Oliver Bazzani

What’s happening in healthtech? 💊🎉 💰The Vic Gov will invest $7.5M to fund researchers to create 50 new startups  run by Breakthrough Victoria 💻 Safewill, bagged $17M to expand services like digital wills, power of attorney, & probate assistance 🧘‍♀️ Pronto Pilates snagged $1.6M in crowdfunding, to disrupt reformer pilates with affordable, trainer-free classes 💼 Hostplus committed $125M to VC, backing startups through IP Group plc Innovation Fund 📜 Private companies will now have to upload health data to My Health Record thanks to the Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2024 🧪 Aussie women will soon have access to at-home chlamydia & gonorrhoea tests 🤖 Baymatob won ‘AI Innovator - Healthcare’ at the Aus AI Awards for its maternal health tech providing early warnings for complications 🧬 The Fed Gov launched Genomics Australia, a national body to lead & coordinate genomic research, with a $30M commitment over 4 years 💼 Aus's $15B National Reconstruction Fund begins investing in deep tech, allocating $300M to boost quantum, robotics, & clean energy innovation ~~~🌎 US & Beyond the Borders 🌎~~~ 💍 ŌURA raised $75M, reaching a US$5B+ valuation, partnering with Dexcom to integrate glucose monitoring data into its platform 🧠 Headspace laid off 13% of its staff & is transitioning all therapists from employed roles 📈 WHOOP adds psychedelics tracking to its Journal feature, letting users log ketamine, LSD, & psilocybin use ⚽ David Beckham codeveloped longevity supplement brand IM8 Health with biotech company Prenetics, launching a longevity drink 💻 Eli Lilly & Company, the global pharma, invests S$42M in Singapore to launch a Digital Health Innovation Hub 🛠️ Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers trained a surgical robot using imitation learning from surgery videos Keen for the links & delicious deets?? 🍩🙌 Take a gander at last week's newsletter in the comments below👇😊 --- PS - if you liked this and are keen to join >8700 legends getting health tech and innovation news dropped direct to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter, What the Health, linked in the comments below! 💜 📩 #healthtech  #health  #healthcare  #digitalhealth  #medtech  #biotech

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✨ Breaking: Melt Ventures Announces New Fund.- Melt Ventures Melt Ventures, a partner of the WAVC initiative, focuses on early-stage investments in sectors aligned with Western Australia’s innovation priorities. https://melt.ventures/ Please share to let other #Founders know For the ❤️ of Startups #Fusion42 #Startups #Venturecapital

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Board Meetings for Seed / A companies should be open discussions on ideas and strategy 🗣️ All investors should have read the Board Pack in advance (and it should be sent 48 hours+ in advance). Specific governance / finance questions can be asked in an email chain or WA group beforehand. When the Board starts, nail any votes required in first 5 mins. Core focus of Board should = 2-3 key things that the Founders want to have a deep dialogue on, where the other members can be the sounding board. "This is our idea around our new marketing campaign. These are our channels." "We've narrowed down these three candidates for x role." "Here is prototype for our new product feature launching next month." "Here's the template for our Sales playbook for moving up market." "We a/b tested these two acquisition channels and have some preliminary data." No need to spend half the Board meeting talking about financials, the Board Pack will show if you've overspent, the reasons why and can be discussed async beforehand.

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Complete list of all active pre-seed & seed lead investors in NZ below. Thank you to all those who helped fill in the gaps. Quite a few people have reached out and said it was helpful, which is great. Next, I am thinking of creating the list of pre-seed & seed investors in NZ who follow and fill in investment rounds. As the list will be quite long, help would be appreciated. Please add in the comments. Aera VC AgriZeroNZ Blackbird Brandon Capital Bridgewest Ventures NZ Cure Kids Ventures Ecliptic Even Capital GD1 (Global From Day One) Hillfarrance Venture Capital Icehouse Ventures Maker Partners Motion Capital Movac Nuance Connected Capital NZ Growth Capital Partners NZVC Outset Ventures Pacific Channel Phase One Ventures Punakaiki Fund Quidnet Ventures Soul Capital Sprout Agritech WNT Ventures

