in domestic contexts more often than men, with one model doing so up to four times more, describing them primarily in terms of home, family and children. Men were associated with business, career and salary. These are not edge cases, they are default outputs from systems that more than a billion people now rely on.

While this study is now a few years old and models continue to be refined, I’d argue the underlying issue has not gone away. The problem, at its core, is who has been in the room when these systems were built. A system designed by a small group of people in one corner of the world can, within a remarkably short period of time, be shaping decisions about credit, healthcare, education, employment, and public discourse across the globe.

The imbalance is visible in the numbers, but it runs deeper than any single metric. Women make up less than 19% of AI researchers worldwide, according to Stanford’s AI Index.

More broadly, the teams building these systems represent a relatively narrow slice of the world: geographically, culturally, and socioeconomically, despite their products being used across vastly different contexts. The training data reflects the same imbalance: scraped largely from the open web, it encodes the biases, hierarchies, and omissions of the world as it currently exists.

None of this requires bad intentions on anyone’s part, and drift doesn’t need malice, it only needs momentum and the absence of people willing to slow down and ask whose values are actually in the machine.

We’ve already seen consumers opt for AI companies they feel are doing the right thing. When the US Department of Defense pressured Anthropic to remove some of Claude’s ethical guardrails for military use and Anthropic refused, the Pentagon blacklisted them as a supply chain risk. Within days, users shifted toward Claude, driving a surge in downloads and sign-ups, and pushing it to the top of the App Store ahead of ChatGPT.

People voted with their attention, and they chose the company that held the line. At scale, that signal is more powerful to these companies than any argument about ethics.

There are also companies being built to do this differently, platforms like Ovum AI and Indi that design for diverse perspectives, user security, and information that genuinely serves the people using it.

When we choose those tools, and when investors back them, the decisions feel small individually but, accumulated across enough people making them consciously, they determine which companies survive and what kind of AI gets built next. Given exponential growth of these tools, the stakes could not be higher.

For the road

🧠 What pregnancy does to the brain is genuinely extraordinary. When researchers scanned the brains of 110 women, they could tell a first pregnancy from a second with 80% accuracy, just from the changes left behind. A first pregnancy rewires how you see yourself and relate to others. A second shifts toward attention and physical responsiveness. The female body just keeps surprising us.

🎓 The school that replaced teachers with AI, from the inside. Alpha High School in Austin runs on a radical premise: AI handles all academic content, and teachers are “guides” whose job is motivation and emotional support. 17-year-old student Alex Mathew gives a first-hand account of what learning actually looks like inside it. He’s also building Berry, an AI stuffed animal for teen mental health, because 52% of his generation already use AI for daily companionship. Watch the interview here.

🚗 EVs are moving the needle on transport emissions. Australia’s transport emissions fell for the first time since the pandemic, down 0.4% in the year to September 2025, driven by a threefold increase in EV ownership since 2022. The next milestone is steeper: roughly half of all new car sales over the next decade need to be electric to hit the 2035 goal, and the policy levers to get there are still being worked out.

🔬 Millions of new materials, none of them real yet. In 2023, DeepMind announced deep learning had uncovered “millions of new materials.” When researchers at UC Santa Barbara looked closely, they found scant evidence for anything actually novel, credible, and useful. Making and testing a material still takes years in a real lab, and no AI model changes that yet. For climate tech, where better batteries and cheaper catalysts are genuinely critical, that gap matters. The underlying science is real and the work is ongoing. The headlines just moved faster than the labs did.

🏥 Healthcare systems are built to spend as little as possible. AI-driven care asks them to spend differently. The a16z health team digs into the friction at the heart of the shift from reactive to proactive care: the economics don’t map cleanly onto existing reimbursement logic. Their piece walks through four emerging pricing models (per task, per workflow, per episode, per patient), each carrying different assumptions about where value is created and who pays for it, and why getting that right matters more than the technology itself.

📊 The jobs AI is most likely to reshape belong to people who are more educated, better paid, and more likely to be women. Anthropic’s labor market research tracks the gap between what AI could theoretically do and what it’s actually doing today, still enormous across every occupation, with no unemployment spike to show for it yet. But hiring of 22-25 year olds into the most exposed roles has slowed by 14%.

💉 Imagine being able to read your hormones the way a CGM reads your blood sugar. Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) transformed how millions of people manage their metabolic health, and oestrogen, progesterone, and cortisol run a far more complex system. Continuously monitoring them could reshape IVF, chronic pain, menopause, and autoimmune disease. This post explains why we’re not there yet: hormones in interstitial fluid are up to two million times less concentrated than glucose. The sensors simply don’t translate.

🐕 A tech entrepreneur with no biology degree just built his dying dog a cancer vaccine. Sydney’s Paul Conyngham used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to design a personalised mRNA vaccine for his rescue dog Rosie, and one week after her first injection, the tumour had shrunk by 75%. Watch here.

Helpful resources

🤝 Community-led growth: a practical guide for AI startups. Build Club’s Annie Liao on how they scaled a 50K+ AI builder community across 60 cities. Useful for founders thinking about distribution.

🌊 The Drop 2025 Ripple Summaries.100 investor-led roundtables from The Drop in Malmö, now summarised and filterable by topic: grid and energy, biodiversity, geopolitics, biotech, and more. Browse them here.

New paths

🔋 Amber Electric is hiring for across roles from Senior Full Stack Engineer (UK), Legal Counsel (Melbourne), Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne), Compliance Specialist (Melbourne) and Strategic Account Manager (Europe).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Lifecycle Marketing Analyst (Remote).

Save the date

📅 March 22: Applications close for ANDHealth’s ACTIVATE accelerator program for Victorian digital health startups. The six-month intensive experience features expert-led content tailored specifically for the sector, knowledge implementation phases to put learnings into practice, and real-time, one-on-one feedback from experts and mentors. Learn more & apply here.

📅 March 22: Applications close for the Supercharge Australia Incubator #2. EnergyLab and New Energy Nexus are looking for founders with an established proof-of-concept across the lithium battery value chain, from raw materials and processing to battery applications and recycling. The program runs April to June 2026. Learn more and apply here.

📅 March 25-26: Impact Investing Summit - Sydney. The Summit brings together thinkers, funds and companies shaping the next phase of investing for positive impact. Tickets available here.

📅 March 26: Applications close for Wade Institute’s Entrepreneur and Investor in Residence program. If you’re an experienced founder or active investor who can commit one day a week in Parkville, this is worth a look. Apply here.

📅 May 5-7: Wisdom & Action Forum 2026: Trust in the Age of AI, Melbourne. Small Giants Academy brings together 300 cross-sector leaders to explore what trust, technology and human connection look like as AI reshapes society. Express your interest here.

📅 April 30: Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival - Sydney. The Giant Leap team will be attending - come along and say hi! Buy tickets here.

📅 May 20-21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking on the topics ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ and ’What Does It Take to Get Breakthrough Technologies to Market?’ Buy tickets here.

📅 June 8-18: ANDHealth UK & EU Market Entry Program. For healthtech companies looking to expand into the UK and EU, including London Tech Week, NHS ConfedExpo, and HLTH Europe. Submit your expression of interest here.

Welcome back to the Small Steps newsletter. After an extended break we’re looking to bring back this channel with something a bit different. In addition to our usual wrap of links and news, we are going to be providing analysis and deeper dives into themes we’re seeing in the impact and VC sector.

We’ll expand on our position on AI in a later edition, given that as an impact investor we have a unique lens on this line of technology. But for now, we wanted to discuss something that’s been going around the watercooler here at Giant Leap: How companies should be leveraging AI.

What we’re thinking about

AI is the amplifier. Alignment is the strategy.

By Will Richardson

Earlier this year, markets did something unusual. They repriced software - not because a cohort missed earnings, but because a product release felt like a business model threat. After Anthropic launched a new automation tool, investors sold off software stocks on the view that AI can now run workflows, not just assist them.

The inbound that followed from LPs and fund managers was telling: what’s actually driving this, and how are startups suddenly disrupting incumbents faster than incumbents can respond?

My answer is simple, and slightly uncomfortable for large organisations: AI is not the strategy. It’s the amplifier. And the thing it amplifies most aggressively is organisational design.

The hidden tax was never effort rather it was coordination.

A lot of SaaS economics were built on seat-based pricing and the assumption that switching costs would stay high enough to make lifetime value (LTV) predictable. AI challenges both. When teams can change tools and models quickly, the productivity layer lifts above any single vendor. LTV becomes harder to forecast, reducing the need to commit to one stack for years.

In knowledge work, output rarely scales linearly with headcount. The real drag isn’t effort. It’s coordination: the reviews, approvals, handoffs, rework, and ambiguity that force people to spend time confirming what should already be clear. AI compresses that. When the first draft becomes cheap, the team that decides quickly becomes disproportionately advantaged.

Incumbents don’t lose because they’re dumb. They lose because they’re slow. And slowness is often a design choice.

Alignment isn’t a culture initiative - it’s a competitive advantage.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage argues that organisational health - not strategy, not technology - is the ultimate competitive advantage. The most effective organisations are those where leadership is cohesive, clarity is shared, and that clarity gets reinforced consistently at every level. It’s not glamorous work. But it’s the work that determines whether everything else compounds or collapses.

In the context of AI, Lencioni’s framework has never been more relevant. AI doesn’t fix misalignment. It amplifies whatever a team already is.

