Six businesses, six completely different industries, all pulling in serious money in the same fortnight.
Arkeus (Melbourne)
$25M Series A. Defence tech building AI powered drone sensors that detect targets in real time. Founded in a one car garage in 2020. Already winning Pentagon contracts and integrated with AeroVironment, Textron and Boeing owned Insitu drones.
ProcurePro (Brisbane)
$15M Series B, now valued at $110M. Construction procurement software. French construction giant Bouygues went from customer to investor. Hiring 100 people over 24 months to scale globally.
Extraordinary Money (Melbourne)
$4M pre-seed. Former Up Bank executives Anson Parker and Sam Mendelsohn building AI native consumer finance. Co-led by Airtree and Triple Bubble.
Ordermentum (Sydney)
$55M from Five V Capital at a $150M+ valuation. The digital backbone connecting more than 50,000 pubs, restaurants and cafes to their wholesale suppliers. Over $3 billion in orders processed.
Lume (New Zealand)
NZ$1.34M friends and family round. A new digital music platform backed by Lorde, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and Letterboxd co-founder Karl von Randow. Rebuilding the album experience for the streaming era.
Diraq and PsiQuantum (Sydney / building in Brisbane)
US$138M between them. Two Aussie founded quantum computing companies secured letters of intent from the US Department of Commerce for a slice of US$2 billion in CHIPS Act funding, with the US government taking equity alongside the cash. Diraq gets up to US$38M. PsiQuantum gets US$100M.
My read
The range is the story. ANZ is not one sector anymore. Defence and quantum sit next to pubs and music, and every one of them found money.