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💸 New Funds looking to give you cash This week, over $2 billion in venture capital funding has been announced across 32 new and ongoing funds targeting early-stage innovation in AI, healthcare, climate tech, and deep tech. The funds span globally, with highlights in Western Australia, Israel, Japan, and the Baltics, focusing on seed to growth-stage startups and niche strategies like secondary investments. ⭐️ Key Highlights: ➡️ Global Reach: Investments target startups across the US, Europe, the GCC, and emerging regions. ➡️ Tech-Driven: Heavy focus on AI, sustainability, cybersecurity, and biotech. ➡️ Growth Focus: Early-stage investments dominate, with notable support for regional innovation hubs. This week shows strong global momentum in funding technologies solving real-world problems, while driving local growth and global impact. For all the details signup to the Fusion42 community. The startup community the founders, framers and funders who what get **it done. for the ❤️ of startups __________________________________ Connect or Follow DeReK WaTSoN ___________________________________ #fusion42 #startups #founders #cofounders #venturecapital #angelinvestors

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Launching a company with a new organisational structure to empower patients isn't easy. First, most people don't know what a DAO is. Second, many of the people who have heard the phrase, hear the word 'blockchain' and immediately associate a DAO with the dodgy Crypto adverts they see on their social feeds. And third, when many investors, who normally want to 'own' a company, find out that patients own it, they make their excuses and leave (showing it's not really patients they care about, right?). If you want to overturn centuries of a corporate system that rewards the already rich at the expense of the sick, you need to explain yourself. So, I lifted this slide from our 'Investor Deck' to explain what Plantz aims to achieve. The terminology may be new but then again, so are financial terms like derivatives, hybrid/compound instruments and detachable warrants. We're not alone in our Quest. I can see it happening across different industries, building new Web 3.0 technology in ways no-one could have predicted. Entire eco-systems appearing & integrating to empower community and mitigate against the disaster capitalism that has given us the joys of unadulterated sewage, immense inequality and a cost-of-living crisis. https://plantz.io

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2024 IPO Winners & Losers: A Rollercoaster Year for Tech and Biotech As we wrap up 2024, it's time to reflect on the IPO landscape. While it wasn't the most thrilling year, there were some standout performances and a few disappointments. Here's a quick rundown: Top Performers: Reddit: Up a staggering 332% since its March IPO, now boasting a market cap of $26 billion. 🥳 Astera Labs: Riding the AI and cloud connectivity wave, up 214% since March. 🌐 Serve Robotics: Delivering success with their innovative delivery robots. 🤖 Underperformers: Webtoon Entertainment: Down about a third since June. 📉 Gauzy: Lost roughly half its value since June. 😬 Ibotta: Down 17% from its offer price. 🛒 Despite the mixed results, the IPO market continues to be a critical avenue for growth and innovation. As a late-stage VC, it's fascinating to see how these companies navigate the public markets. Is Now the Right Time for an IPO? With several companies recently filing for IPOs, 2025 could be the year PE and VC funds start delivering some liquidity to their LPs. The market outlook is promising, driven by interest rate cuts, pent-up investor demand, and a growing backlog of IPO hopefuls. What do you think about this year's IPOs? Any surprises or predictions for 2025? Let's discuss! 💬 #VentureCapital #IPO

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Funding opportunity for mental health startups. This is your reminder that the Wellcome Trust have launched a funding program to provide between $4m and $9m to multiple mental health organisations. Deadline for applications is December 5th. There's a bit of work in it, so if you haven't already got started, this is your sign to do so! If you want to learn more about this opportunity and how to apply, read the article I wrote with Elena Netsi in the comments. #MentalHealth #BehavioralHealth #HealthTech