If you’re aligned, AI multiplies shipping. If you’re misaligned, AI multiplies noise. More meetings, documents and dashboards. More “alignment work” that only exists because alignment doesn’t. It’s like a chaotic startup raising a big round and going on a hiring streak to put out fires - nothing becomes clearer, you just accelerate the existing dysfunction.

Real alignment is mechanical. Shared goals that are stable enough to matter. Priorities explicit enough to say no with ownership clear enough that work doesn’t boomerang between teams. Decisions pushed far enough down that the people closest to the work can move without permission slips. When that’s true, AI feels like a cheat code - not because it makes people smarter, but because it collapses the sludge between intent and output.

Organisational health is table stakes.

The market selloff was framed as a valuation story. It’s more useful to read it as an organisational story. AI is making design constraints visible, and in doing so, it’s making alignment - or the absence of it - something investors can increasingly price.

At Giant Leap, we look for founders who understand this distinction. Not just founders building with AI, but founders building organisations that can survive amplification. The ones who want to do the unglamorous work of getting their house in order.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth for incumbents: the best AI strategy might start with a non-AI intervention. Get clear on what you’re actually trying to do, clarify ownership and shorten the distance between action and feedback. Then amplify.

The winners won’t be the companies with the most AI. They’ll be the companies whose operating systems are aligned enough to integrate and capitalise on it.

Capital is a force multiplier and so is AI. Both compound resilience in healthy organisations and both accelerate fragility in broken ones. The question for founders and investors alike isn’t whether to adopt AI - it’s whether your organisation is ready for it.

The organisations best positioned to survive amplification are also the ones most likely to use it well. For founders solving the world’s most pressing problems across climate, health and people, alignment isn’t just a growth lever - it’s the precondition for building something that actually matters.

For the road

🤖 Robots take the nursing night shift. In a Taiwanese hospital, robots are taking over overnight transport rounds from nurses, saving 2-3 hours a day at a time. And in China at Lunar New Year, robots performed kung fu on stage to a crowd that didn’t quite know how to feel. The data underneath both stories tells you why it matters: in 2011, China was installing similar numbers of industrial robots as the US, Japan, and South Korea. By 2023, it was 12x more at 276,000 a year. South Korea now has more than one robot for every ten manufacturing workers. The technology has been moving faster than most of us noticed.

🐄 The climate fix that has to make sense for farmers too. Cattle globally convert 2–12% of everything they eat into methane and burp it into the atmosphere instead of turning it into milk or meat. That’s the energy efficiency problem hiding inside the climate problem, but solutions that only make the climate case rarely get adopted. Twynam’s deep dive maps out every major solution on the table right now: vaccines, seaweed additives, commercial feed supplements, and the criteria that separate what might work from what actually scales.

🩺 Surgery shouldn’t be the first answer but for too many women, it is. One in seven Australian women live with endometriosis. Best practice guidelines from Australia’s peak obstetrics body are clear: imaging comes first, surgery is a last resort, and repeated operations have no proven benefit. A seven-month Four Corners investigation found those guidelines aren’t always being followed and that some women are, in their words, “gaslit into thinking surgery is the only way to validate their pain.”

⚡We need all of it. And we need the grid to catch up. Start with the pace. In 2020, forecasts predicted global energy demand would grow 25% over a decade. It took four years. AI dominates the headlines, but demand is accelerating from every direction from data centres, EVs, industrial growth to rising temperatures.

As for what will power all of this, Brookfield’s latest global energy outlook is clear: we need all of it. Renewables are cheapest and fastest to build. Batteries, down 92% in cost since 2010, are making them dispatchable around the clock. Nuclear is back, with the global fleet projected to grow by a third. Gas remains the stabiliser while everything else scales. No single technology gets us there.

The constraint is the grid. More than 2,500 gigawatts of new projects are sitting in connection queues. Solar and wind overtook coal for the first time in 2025. The transition is happening. Fast enough is the question.

🧱 Why big companies keep losing to small teams. Most companies are layering AI onto existing workflows and wondering why the returns are modest. But this HBR piece has a clear answer: they’re diagnosing the problem wrong. Using Figma vs Adobe and Shein vs traditional fashion, the article shows that challengers don’t win by adopting better tools but they win by redefining the basic unit of work and reorganising coordination around it. Adobe built all the same features as Figma. The problem was the file. Worth asking: what’s your equivalent?

♿ They laughed at the bathtub with a door. In 2003, a plumbing veteran thought the walk-in tub was a joke - a bathtub with a door, built for seniors who couldn’t step over the rim. By 2005 he’d bought the company. Today it’s a US$750m market. This HBR piece coined the term “design amplification”: innovations built for people with disabilities tend to create products that work better for everyone, because the constraint forces a better question.

🧭 When ‘impact’ stops meaning something. One impact fund recently declared on stage: “Camouflage is the new green.” It was meant to be clever. Johannes Weber of Ananda Impact Ventures finds it alarming and writes plainly about why. Mandates are softening and defence investments are creeping in under impact branding, as the word “impact” is being stretched to cover almost anything that needs moral cover in a tough market. If you’re in the impact space and you’ve felt the ground shifting under the word, Weber’s piece names it clearly.

Helpful resources

🔖 What Founders Want: Provides a resource hub for startup founders (with a NZ focus): funding directories, grants, programmes and tools all in one place .

📚 Lucy Li from Seek Investments’s weekly edtech newsletter is for those who want to stay across what’s happening in edtech globally without building your own tracker. It covers funding, M&A, policy shifts, and trends across education software, AI teaching tools and workforce learning.

Giant leaps

🌱 Victoria’s top 20 tech startups included three Giant Leap portfolio companies: Mindset Health, Ovum and MoreGoodDays. The cohort is collectively worth billions, in an ecosystem that has grown 26x since 2016 to A$132 billion. More than half of Australia’s healthtech startups now call Victoria home.

🧠 There only 400 psychologists for tens of millions of IBS patients. Worth listening to Alex Noumidis, Co-founder and CEO of Mindset Health, talk through the Nerva platform and what it takes to build at-scale digital therapeutics.

🏗️ SPEC Toolbox raises A$3m. SPEC Toolbox started life as CLT Toolbox, a platform automating engineering specs for mass timber. Then the team realised the problem was much bigger. Designers across construction routinely avoid innovative sustainable materials because specifying them is technically complex. SPEC Toolbox automates that gap. They have 6,000+ users now across Europe, the UK, and North America.

💼 Women want security, safety, and the right to switch off. The top priorities for women at work in 2026 are not mentorship programs or leadership pipelines. They are job security, psychological safety and the right to disconnect. WORK180’s annual report surveyed 1,100+ women and found 58% say workplaces are improving, up 5% from last year. But 95% still face at least one barrier to success, and 1 in 5 say AI is making their role feel less secure.

New paths

🔋 Amber Electric is hiring for across roles from Office Manager & Executive Assistant, IT Operations Administrator, Senior Software Engineer, Senior Growth Designer (Product), Compliance Specialist, Regulatory Compliance Officer and Senior Product Marketing Manager.

🎧 Mindset Health is looking for a Fractional Medical Director (US).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a Director of Performance Marketing (Remote) and Lifecycle Marketing Analyst (Remote).

Save the date

📅 March 6: Applications close for LuminaX’s Accelerator for Australian healthtech startups - Gold Coast, QLD. The program connects you to 40+ mentors, clinicians, experts and entrepreneurs - including Giant Leap Partner, Rachel Yang. Learn more here.

📅 March 10: Applications close for LaunchVic’s Basecamp. This is a no-cost education program by LaunchVic for seed to series A founders. Learn more and apply here.

📅 March 10-12: EnergyLab is hosting the Tech, Innovation & Startup Precinct as part of CAWSyd 2026. Check out all the precinct events here.

📅 March 12: Applications close for RMIT’s FounderHUB. The four-week program is for aspiring founders who are also RMIT students, staff, researchers and/or alumni. Learn more and apply here.

📅 March 12: Greenhouse’s Reverse Pitch Night: “Shut Up & Take My Money!” - Sydney. Climate investors take the stage for one-minute pitches about what they offer to founders - including Giant Leap Managing Partner, Will Richardson. Get tickets here.

📅 March 12: EnergyLab’s How To Get A Job In Climate Tech - Sydney. The event includes a panel discussing how to get a career in climate tech. Register for tickets here.

📅 March 13: Applications close for Ochre Indigenous Pre-Accelerator. The seven-week program is delivered online. Learn more and apply here.

📅 March 15: Applications close for EnergyLab’s Climate Solutions Accelerator 2026 cohort. The program is designed for companies with strong early traction and gearing up for significant scale or a Seed/Series A in the next 12-18 months. You can learn more and apply here.

📅 March 22: Applications close for ANDHealth’s ACTIVATE accelerator program for Victorian digital health startups. The six-month intensive experience features expert-led content tailored specifically for the sector, knowledge implementation phases to put learnings into practice, and real-time, one-on-one feedback from experts and mentors. Learn more & apply here.

📅 March 25-26: Impact Investing Summit - Sydney. The Summit brings together thinkers, funds and companies shaping the next phase of investing for positive impact. Tickets available here.

📅 April 30: Blackbird’s Sunrise Festival - Sydney. The Giant Leap team will be attending - come along and say hi! Buy tickets here.

📅 May 20-21: Digital Health Festival - Melbourne. DHF brings together the most influential leaders and innovators in healthcare with over 8,000+ attendees. Rachel Yang is speaking at the ‘Unlocking investment into women’s health’ session. Buy tickets here.

It has been a big year! Between the highs, the hurdles, and everything in between, the standout has been the founders who kept showing up with momentum and clarity.

For Giant Leap, 2025 has been a special chapter too. We announced investments in Ovum, Foremind, FlyORO, Indi and Teacher’s Buddy - five teams taking on big problems, stretching what’s possible in impact and innovation, and reminding us exactly why this work matters.

This is our final newsletter for 2025 and to close out the year, we’re sharing a conversation we’ve been looking forward to: an interview with Grace Lethlean from ANDHealth. Grace shared with us the practical realities of digital health commercialisation, as well as why progress often comes from patience, clarity and having the right support.

As we wrap things up, we want to wish you a restorative break - may it be a chance to recharge, reconnect and return with fresh energy.

Thanks again for being part of the Small Steps community - we’ll see you next year! 👋

Please note: Giant Leap’s office will be closed from Friday 19 December 2025, returning on Monday 5 January 2024.

An interview with Grace Lethlean

Digital health founders are building in a uniquely tough environment: where regulation, clinical evidence, behaviour change and fragmented health systems all collide.

Grace Lethlean, COO at ANDHealth has seen first-hand what it takes to not just generate evidence, but to turn that evidence into a product that health systems, patients and payers will actually adopt.

We sat down with her to talk about the gaps that sparked the ANDHealth+ program, the patterns she sees in companies that succeed, and what health systems and investors truly want from digital health.

1. What unmet need in the health ecosystem inspired ANDHealth+, and where were founders falling through the cracks in existing support systems?

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about what ANDHealth does is that I started out as a co-inventor of a digital health product myself.

Before ANDHealth started, there was essentially nothing in Australia that was truly digital health specific. Digital health companies would find themselves applying for medical research funding alongside drugs, with assessments heavily weighted to patent portfolios and known clinical development milestones. Alternatively, they would find themselves trying to generate revenues before focusing on clinical evidence to secure investment from more “tech” aligned investors and accelerators. Digital health companies just weren’t getting cut through.

ANDHealth’s Founder, Bronwyn Le Grice, came from a venture capital background and wanted to unlock the investment potential inherent in the nascent digital health sector. The challenge was that the companies just weren’t investable yet. They hadn’t answered some of the key “killer questions” you need to be able to answer before going to market. ANDHealth+ was designed to fill that gap, creating companies able to survive and thrive, attract institutional-grade investment and deliver products and services attractive to enterprise customers in the healthcare sector.

2. What are the biggest challenges you see health founders consistently underestimating?

The toughest question in digital health is almost always the business model.

Who’s going to pay? How will this be commercialised? Whether you’re selling to insurers, government, health systems, physicians, practices or consumers, or a combination of all of those, each path comes with a long list of follow-on questions.

Founders also tend to come in with a really strong bias towards their own background. We see companies led by patients, clinicians, caregivers, technologists and medical researchers. Each group has different strengths, challenges and blind spots.

If they come from a tech and product background, the UX and UI often look fantastic, but the clinical evidence requirements are not fully thought through or they believe avoiding regulation to get to revenue early is critical, rather than fully embracing regulation as a competitive defence and customer attraction mechanism.

Alternatively, if they come from a clinical research background, it’s usually the opposite. The medical data is excellent; the intervention works. But they may not have fully thought through how it fits into the clinical workflow outside their own lab or practice, or they are unaware of the regulatory thresholds, cyber and data security considerations or how to “plug in” to the bigger pieces of health infrastructure.

Pricing is another universal challenge. Innovators need to figure out how to determine and articulate the value they’re offering, and then price appropriately in a market that’s still emerging. They need to clearly identify who will pay, why they will pay and how they will pay, making health economics critical to the go-to-market plan. Is the product or service more like a device? A software subscription? A service? A hybrid of service and product? Something in between? The diversity of possible outcomes there is huge, and the external market is shifting rapidly, making support by people with super targeted domain expertise absolutely critical.

3. What differentiates the companies that succeed in digital health commercialisation from those that struggle?

One big differentiator is whether a company really understands how its product will be used in context, and by whom.

The best teams can clearly articulate three things: their users, their beneficiaries, and their payers. In digital health, those three are rarely the same. It’s often a chain of people and organisations, and mapping that chain correctly is critical.

The second differentiator is how open the Founders and CEOs are to having their assumptions challenged. For companies in the ANDHealth+ program, we curate a panel of experts across many disciplines from clinical practice, commercialisation, regulation, to product development, market access, and health economics. That panel meets monthly to have exactly those robust conversations.

We ask: what are the key assumptions? How can we derisk them? When new information comes in, how does it change the strategy?

We also deliberately bring in consumer, patient and community voices through the process. It’s one thing to have an elegant solution on paper; it’s another to have something that a patient actually wants to use, or that fits seamlessly into a nurse’s workflow.

That diversity of perspective can introduce constructive conflict, and I’m a big believer that conflict breeds creativity.

4. What do health systems want from digital health companies right now, and what do founders often misunderstand?

The Australian health system is better than most in the world, but it’s still incredibly fragmented. That fragmentation is at the heart of what founders need to understand.

When you pitch into a hospital or health service, you’re not just selling to a single buyer. You’re dealing with end users, clinical champions, procurement, IT, finance, executives - all with different priorities, budgets and constraints. You need a clear value proposition not just for the direct user, but for the broader system around them.

One common misconception is that because something is “just an app”, adoption will be straightforward. In reality, that app has to be picked up, used regularly, integrated into existing architecture and fit around a person’s life. Any time you’re asking for significant behaviour change, you’re taking on a big adoption risk.

Ultimately, technology itself doesn’t create productivity or profoundly change patient outcomes. Adoption does.

So, we encourage founders to start with the adoption question: what are the barriers and how can you design around them? There’s a lot of work being done at a system level to digitise and train the health workforce, but companies still need to own their piece of that adoption journey.

5. How should founders think about timing for global expansion?

The reality is that very few businesses are going to attract the eye of substantive VC cheques without a clear plan to access major international markets.

The single biggest challenge we see here is “US market or nothing” attitudes, with the vast majority of companies stating that their goal is to enter the US without any real experience or understanding of the US healthcare market in all its complexity.

When considering international markets from a go-to-market perspective, companies really should be spending a lot of time exploring the payment mechanisms and business/ revenue models which are most likely to drive adoption in that particular jurisdiction.

Factors such as mutual regulatory recognition, reimbursement structures, national digital health infrastructure, fast-track procurement pathways and understanding government funded pathways vs private pathways are all key drivers of selection of primary target markets for international expansion.

The ANDHealth+ International Investment committee, global leaders with over $6B of exits in digital health, provide clear guidance to our portfolio companies on these types of issues, with the consensus often being that the US is not the best, first international market to attempt to conquer.

6. What metrics or proof points are investors prioritising in digital health in 2025?

At ANDHealth+ we try to stay very close to this question. At a midpoint in the program, we pause and put our companies in front of investors and enterprise customers for structured feedback. We use that feedback to decide which projects to prioritise and, in some cases, whether it makes sense to keep going in a particular direction.

In larger jurisdictions such as the US and UK, there are dedicated digital health funds which focus specifically on this space, bringing deep domain expertise and global healthcare networks. In Australia, our dedicated healthcare investors are naturally more comfortable with pre-revenue companies with extended, deep tech, clinical development pathways, but lean in heavily to the traditional biotech and Medtech sectors. More generalist tech investors may look at revenue and forecast revenue growth and be less comfortable in the pre-revenue space.

However, the reality is that this is a fast moving sector, which following the Covid highs, has seen some substantial company failures and investor losses. So it is still a high-risk sector from the investor perspective.

From a startup perspective, the key is to know who the investors are, deeply understand their mandates and individual target company profiles and then to lean in to those investors that are best aligned with their business.

Quick fire

One underrated opportunity in digital health right now?

Everything that is not badged as AI

There is an enormous amount of money flowing into companies which badge themselves as AI driven technology.That leaves a huge number of other companies, with incredibly strong fundamentals, underfunded and undervalued.

One costly mistake founders can avoid early?

Active avoidance of the regulated path

Avoiding “doing the work” early to achieve appropriate regulatory thresholds will ultimately slow you down just as everyone is expecting you to speed up.

One trend founders should be preparing for over the next few years?

That healthcare will always move slower than technology

Healthcare is a risk averse sector that is intensely conscious of its obligation to firstly “do no harm”. Everything moves slower in healthcare and companies rarely adequately adjust their time and capital requirements accordingly.

This perspective makes one thing clear: digital health success isn’t about having the flashiest technology. It’s about understanding who pays, who benefits, who uses the product and being willing to have your assumptions tested along the way.

ANDHealth+ is Australia’s leading digital and connected health accelerator program, supporting evidence-based digital and connected health SMEs with funding, services, and hands-on support.

If you are a digital health founder ready to prove your commercial viability, the ANDHealth+ Program provides non-dilutive funding, expert validation and resources.

Applications for the ANDHealth+ Program 2025 are now open.

• Application deadline: 11:59 pm (AEDT) Friday 16 January 2026

• How to apply: via Gust (online submission only)

• Program structure: two-stage commercialisation acceleration program

• Funding support: up to $5 million in non-dilutive project funding, tranched by agreed milestones

• Key benefit: no equity requirements or IP transfer

What we’re thinking about

🤖 Why most AI isn’t delivering (and why the real issue is us, not the tech). This article on Linkedin explores why companies aren’t seeing any meaningful impact from AI at all. It’s not because the models are bad but because people don’t understand how these systems make decisions. Without that clarity, trust and adoption stall before anything can scale.