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10% chance of rain. 100% chance of petrichor and genuine connection for today's #Brooklyn WELLNESS #TechWalk led by Clara Fletcher (CareerStar). FYI - petrichor is the actual smell of rain. "The term was coined in 1964 by Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas, who published their research in the journal Nature. They discovered that a yellow oil trapped in rocks and soil was responsible for the smell of rain. The oil is a combination of oils from plants and chemicals from soil bacteria." So grab some waterproof boots and an umbrella to join today's special WELLNESS #TechWalk featuring an impressive lineup of Co-Hosts which includes: 🌳 Ricardo Soares - Co-Founder and Soulworker SOULSARA - an organization the provides workplace wellness solutions 🌳 Michael Zaytsev - Academic Director: Business of Cannabis, LIM College, Best-selling Author, "The Cannabis Business Book", Founder, High NY 🌳 Collin Palmer - CEO of VesselLifeScience a company at the intersection of tech, design, art , wellness, regenerative agriculture, with a 20-year award-winning history of developing some of the most recognized products in the #cannabis market. Ricardo Soares and SOULSARA will be gifting three attendees of our 9/26 walk two (1) hour wellness coaching sessions. Over 30 days, coaching recipients will explore topics like: #stressmanagement, sustainable performance levels, creativity,#purposefulliving, and personalized wellness subjects. Each session will include training exercises to practice until the next meeting. Follow-up check-ins via phone or text to support the recipient's progress. Take a deep inhale and see you there! Useful links in the comments.

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This is nuts! Putting a barrier to exit through M&A will have profound downstream implications on startup funding, especially in AgriTech. The Australian Government are proposing that acquisitions by companies with turnover of $200 Million + will require regulatory approval. This policy will put Australia at a disadvantage, as it is yet another reason for the best companies and technologies to seek capital and exits overseas. This approach cuts the capital cycle for new innovation and has the opposite effect on promoting competition, as it creates a barrier for new solutions to access the full life cycle of funding and liquidity. I would argue that the acquisition of technology through M&A is actually what we need to incentivise, to make larger Australian companies more globally competitive.

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This post is great for Startmate, but don't ignore the headline: "9 out of 10 times VC loses money". This is a truth a lot of startup founders just don't get... when you take VC, you think you've made it... but *most of the time* a VC writes a check it goes sideways. Getting VC is NOT a magnificent milestone... it's the start of a very risky journey. Think about that: your investor comes to your board meeting... and 8 or 9 out of every 10 board meetings they go to they know "this company ain't gonna make it". I'm not against VC's and I had a terrific VC in my company, but I don't think enough founders *understand* the realities of venture capital, *particularly* in Australia, where the whole ecosystem is quite immature and a long way behind the US. #VentureCapital #fundraising #VC #startups #founders

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Recently I was asked for some input on running a startup accelerator. Since I don't live in NZ, and I now work in growth capital not VC, that freed me up to be pretty candid. Here's what I wrote: Aus and NZ are innovative nations by nature, yet the incubator and accelerator model has been a copy&paste of American/Cambridge and Israeli models that have done nothing to stem the 80% fail rate. Rather than address this systemic failure, we have normalised failure by saying “well startups are just inherently high risk” That’s partially true, they are like high performance motorcycles : deadly in the hands of a rider who does not know how to ride it. But there's a big caveat: that's only true if you don't train the rider (founder) VCs meanwhile simply go unicorn hunting and stack more companies in their portfolio so that the binomial equation has more chance of yielding a return rather than address systemic failure. And so the façade continues: 80% fail. Of the 20% who “succeed”: 80% scrape themselves over the finish line saying “never again”. The 20% of the 20% then get rockstar-entrepreneur gigs lecturing to novice entrepreneur about how to succeed by copying their “sacrifice everything” model, no knowledge is actually passed on, because they are not skilled in knowledge transfer, and not able to abstract out what caused them to succeed vs what causes other entrepreneurs in a different context to succeed. Compare that to what happens in sports: ex-players value the art of learning to pass on knowledge, going through a long apprenticeship before they emerge, sometimes a decade later, as a successful coach of others. By contrast, in the world of tech startups, we have no ecosystem-wide emphasis on skill development of the founder, or helping them cultivate the mindset and habits they will need to run a company, grow a company, pitch, sell, lead, and scale the next generation of leadership so that they don’t become the bottleneck to growth. In short, we have a culture of complete neglect of growing the most important assets: the founders, even though Bill Campbell transparently demonstrated in his coaching of Steve jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt that treating founders like high performance athletes and giving them real coaching, not light touch mentoring that you’d be chastised for giving a 5th grade soccer team, was the recipe for scaleable success. So if your accelerator simply seeks to answer the question “how would I treat my founders if they were high performance athletes I wanted to win on the global stage” it will be better than 99.5% of the world’s incubators and accelerators.