This MIT piece adds a useful macro lens: the missing impact might also reflect timing. Big productivity shifts often lag because organisations need new data foundations, reworked processes and reskilled teams before AI can meaningfully move the dial.

It also raises a deeper question: maybe productivity isn’t showing up because AI isn’t being aimed at the sectors that drive the real economy. Tools that genuinely support nurses, teachers or manufacturing workers could matter far more than upgrades to already-digitised professions.

🤝 We loved this video from LaunchVic about choosing investors wisely. It’s easy to focus on capital, but the real question is alignment: who understands what you’re building and how you want to build it? Hear from our own Rachel Yang, as well as other VCs, about what founders should look for in an investor.

🌍 Tailwind’s new Adaptation & Resilience Playbook provides a rare look at the climate adaptation market. The big message? The world is already spending over U$1.4 trillion every year adapting to climate change, but adaptation startups receive just 3% of climate tech funding: holding back solutions communities urgently need. The report also highlights how uneven the innovation landscape is.

There’s growing momentum in areas like water systems, climate-risk analytics and building cooling but many of the world’s most urgent needs are deeply physical: flood protection, resilient housing, soil health, wildfire prevention. And because governments, households and corporates all buy resilience differently, founders will need sharp, specific go-to-markets rather than broad “climate” narratives.

It’s a reminder that adaptation with urgent needs, overlooked entrepreneurs and huge potential for impact.

✨🧪A new kind of evidence. A growing set of technologies is offering researchers something they’ve long lacked: evidence that reflects human biology. Organ chips, lab-grown tissues and digital twins offer glimpses we never had before, and together they build an evidence base rooted in people rather than proxies.That scientific momentum sits alongside policy moves like the UK’s plan to wind down some animal tests by 2030.

📚When the foundations set, AI’s real growth begins. Rob Go’s latest essay makes something clear: the centre of gravity in AI is shifting. As the infrastructure race matures, the next wave belongs to founders building practical, everyday applications that actually solve problems. It’s not about outmuscling the giants, it’s about creating value where people feel it. The opportunity ahead isn’t smaller. It’s wider, more accessible and up for grabs.

If Fundrise’s chart is any clue, across every tech cycle nearly half the value ultimately shifts to the application layer: AI is just following the same curve.

Source: Fundraise via Rob Go’s essay.

🧠 What if creativity wasn’t magic at all, but something closer to math? This video dives into how creativity works: from Simonton’s “law of large numbers” (great ideas come from many attempts) to Margaret Boden’s idea that creativity is really just new combinations of what we already know. It’s a lovely reminder that innovation isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s practice, patience and the willingness to play at the edge of chaos.

🌱How leaders navigate menopause. A new study shows menopause at work isn’t one story but many. 87% of senior leaders stayed effective at work but the nuance lies in how. Women with medical knowledge, workplace allies and psychological safety navigated symptoms more smoothly; those without struggled. For many, managing menopause became a turning point that deepened resilience and leadership maturity but only when the surrounding systems supported them.

🔥Miss the headlines? Climate investing has flipped the script. New BCG analysis cuts through the “climate investing is dead” narrative. With 55% of low-carbon technologies already cost-competitive and strong policy tailwinds in the EU and APAC, the opportunity set is expanding especially in circularity, adaptation and resilience. After analysing 46 subsegments, BCG finds a broadening landscape of investable climate solutions… just as valuations become more attractive.

Further reading & listening

• Paul Ramsay Foundation’s 2025 Sustainable Impact Report deepens their commitment to what they call a “Total Impact Approach”, exploring how their capital can create positive impact beyond what has traditionally been allocated to grants.

• Listen to how Michael Tefula from Ada Ventures, a pre-seed VC fund, has built AI tools for founders, not for making investment decisions. What started as a simple tool used by 200 founders a month has grown into Deck Genius that provides detailed pitch deck feedback.

In the news

💥 Finally, clarity for new parents. WORK180’s new calculator reveals the actual parental-leave numbers for 7,000+ employers: government pay, employer top-ups and what it means for your actual income. A simple idea with outsized impact on one of life’s biggest transitions.

🔋Amber secured a further A$10m to supercharge its global rollout. The round brings in E.ON Next UK and Australian climate-tech fund Virescent Ventures, backing Amber’s vision for households to become active players in the clean-energy grid.

🩺 What does it take to scale evidence-based pain recovery? According to MoreGoodDays founder Nel Fulia: aligned payers, lived experience and a willingness to put everything on the line. We loved this reflection on why meaningful health impact depends on business models as much as science, hearing how alumni now apply to join the team and how being a founder has pushed her far beyond past roles.

✈️ A huge milestone for FlyORO, and for Australia’s SAF future. Amid Australia’s new A$1.1bn push to build a local sustainable aviation fuel industry, FlyORO has activated its first modular SAF-blending unit in Queensland. The tech lets airports blend SAF on-site, in hours, rather than relying on distant refineries. Read our Theory of Change for FlyORO below.

Our Theory of Change for FlyORO

ICYMI, you can read the raise releases on Indi (Capital Brief - paywall / Startup Daily) and Teacher’s Buddy (Capital Brief - paywall / Startup Daily).

New Paths

🔋Amber Electric is hiring across Melbourne and London; and in Melbourne alone, roles span Product Marketing, Product Design, Engineering Management, IT Operations, Sales, Talent and CX Operations.

🎧 Foremind is looking for a EAP clinician.

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is hiring across Australia, Los Angeles and Manila. In Australia, roles include Senior Software Engineer, Performance Creative Lead, Lifecycle Marketing Analyst, National Account Manager and Growth Lead.

🪰 Goterra is hiring a Site Manager, Waste Team Lead and Waste Operator (Wetherill Park) and Waste Operator (ACT).

🌳 Gandel Invest is looking for an Innovation Hub Operator to build and operate a founder-focused space in Melbourne.

Save the date

📅 17 December 2025: LaunchVic’s Victorian Startup Founder Survey. Victoria’s startup community has grown from 2,650 to over 4,300 since 2022, and LaunchVic’s confidential founder survey will help explain why. If you are a Victorian startup founder, take the survey here. Your input shapes the data guiding ecosystem support and future programs.

📅 16 January 2026: Applications close for ANDHealth+. Are you ready to grow and scale your digital and connected health business? Learn more and apply here.

📅 16 January 2026: Applications close for EnergyLab’s EnergyLab’s Investment Ready Program (QLD), a program supporting Queensland-based climate tech founder considering raising capital. Learn more here.

📅 8 February 2026: Applications close for RMIT’s [Re]Launch, a pre-accelerator program for startups operating within the circular economy. Apply here.

📅 2 March 2026: Applications close for EnergyLab’s Climate Tech Lab to Market Program. The 9-week program is designed to help researchers explore entrepreneurship as a commercialisation pathway for your research. Learn more and apply here.

🔋 Batteries are having a moment

It's been a big couple months for batteries, with our grid getting a couple of new shock absorbers to soak up renewables, help smooth out demand and stabilise the system.

In early August, the Waratah Super Battery was connected to the NSW grid and switched on, becoming Australia’s largest battery. Built on the site of a former coal plant, the battery will be at full power later this year, and will act as a buffer for the whole state, making outages rarer, energy cheaper, and the shift to clean power more resilient.

However the Waratah’s reign as Australia’s biggest battery was to be short-lived. Not to be outdone by their east coast compatriots, West Australia’s Collie Battery, the first to feature more than 2 GWh of storage, raced through its commissioning process and became operational, supporting the WA grid as of late August. To put its size in perspective, it has 17 times as much storage as the original Tesla big battery in South Australia and 5 times the storage of the Victorian Big Battery.

Records will continue to tumble over the next few years, with a strong pipeline of grid-scale battery energy storage projects forecast to increase capacity 7x-9x by the end of 2027.

Image Source: Modo Energy

At the same time we’ve seen the highly successful roll-out of the Albanese government’s Cheaper Home Batteries program seeing just under 20,000 batteries installed in the first month. The program has been so successful that the $2.3bn allocated by the government may be exhausted well before the planned end of the scheme in 2030.

It’s all part of ensuring we build resilience into our grid to ensure it can keep pace with our energy transition…something we will be diving a little deeper into soon!

🧠 What’s we’re thinking about

🌿 Mind-blowing nature. Our brains don’t just enjoy nature, being in it changes how they function. A new book called Nature and the Mind pulls together the latest science showing what we all intuitively feel - that surrounding ourselves with trees to coastlines can improve attention, cognition, immunity and emotional balance.

🕒 The brain-friendly workday. Work better by working differently. This AFR piece breaks down how neuroscience can help you rethink your daily rhythm, fewer meetings, more breaks and better alignment with your brain’s natural focus zones. The end result? Less burnout, more flow.

💧 A quarter of your water. Artificial intelligence may run on data, but it drinks water. We’ve all heard about the massive energy requirements of AI, but this article reveals how training and running AI models consumes surprising volumes of water, often out of sight. As AI use scales, this hidden cost will demand more attention - especially in drought-prone regions.

🔌 Can data centres be responsible grid citizens? Data centres usually show up in climate stories as villains (see above), but they could also be part of the solution. In this podcast from Volts, host David Roberts explores how we could potentially turn data centres into grid-stabilising assets.

📰 Perplexity's publisher play. Amid growing tensions between AI platforms and media outlets, Perplexity is proposing a different approach. Their new revenue-share model promises publishers both money and meaningful attribution when their content is surfaced. It’s early days, but it could signal a way forward to a heated debate.

⚠️ NDIS changes are close - and families are worried. Major NDIS reforms are just around the corner, and families are bracing for impact.

📰 In the news

📦 Sendle merges to take on the big players. Sendle has just entered a three-way merger positioning itself to scale fast and compete with major postal networks in the US.

🧬 A new chapter in women’s health. As part of Ovum AI's official launch, Dr. Ariella Heffernan Marks was invited to join the Channel 9 news desk for an interview about the mission behind Ovum and the movement they are driving within women’s health.

🦗Scaling insect-powered waste management. Goterra founder Olympia Yarger was invited to The Mucky Middle podcast to share what it takes to steer a first-of-its-kind from vision to commercial success.

New Paths

🔋 Amber is hiring for a Strategic Growth Operations Manager (Melbourne) and a Senior Hedging Manager (Melbourne).

🚀 Mindset Health is hiring for a Head of Marketing (Melbourne) a Conversational AI Designer (Melbourne) and a Partnerships Manager (New York).

💡 Investible is hiring for an Investor Relations Associate.

Save the Date

📅 8 September Climate Salad Webinar: Decarbonising the Built Environment - Online

📅 10 September Cicada x Tech23 - Sydney

📅 17 September Startmate Alumni Showcase - Sydney

📅 19 September HEXPO 2025 - Festival of Ideas & Innovation - Melbourne

📅 11 November Remarkable Disability Tech Summit 2025 - Sydney

What we're thinking about:

⚡What if your EV could power your home? Globally, over 1 in 5 new cars sold are electric. In Australia, it's just 13% but growing. As EVs scale, their batteries are being seen as more than just transportation tech. With the right setup, they could send energy back into the grid, stabilising it when demand spikes, or even power your home in a blackout.

But the system isn’t ready. Most EVs aren’t yet compatible, and the standards and incentives that would make it all work are still lagging. As the cost of traditional energy infrastructure keeps climbing, momentum is building around smaller, decentralised storage that lives closer to where energy is used. The grid is shifting... and we’re diving deeper into this soon. Stay tuned!

Graph source: Our World in Data

🌱📈 More food, with less. We often assume growing more food means throwing more at the problem: more fertiliser, more land and more labour. But in many high- and middle-income countries, that’s not what’s happening. Yields are going up, while inputs are holding steady or even falling. The shift seems to come from a mix of better seeds, smarter timing and farmers having the right info at the right time. Read more here.

🎯 Early traction ≠ early revenue. First Momentum have shared their 2025 Deep Tech Hardware Napkin, and it’s full of thoughtful signals about what early-stage success looks like in this space. Stats that stood out: 40% of pre-seed teams have no traction beyond customer research and some Series B startups aren’t even generating revenue yet. Instead of early results, investors are leaning into long-term technical bets and teams with strong commercial intuition.

🧪Amazon enters diagnostics. Amazon launched at-home testing across six Indian cities, offering blood tests with 60-minute pickup and six-hour results. This adds another layer to its growing health stack alongside telehealth, pharmacy and AI tools. It’s early days, but you can start to see the shape of something fuller: a more connected, data-driven model of care.

🧠💓 Hope as medicine? New research links higher hope levels to better heart health including less pain, less fatigue and lower mortality. We don’t fully understand how the mind-body link works yet, but researchers are exploring how positive thinking might one day be part of treatment plans.

🌾 When food travels far, everyone pays the price. Fresh produce often travels thousands of kilometres to city hubs, and then back out to regional towns. It’s inefficient, expensive, and frustrating for farmers and remote communities alike. This ABC article explores how rethinking food logistics including localising processing and shortening supply chains, could help build fairer and more resilient systems.

👀 Still curious about AI in education after our last deep dive?

• 🧑‍🏫 Ariel Hersh from Seek Investments’ shares 5 sharp insights on how AI tools are being used by teachers today and where it's is heading.

• 🤖Have you tried Study Mode in ChatGPT? It is a study partner that guides users through problems, instead of just getting an answer. Google’s Gemini has also rolled out a similar feature called Guided Learning, which include licensed visuals that help students understand difficult concepts.

• 📚And if you’re using Google Classroom, there are now 30+ free AI tools available to support your teaching.

In the news

🧩 The room matters as much as the pitch. On the Women’s Agenda Podcast, our Giant Leap Partner Rachel Yang explores what it really takes to shift investment culture, from who’s in the team to how the process is structured including how founders are questioned.

💜 Ovum is now live on Apple and Android! It’s the first AI health partner built for women that tracks symptoms, spots patterns and shows up to appointments with real data. Ovum is here to close the gender health gap, giving women more clarity, confidence and control in every medical conversation.

New paths

🪰 Goterra is looking for a National General Manager (Sydney).

🚽 Who Gives A Crap is hiring a National Channel Manager (B2B) (remote).

🎧 Mindset Health is after a Senior Software Engineer - Tech Lead (Melbourne), Senior Software Engineer - DevOps (Melbourne), and Provider Partnerships Manager (New York, hybrid).

⚡Amber is looking for a Software Engineer Manager (Melbourne), Senior Finance Accountant (Melbourne) and Full Stack Engineer (London).

Save the date

📅 11 August: The Australian Government is offering up to $5 million in grant funding to accelerate the uptake and deployment of grid enhancing technologies on Australia's electricity networks.

📅 12 August: Catalysing Climate Capital Report Launch, Sydney.

📅 10 September: Cicada x Tech23 2025, Sydney.

📅 19 September: HEXPO 2025: Festival of Ideas & Innovation, Melbourne.

📅 October: ANDHealth is inviting Australian digital health companies, along with key ecosystem partners, to join ANDHealth Delegation to the US. This initiative is designed to help companies grow their brand, connect with key US healthcare stakeholders, and gain practical insights into market entry and expansion. Submit your EOI here.

In this deep dive, we examine how artificial intelligence (AI) can help tackle key challenges faced by students, teachers and education systems, while also considering the ways it may hinder progress. For teachers and students, we explore the specific problems, the potential of AI solutions and their resulting complications. For the education system as a whole, we analyse the challenge of slow innovation and the market opportunities this creates for new learning models to emerge.

Introduction

Primary and high school education lays the foundation for lifelong learning - not just through academic achievement, but by developing critical thinking, resilience, creativity, ethics, and collaboration skills that students need to thrive in an increasingly complex world.

By nurturing these traits, schools help young people grow into capable, thoughtful individuals who are ready to shape their own futures and contribute meaningfully to society. Amid teacher shortages and administrative burdens, AI is being rapidly adopted with 77% of students and 60% of teachers reportedly using these tools.

“An overall view is that they are using [AI] for everything. So what we're doing now is always assuming that they're using it.” - Dr Natalie Day, literature teacher at McKinnon Secondary College.

This swift normalisation, while offering potential relief for systemic pressures, is giving rise to new tensions and challenges that educators must now navigate.

To understand this landscape, we’ve explored the impact through the distinct experiences of its core participants: teachers, students and education systems as a whole.

Teachers

The problem: Teacher workload

A significant challenge for educators is the growing imbalance between the time available for teaching and their administrative responsibilities, including manual paperwork, curriculum differentiation and resource creation, greater administration required for student wellbeing and staff recruitment.

💡 AI as a thought partner

AI platforms have the potential to act as a "thought partner" to streamline administrative tasks and improve workflow. For instance, it can provide a starting base for a new lesson plan or an assessment task, differentiate materials for various student needs, mark assessments, provide feedback and handle routine communications. This promise is compelling, freeing educators' time to focus on the inherently human aspects of their role such as building relationships, addressing complex student needs and fostering rich classroom dialogue.

AI complications: Quality and bias

While the initial focus was on managing student use, educators now face implications for their own practice. While AI offers the promise of efficiency, its value is entirely conditional on how it is used. AI output can be generic, inaccurate and low quality. It also isn’t neutral, potentially reflecting existing biases including pedagogical or teaching styles and racial.

For instance, research has shown that AI tends to default to 'teacher-centred’ lesson plans that focus on delivering facts, rather than modern approaches that encourage students to share ideas and take an active part in their own learning.

“Just because AI can generate a lesson plan quickly doesn’t mean it’s good. Without strong pedagogical knowledge, it’s hard to judge the quality of what it produces, let alone use it effectively in the classroom. The output is only as good as the prompts you give it, and those prompts are shaped by your understanding of teaching. AI can be a helpful starting point, but it still takes an expert to shape, refine, and enact it meaningfully.” - Dr Aylie Davidson, mathematics lecturer at Deakin University

This concern also extends to grading, which has shown signs of bias to learners from diverse ethnic backgrounds. This raises the critical question of who 'grades the AI' itself for fairness and accuracy. The risk is that these tools could inadvertently push teaching methods backwards.

Furthermore, there is a risk that an over-reliance on AI tools can erode the human connection essential to great teaching. If AI reduces opportunities for valuable classroom dialogue, it de-emphasises the teacher-student relationship that is paramount to effective learning.