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I'm very proud to see Crimson Education, founded by Jamie Beaton, Fangzhou Jiang, and Sharndré Kushor, cement its place in New Zealand's small stable of tech Unicorns. It's exciting to see an ANZ edtech focused on K - 12 education excel on a global stage. It's a proof point that the region can produce successful tech businesses beyond B2B SaaS. Crimson's journey has intersected with mine in curious ways. I remember spending the summer break with Jamie and Richard when they were applying to US universities; I must have proofread dozens of iterations of personal statements. I was then one of Crimson's first tutors in 2013, and recruited several others from ANU to support Crimson's expansion into tutoring HSC subjects. I remember having pizza with the team in Fangzhou's Unilodge dorm room, in between the information sessions they hosted for highschool students. From these humble beginnings, it's incredible to see Crimson grow into a world leader in college admissions consulting and online high school education - while accelerating to over $100m USD in annual turnover. At various times, I've heard Crimson cop criticism for creating a 'hack' for getting into elite universities. Having worked closely with a number of Crimson students - I think what Crimson really does is expand students' horizons, help them to hone in on what they're great at, and raise their ambition. Ever since he was 17 years old, Jamie has believed that the world could be his oyster. His optimism and energy is infectious; spending time with Jamie always raises my ambition too. It's marvelous to see him scale his superpower via the business he's built in Crimson Education. More about the raise in this article by Paul Smith -

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📣 Excited to Announce an 8-Part Series on Innovation Frameworks & Emerging Technologies! #Innovation isn’t just about having great ideas. If it were, everyone would do it—and it wouldn't be a profession. Having worked at pioneering companies like IDEO and Disney, and on groundbreaking projects such as the F-35 fighter jet and manufacturing in space, I can tell you: innovation is a career. It’s a methodical process, similar to that of a visionary founder, and like any skill, it can be learned. That’s why I’m launching this series! 🚀 This quarter (Oct-Dec) I’ll share practical tips, tools, frameworks, and real-world experiences from my nearly 20 years of tech-based innovation. From my time as a founder, civil servant, diplomat, product creator, business designer, corporate executive, and angel/VC investor, I’ve seen some organizations thrive with innovation while others hit roadblocks. So, how do you actually get innovation done? What does it look like in practice? 🌟 This series will break it down. Here’s what I’ll cover: 1️⃣ Parts 1-4: Innovation #frameworks: How to build strong, multidisciplinary teams, craft effective strategies, and work collaboratively for success. 2️⃣ Parts 5-8: Emerging #technologies: From AI and Robotics to Quantum Computing and 3D/4D, we’ll explore how these innovations will reshape industries, economies, and even societies. This isn’t just for big companies! Whether you're leading a startup, working in government, or driving new product development in a larger organization, this series will be a simple how-to guide to innovation, giving you insights to tackle today’s challenges and prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities. 💬 Let’s make this interactive! I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Got questions or want to share your own stories about innovation? Drop a comment below, or message me directly. #DesignThinking #ThreeHorizons #TripleHelix #HypeCycle #AI #robotics #QuantumComputing #4D

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What makes for an attractive VC for innovators? I've been interviewing startup founders in recent months - focussing on those who either have significant traction or previous exits. They consistently pick out two things they look for in an investor: 1. Understanding their industry vertical. When a VC doesn't understand it at all, it shows. 2. Caring about the founder. Or at least making the bare minimum effort to pretend that you do. It's pretty astonishing, but VCs could be missing out on some substantial deals because they miss this, low, bar.