“AI can give you a lesson plan, but it can’t bring it to life. Without the educator’s skill—the classroom management, the relationships, the ability to read the room and respond—it’s just a dry script. It’s the teacher who brings the energy, the nuance, and the connection that makes learning actually happen.” - Dr Natalie Day, literature teacher at McKinnon Secondary College.

For this reason, we believe the most pragmatic value lies in AI tools designed for targeted teacher support that address these core challenges of quality and trust. The opportunity is in developing solutions that respect a teacher's professional responsibility. A teacher needs to be able to trust the tool's output as a solid starting point, while always having ultimate control to evaluate and adapt the material for their own classroom.

Examples in this space range from platforms like Edexia and Mark My Words, which focus on streamlining feedback and assessment, and tools such as Teacher's Buddy and EasedUp aimed at alleviating content creation burdens, to more comprehensive or integrated platforms like Magic School, School AI and Kira that offer broader workflow support.

Students

The problem: The Two Sigma challenge

The conventional 'one-to-many' classroom structure, by its very design, imposes fundamental constraints on meeting diverse student learning needs. When a single instructor addresses numerous students simultaneously, the capacity to tailor pacing, provide individualised feedback and ensure engagement for each learner is inherently restricted.

Benjamin Bloom's paper in 1984 revealed that one-to-one tutoring, when combined with regular assessments and feedback, could elevate average student performance by two standard deviations - referred to as two sigmas, hence the term ‘Two Sigma Problem’. This result effectively placed these students above 98% of peers in standard classroom instruction. To no surprise, one-to-one tutoring is too costly and inefficient to implement.

💡 AI tutors for personalised learning

AI tutors have the potential to address the Two Sigma Problem. Research indicates that AI tutors can help students learn more material, with students self-reporting significant engagement and motivation to learn, where the AI tutor was tailored to behave like a seasoned instructor for the specific course.

AI complications: Over-reliance and intellectual passivity

There are concerns about students’ increasing over-reliance on AI platforms. The ease of task completion can decrease learning skills, undermine critical thinking skills and long-term learning outcomes, potentially creating 'apparent experts' where students who use AI to produce answers but haven't engaged in the productive struggle necessary for deep learning.

A study conducted by the University College of London showed that humans are hard-wired to take the path of least resistance. The study explored how people respond when a familiar action becomes slightly more difficult. Participants were asked to complete a repetitive task involving turning a handle. Over time, the direction that had been easier to turn was made slightly harder. Most people subconsciously adjusted their actions to continue taking the easier route, even when it was no longer the correct one. Only a small group recognised the increasing difficulty and made a deliberate decision to change their behaviour, even though it required more effort.

This finding highlights a deeper issue: awareness and deliberate effort are key to meaningful learning. If AI systems make tasks too frictionless, students may be nudged away from developing persistence and critical thinking, qualities essential for long-term learning success. In trying to optimise learning pathways, AI could inadvertently encourage intellectual passivity unless designed with intention.

We believe the real value lies in AI platforms built on sound pedagogical principles, designed to foster critical thinking and problem-solving, and capable of providing teachers with actionable insights into student understanding, not just their performance. We are particularly excited by companies building in areas such as Sigiq, Synthesis Tutor, Khanmigo and Squirrel AI.

Education Systems

The problem: Slow pace of innovation

A core challenge for our education system is its slow pace of innovation, a problem the Gonski 2.0 report attributes to Australia being stuck in a 20th century industrial model of schooling. This inertia is reflected in structures like the Australian curriculum's official six-year review cycle, creating a system that is not designed to incentivise schools to innovate. The result is a focus on static content, often geared towards standardised testing, which can under-prepare students with the resilient and adaptive skills required for the future.

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the response to AI. While these technologies are evolving rapidly, schools are operating within a system that is not designed to keep pace. Yet many educators recognise that ignoring AI is not an option.

"We are proactively engaging with students, staff and families to develop the critical literacies needed to support responsible, ethical, and age-appropriate use of AI. Alongside this, we’re transforming our digital ecosystem and equipping staff with the skills to harness AI for greater productivity, and in the process generating meaningful insights that directly support student learning." - Kate Manners, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Camberwell Girls Grammar School

The opportunity: New learning ecosystems

This creates opportunities for founders to build solutions that operate both alongside and beyond the traditional system. One pathway lies in complementary programs, which work alongside formal schooling to provide critical skills development that is challenging to deliver or assess within the confines of a standardised curriculum.

While schools build foundational knowledge, these programs build applied capability: teaching students how to solve complex problems, work in teams, communicate with impact, and develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Our portfolio company HEX is a prime example, delivering future-focused skills for high school students and leavers, and university students by bridging the gap between classroom theory and real-world innovation.

A bolder path involves building new learning ecosystems entirely. It’s particularly interesting to see the growing demand for microschools in the US, which are small, flexible learning communities that operate as an alternative to traditional schooling. These models often prioritise personalised learning, giving students more agency over how they learn, with ventures like Primer and Kaipod leading the way. While this movement is currently more established in the US, it points to a global appetite for more personalised and flexible models and shows the ambition of founders wanting to redefine learning itself.

What does this mean for market opportunity?

Historically, the path for an Edtech startup to achieve venture-scale returns has been challenging. As we've noted in our pitch deck guide for edtech founders, hurdles like long sales cycles, a fragmented system and an Australian market that can be deceptively small for a niche solution have often made this a difficult landscape to navigate.

AI does not erase these go-to-market challenges. The user-vs-buyer dynamic persists, which means the people who use the software every day or users, namely teachers and students, are often not the ones who approve the purchase. That decision falls to the buyers, typically school leadership who hold the budget.

Instead, one of the major impacts of AI is its ability to lower the cost and complexity of building a product that could realise personalised learning for every student, and enhanced capacity for every teacher.

Eric Schmidt’s call to adopt AI faster to solve foundational problems like education, frames the immense and positive opportunity before us. Realising this opportunity requires a clear focus not on what technology can replace, but on what it can amplify: the impact and effectiveness of human teachers. AI remains a tool in service of the deeply human endeavour of teaching. Investing in this space means backing solutions that embrace this vision, aiming to build a future where technology empowers us to create an education system truly equipped to develop the creative and resilient minds our future demands.

If you’re a founder building in this space, or know someone who is, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us here.

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Hungry for more?

🤯 Lower brain engagement when ChatGPT writes your homework. A new study out of MIT Media Lab suggests students who lean on ChatGPT for school-style writing tasks show reduced neural engagement and weaker retention compared with peers who wrestled with the work themselves. The research is preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed, but it raises timely concerns about the cognitive effects of generative AI.

💡 Digital twins reveal why some brain struggle with maths. Stanford HAI researchers have built “digital twins” of students’ brains, pinpointing the neurological signatures of maths learning disabilities. They found too much neural activity, rather than too little, resulted in learning difficulties. This work opens a path to personalised learning plans tailored to each learner’s neural wiring.

🤖 Automation doesn’t just displace, it reshapes expertise. According to MIT economist David Autor, focusing on “automation exposure” alone misses the point. Analysing U.S. job‑task data from 1977‑2018, David found 64 % of routine tasks vanished while 76 % of new tasks were abstract, meaning some roles became more specialised and better paid (proofreaders), while others became less expert but more plentiful (taxi drivers).

Image source: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Assessing the Real Impact of Automation on Jobs

🔬 Reclaiming teacher’s superpower. Byron Scaf from Stile Education argues that AI should liberate teachers to focus on the messy, human parts of learning – mentoring, emotional coaching, real‑world projects – not replace them.

📚 Publishers are tapping into AI. Major publishers have announced partnerships with AI platforms, including Perplexity & Wiley returning answers anchored to citations for easy source‑checking; and Pearson & Alphabet creating personalised learning tools across K-12. One deal boosts trust and discovery; the other personalises practice. Together, they signal a future where AI elevates both the quality of information and the experience of learning it.

🧑‍🏫 Listen to a16z’s episode on the “State of AI & Education” to get their perspective on where they see AI in education today.

New paths

🔍 Trace is looking for a Sustainability and Customer Success Manager (Sydney).

🧘 Mindset Health is hiring a Senior Software Engineer - Mobile, AI (Melbourne, hybrid), Senior Software Engineer - DevOps) and Healthcare Account Executive (New York, hybrid).

⚡Amber is hiring a Software Engineer (Melbourne, hybrid), Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne, hybrid), Senior Full Stack Engineer (London, hybrid), Customer Service Specialist (Melbourne, hybrid), Business Development Manager (Melbourne, hybrid) and Technical Sales Expert (Melbourne, hybrid).

🚜 Artesian is hiring an Investment Associate in AgriFoodTech (Sydney).

🧻 Who Gives A Crap is looking for a Logistics Manager for a 12-month parental leave cover (London).

Save the date

📅 3 July: Investing in the Inevitable – Where are the Big Bets in Climate Tech? (Sydney). Interested in learning about investing in climate tech? Greenhouse is hosting a session with experts, founders and operators in the space. Get tickets here.

📅 10 July: The Secrets to More Sustainable Buildings (Melbourne). Secrets? Yes please! EnergyLab is hosting a panel to reveal what’s need for zero-carbon buildings to become a reality. Register here.

📅 10-11 July: AI Hackathon By Antler and MLAI (Melbourne). A 24-hour retreat-style Hackathon for 10 AI builders, engineers or researchers. Register here.

📅 24 July: LuminaX Accelerator Demo Night 2025 (Gold Coast). Tickets here to see what startups are building in the HealthTech space.

📅 6 August: Startup&Angels’ Impact Investors Pitch Night (Sydney). Ben will part of the panel - come say hi! 👋 Tickets available here.

This 3rd edition provides a comprehensive three-year view of Australia’s impact startup landscape and builds on our ongoing work to systematically track impact startup investment in Australia. Since Giant Leap’s launch in 2016, we have reviewed data from over 10,000 startups, making our dataset one of the most detailed sources on the ecosystem’s evolution. With each release, the data has become more robust and the findings more attuned to how the ecosystem is evolving.

This year, with data provided by Cut Through Venture, the report combines quantitative analysis with sector deep dives and first-hand stories from founders and investors shaping the future of impact. Our focus remains on sectors closely aligned with our investment mandate: Climate, Health, and People.

This email skims the highlights of the report. If you prefer the full experience with more charts, interviews and deep dives, you can access the report here.

Read the report here

A note on methodology: We have taken a broad lens to acknowledge that impact is subjective. You can read our full impact methodology and how we have defined the sub-sectors referenced in the Appendix of the report on page 87.

Key takeaways

1. Impact sectors have shown resilience in volatile markets. Impact sectors rose from 38.9% of startup funding in 2022 to 55.6% in 2023, before settling at 41.5% in 2024. This stable allocation signals that investor conviction around impact is strong, with sustained capital support even through a challenging environment.

   

2. Climate remains the dominant theme in Australia. Climate has consistently attracted the highest levels of investment across impact sectors, underpinned by clear policy signals and strong corporate demand. Investment is shifting towards emerging solutions, signalling growing conviction in technologies that could define the next wave of decarbonisation.

   

   

3. Health investment held steady. The Health sector has shown consistent investment levels, with Biotech / Therapeutics attracting the strongest backing. Conversely, digital health investment has softened, as uncertainty around commercial models, regulatory navigation and payer dynamics continues to temper investor enthusiasm.

   

4. Investment in People, namely Edtech and HR Tech, experienced significant funding declines, reflecting a combination of structural and macroeconomic pressures including long sales cycles, customer acquisition challenges and broader economic uncertainty.

   

5. AI has become ubiquitous. AI has shifted from experimental use to a core operational enabler, significantly reshaping innovation in Climate, Health and People. This cross-sector adoption is not only accelerating innovation timelines but also raising the bar for what constitutes defensibility.

6. Series A funding is a growing bottleneck with investors placing greater scrutiny on traction, operational efficiency and scalability. Series A activity has contracted for two consecutive years, with both deal count and median deal size declining.

   

7. Investors demand clearer signals before deploying capital. Startups that may have previously advanced on strong narrative now face more rigorous benchmarks, with investors placing greater scrutiny on traction, operational efficiency and scalability. There is also a focus on startups delivering what they promise, achieving milestones and maintaining execution over time.

8. Thematic investment is on the rise, with more fund managers aligning around areas like climate, health and deep tech.

Behind the numbers: Stories that shape the stats

The data offers a clear signal of where the ecosystem stands, but it’s the sector deep dives and interviews that reveal how founders and investors are adapting in real time. These perspectives help us understand not just what is happening, but why it matters and where it might go next.

In Climate: The climate sector continues to attract the lion’s share of impact capital, but the conversation is evolving. Our deep dives explore a shift from decarbonisation to resilience, emerging investment in biodiversity and regenerative agriculture, as well as products & materials, where market fit and scalability are coming into sharper focus.

Among the interviewees we spoke to were Sophie Purdom (Planeteer Capital) and Patrick Sieb (Climate Tech Partners), who reflected on where future climate opportunities lie, as well as Adam Jones (CLT Toolbox) and Natassia Grace (Conserving Beauty) who are each tackling the challenge of embedding sustainability into established systems.

In Health: Some of the most urgent and underserved opportunities are emerging in women’s health and longevity. These areas are attracting a wave of founder-led innovation and investor interest. Interviews with Ida Tin (Clue) and Ariella Heffernan-Marks (Ovum) explore what it means to close the health gap, and why now is the moment.

In People: Funding in Edtech and HR Tech has slowed, but AI is opening new possibilities. We spoke with Ben Sze (Teacher's Buddy & Edrolo) about how AI can support teacher workflows without compromising human connection, and Brian Dixon (Kapor Capital) on the greatest opportunities in edtech investment.

Alongside the report, we’ve updated our directory of key players in the Australian impact startup ecosystem: organisations offering capital, mentorship and co-working space to support early-stage startups. We’ve also included an updated directory of global impact-focused VCs to support founders exploring international capital.

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t yet clicked, get the full report here!

Let us know what resonated, what surprised you and how you’re thinking about what’s next.

P.S. We’ve launched our new website! Take a moment to explore it and share your thoughts. We would love your feedback!

Kick start

We’re excited to share our recent investment in Foremind, a wellbeing and safety platform that combines mental health support with compliance tools to help businesses manage psychosocial hazards.

Foremind began with a powerful insight: the biggest barrier to mental health support isn’t access; it’s reaching out. After founder Joel Anderson spent a year carrying his workplace crisis line in his pocket before using it, he set out to build something better. Not just faster access to counselling, but a platform that understands the invisible hazards of the modern workplace: bullying, burnout, harassment, and helps employers respond before things hit crisis point.

CEO Joel Anderson

Read our full Theory of Change for Foremind here, and read more about Foremind’s raise in Capital Brief here.

What we're thinking about

👋 Meet Giant Leap’s new Investment Manager. Introducing Ben who recently joined the team! Check out this Q&A to learn more about the areas he’s passionate about, plus his latest book recommendation.

🌍 AI’s growing climate footprint. A new piece from Climate Tech Partners highlights the environmental cost of large AI models, from energy-hungry data centres and water-intensive cooling to the resource demands of semiconductors. But used wisely, AI could still help optimise energy, track emissions and model climate risks.

For a deeper dive into AI’s impact on climate, MIT Technology Review’s Power Hungry series is well worth a read. It unpacks the energy demands and carbon costs of the AI boom, why measuring them is trickier than it sounds, and offers four reasons to stay optimistic about AI’s future in a warming world.

🧬 A breakthrough in CRISPR treatment. Scientists have used gene-editing to treat a baby with a rare genetic disorder. The therapy was customised to target a specific mutation, offering a glimpse into the future of personalised gene-editing. It’s still early days, but it marks a significant step forward for precision medicine.

🎬 Rethinking how we learn. Freakonomics’ Steve Levitt and Google Chief Technologist Ben Gomes discuss the future of education in a world shaped by AI: not by cramming in more content, but by helping students learn what they need, when they need it.

⬛ A blackout across Iberia. On May 15, a complex failure in power grid synchronisation caused a blackout across Spain and Portugal. This piece from The Conversation is a great breakdown of what actually happened and what it tells us about how fragile, even in the most modernised nations, our energy infrastructure remains.

🗣️ AI’s yes-man problem. In April, OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update that made ChatGPT overly flattering. Now, researchers from Stanford, Oxford, and Carnegie Mellon have introduced Elephant, a benchmark for measuring how often language models agree with users. Tested across eight major models, the study found AI was far more sycophantic than humans, especially in morally or emotionally charged situations. A reminder that while it’s nice to feel validated, making AI feel helpful isn’t the same as making it safe.

🔥 Close to the edge. A sobering forecast from the World Meteorological Organisation warns we could hit between 1.2-1.9°C of warming above pre-industrial levels within the next five years. It’s not a formal breach of the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warming levels (typically over 20 years), but it’s a sign that extreme heat is becoming the norm.

Source: WMO via Financial Times

🙈 Not-so-private chats. Meta’s AI chatbot app includes a public “Discover” feed where user conversations, some surprisingly personal, are showing up for others to see. From medical questions to relationship worries, it’s a reminder that not every AI interaction is as private as it feels, and “opt-in” isn’t always as clear as it should be.

In the news

🌱 Backing what matters. In a recent article published by SmartCompany, our Managing Partner Will Richardson asks a simple question: what kind of future are we building? While funding pours into AI built for distraction, the real opportunity lies in tools that support health, education and climate.

🔋 Home batteries, demystified. Curious about when a home battery actually starts paying for itself? Amber provides an explainer on payback periods, pricing factors, and what’s changing in the market. We're also thrilled that Amber has just raised $45 million in a Series D!

🤲🎉 A first-time climate fund, against the odds. Planeteer Capital, led by Sophie Purdom, has closed its debut US$54 million fund. This is no small feat in a year where US climate VC fundraising hit a 15-year low. In a tough fundraising environment, it’s a clear sign there’s still strong conviction behind climate solutions that are built to scale.

💜 Ovum AI is launching in July! 👉 Sign up for early access.

New paths

🎧 Mindset Health is after a Head of Marketing (Melbourne, hybrid), Lifecycle Marketing Manger (Melbourne, hybrid), Conversational AI Designer (Melbourne, hybrid), Senior Software Engineer - Mobile, AI (Melbourne, hybrid), Senior Software Engineer - DevOps) and Provider Partnerships Manager (New York, hybrid).

🌓 Foremind is looking for an EAP clinician - sole trader.

⚡Amber is hiring a Battery Channel Manager (Brisbane), Business Development Manager (Melbourne), Sales Specialist (Melbourne) and Sales Coordinator (Melbourne).

Save the date

📅 10 June: Applications close for RMIT’s [Re]Launch Incubator, which is tailored towards advancing startups which target the circular economy.

📅 11 June: Notion x Antler: Founders Mixer, Melbourne

📅 16 June: Applications close for the Snow Entrepreneurs Fellowship. The program supports innovators tackling pressing social challenges, and past fellows include Joel Anderson from our portfolio company, Foremind.

📅 18 June: Vibe Coding for Business, Melbourne

📅 22 July: Apply for Governing for Purpose, a 5-week hybrid program developed by Small Giants and designed for board directors and senior leaders who want to move beyond compliance and into purpose-driven governance.

What we’re thinking about

🛌 Planning your workouts? A Nature study using WHOOP data found that intense exercise too close to bedtime can mess with your sleep. The sweet spot? Try to finish tough sessions at least 4 hours before lights out (or just keep it light!).

🤖🌿 AI isn’t just for emails anymore. A year ago, AI was all about finding ways to make life a little faster or easier. Now, people are turning to it for the messy, human stuff: therapy, finding purpose and getting life organised. Funny how we built these tools to manage our external world, only to discover they're even better at helping us navigate our inner one. HBR explores the trends.

💨 Can we breed our way to lower emissions? A new US$27.4 million initiative backed by the Bezos Earth Fund and Global Methane Hub is betting on it, aiming to breed low-methane livestock across four continents. More here.

🧪🌥️ Spraying the sky to buy time? UK scientists are now testing geoengineering in the real world, spraying tiny particles into the sky to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. It's part of a £50 million government push to explore climate interventions into large-scale climate interventions. Depending on who you ask, it’s bold innovation… or a worrying sign of just how behind we are.

🚢 Big news for the high seas. A draft deal from the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO) would require cargo vessels to cut emissions or pay up. It’s the first time a global industry could face a climate price no matter where it sails. The plan isn’t approved yet, but it could help fund cleaner fuels and support countries hit hardest by climate change.

🌱 Agtech VC is evolving. Investor hype around agtech is settling, and that might be a good thing. Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder & General Partner of Tenacious Ventures, breaks down what’s stalling adoption, and how this reset could lead to models that actually work in the real world (not just pitch decks).

🔥 The fossil fuel subsidy iceberg. In 2022, governments spent $1.5 trillion in direct subsidies to consumers and producers. Add in the hidden costs like air pollution and climate change, and the total jumps to $7 trillion. It's a reminder that decarbonisation isn’t just about tech transitions, but about reworking the economic scaffolding that holds fossil fuels in place.

Image sourced here.

🎙️ Need a rewilding reset? Ben Goldsmith’s podcast is full of hopeful and thoughtful conversations about how bringing nature back could change the world and the way we live.

In the news

🙌 Ovum AI gets a standing ovation. Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks gave the first public demo of Ovum at the innovAItor series, and was met with a standing ovation for its potential to transform women’s healthcare. 👉 Sign up here for early access to Ovum.

⚡ Amber wins for Vehicle-to-Grid. Amber won Canstar Blue’s Innovation Excellence Award 2025 - Energy for their Vehicle to Grid program.

🩺 Telehealth’s second act is here. Diana Pitts, CEO of Coviu, chats about how the pandemic made virtual care a must-have, and what clinics need now to make it work long-term. Watch here.

📋 What women want (at work). Work180 released their What Women Want 2025 report, looking at what women and underrepresented groups actually need from employers in 2025.

👔 From the CFO seat to CEO. Cyril Gabriel reflects on his first 30 days leading Academy Xi - on letting go of control, embracing ambiguity and leading with trust. Read here.

New paths

🔧 Amber is hiring a Hardware Integrations Engineer (Melbourne, hybrid) and Senior Full Stack Engineer (remote).

🎨 Mindset Health is after a Digital Designer and a Lifecycle Marketing Manger (Melbourne, hybrid).

💼 Climate Tech Partners is searching for an Investment Associate (Sydney, hybrid).

🧠 Tenacious Ventures is looking for an Investment Principal and Insights Lead (Sydney or Melbourne).

Save the date

📅 6 May: ANDHealth Unfiltered: Digital Health Summit, Sydney.

📅 13 - 14 May: Digital Health Fest, Melbourne - come say hi to Rachel and Jo from our team, who will be there.

📅 15 May: Energy Lab’s Women Investors in Climate Tech, Melbourne.

Applications close for the Press Play Cohort 4. Press Play is pre-accelerator for women transitioning from corporate life into building their own startups. 20 scholarship spots are available with 85% off. Apply here.

Applications close for the Ignite Spark Program. Grant funding for Queensland-based SMEs to test and validate their ideas. You can read more here.

📅 2 June: Applications close for the Ignite Ideas Fund. Grants funding for Queensland-based SMEs to commercialise their product. Read more here.

What we’re thinking about

🌱 The biggest repricing event in history. Norges Bank, which manages the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, has placed 96% of its portfolio under natural capital risk assessment. This is a quiet, but enormous, acknowledgement: nature and climate risk stand to fundamentally reshape our financial systems and can no longer be ignored. Impact One breaks it down.

🩺 Hinge Health breaks the digital health IPO drought. Hinge Health has filed to go public, the first digital health company to do so in nearly three years. With an estimated raise of US$500m, this could be a sign of a long-awaited reawakening for healthtech in public markets. Read more in TechCrunch.

🍎 AI a day keeps the doctor away. New legislation tabled in the US House of Representatives could allow AI to autonomously prescribe FDA-approved drugs. It raises questions about safety, ethics, and the definition of a clinician, but signals the continued integration of AI into all aspects of the medical system. Read more here.

🤝 Climate-conscious consumerism isn’t as partisan as you may think. According to Northwind Climate’s new research, climate-conscious consumers aren’t just clustered on one end of the political spectrum. A reminder that values-led purchasing is more widespread and nuanced than we might assume, and that regardless of political alignment, brands can expect to be punished by consumers for overstating their climate credentials. TechCrunch has the story.

🚗💨 EV charging at speed. Chinese EV manufacturer BYD is working on making EV charging as fast as topping up a petrol tank, as part of its broader rethinking of charging infrastructure. While details remain vague, it claims its new Han L sedan could add as much as 248 miles, or ~400 km, in just 5 minutes. More here.

🎓 AI in the classroom, at scale. The London School of Economics has partnered with Anthropic to bring Claude to all of its students. The new ‘Claude for Education’ includes a ‘learning mode’ that focuses on guiding student reasoning instead of handing out answers. This could be the start of a huge wave of tertiary institutions going with, rather than resisting, the flowing tide of AI. Read the LSE announcement and Anthropic’s update.

💪 Femtech takes on Big Tech. Six leading European women’s health startups are taking on Big Tech, filing complaints with the EU over digital censorship of women’s health content. A bold collective action pushing for more equitable digital ecosystems. More via Tech.eu.

💊 Plan B, move over for Plan A. NEXT Life Sciences has launched clinical trials in Australia for 'Plan A' – a hormone-free, long-lasting and reversible-on-demand male contraceptive. While there’s still a long path to market, it’s a promising step towards shifting the primary burden of contraception away from women. More here.

In the news

🔋 Your EV could save you $30k. Vehicle-to-grid tech is getting real. According to the AFR, EV owners could save up to $30,000 over 10 years by feeding excess battery power back into the grid by using Amber Electric’s new bidirectional charging software. It’s not just good for your wallet, but a crucial piece in solving the broader energy crisis. Full piece in the AFR.

💡 APAC’s most innovative companies of 2025. Fast Company’s 2025 list of most innovative companies is out – and our portfolio company Who Gives A Crap made the cut. Read the list here.

👩🏻‍🍼 Startups and small humans. What’s it like running a company while raising little kids? Neala Fulia, CEO of More Good Days, shares her honest take, alongside Michelle Battersby (Sunroom) and Freya Berwick (Sense of Self). Read the article from Blackbird here.

💵 Tech and the 2025 Budget. Giant Leap’s Managing Partner Will Richardson shares his thoughts on what the federal budget means for tech – with policies like the Front Door for investors and efforts to streamline M&A processes being welcome changes. StartupDaily article here.

🎙 Funded Futures: Founders, students and scale. In this great episode of Funded Futures, Jeanette Chea, CEO and co-founder of HEX, dives into the student-to-founder journey, bootstrapping, sustainable growth and more. Worth a listen.

New paths

🚀 Mindset Health is hiring a Data / Analytics Engineer (Melbourne).

🔋 Amber Electric is hiring a Senior UX Designer, Software Engineering Manager and a Software Engineer (Melbourne).

✏️ What the Health is hiring a Content Lead (Australia, remote).

Save the date

📅 4 April: Startup Sips, Colllingwood, Melbourne.

📅 6 April: StartSpace x Build Club Machine Learning / AI Saturday co-working, Melbourne.

📅 10 April: Cicada x Tech23: Meet Australia’s Deep Tech Leaders, Sydney.

No-Code, AI & Venture Studios: Alt paths to MVPs, Melbourne.

F*ckUp Nights Melbourne: April 2025 edition, Melbourne - featuring Rohit Bhargava, Sergio Brodsky, Gemma Hunter, and more.

📅 30 April - 1 May: Sunrise, Sydney - get your tickets and come say hi to the Giant Leap team, we’ll all be there.

Startmate Demo Day, Sydney. Get on this quickly as tickets will sell out!

📅 13 - 14 May: Digital Health Fest, Melbourne. Come say hi to Rachel and Jo from our team!