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[HIRING] Help me out here LinkedIn - looking for a legend who will help hundreds of founders ❤️ 💥 FOUNDERS ASSOCIATE #1 Find the most ambitious early-stage founders to invest in ANZ #2 Your tools: run Launch Club and Buildmate to help hundreds of founders start and grow their startups every year >> which feeds back into #1 Link in the comments! Give this a like or tag a legend 🔥

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Seasoned startup and product builder Chris Saad on why a typical American user from the west coast is often worth about "five to ten times more" than an Australian user. We explored the fundamental differences between the Australian and American startup ecosystems - mindset, regulations, taxes, social safety nets, sophistication of investors, geography, talent density, capital availability, and so on. Check out the full conversation in episode 434 of the Future Squared podcast.

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Funding opportunity for mental health startups (up to $9m) Here's what you need to know... - Wellcome Trust have launched a new funding opportunity for digital interventions for mental health - Teams can get up to $9 million - Businesses and non-profit organisations can apply - The focus is on scalable, digital interventions to advance early intervention in depression, anxiety and psychosis - Projects must be innovative and have potential for scalable, sustainable impact - Applications closes on December 5th This is a fantastic opportunity for any organisation (big or small) who wants to scale the impact of their intervention. If you want all the details (including how to apply and the assessment criteria) I've shared them all in this week's edition of The Hemingway Report (link is in the comments). __ Thanks to Elena Netsi and Lynsey Bilsland for taking the time to speak to me about this funding opportunity (and of course for all their work to create this opportunity in the first place). __ If you want insights on mental health innovation, subscribe to The Hemingway Report and follow me Steve Duke 📩 #MentalHealth #BehavioralHealth

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What’s happening in Aussie healthtech? 💊🎉 🧬 Presagen’s Life Whisperer IVF embryo AI tech was acquired by Japan's Astec, to expand its use globally 🧫Cartherics Pty Ltd raised $15m to support a clinical trial for CTH-401, a cell therapy targeting ovarian cancer 🧠 Tessara Therapeutics, Psylo, & USyd snagged a $3m CRC-P grant 🤰 Kali Healthcare bagged a $2.65m CRC-P grant to advance its AI-enabled wearable for pregnancy monitoring 💉 Vaxxas, is raising $100m for clinical trials for its needle-free vaccine patch 🩺 ANDHealth+ invested $3.25m of MRFF grants into 5 startups as part of its digital & connected health accelerator program: Eugene, Atmo Biosciences, Immunosis, Metabolic Health Solutions, Humanetix 💊 Wesfarmers Health expects $6bn in revenue this year as it expands digital & pharmacy operations 📱 Medibank partnered with League to enhance customer experience with AI-driven personalisation across its services for 4.2M customers 🖥️ Bupa is offering eligible members 3 free telehealth consults/ year 🚀 Cortical Dynamics Limited, Microbio, & Resonait join the Biomedical AI Sprints Accelerator by ARM Hub & MTPConnect 🧠 Griffith University launched a clinical trial using olfactory nerve bridges from patients' cells to treat chronic spinal cord injuries 💼 SA’s Upper House voted 10-9 against a proposed law restricting abortions after 28 weeks 💡 > 400k Aussies downgraded from "gold" health insurance due to cost-of-living pressures Keen for the links & delicious deets?? 🍩🙌 Take a gander at last week's newsletter in the comments below👇😊 --- PS - if you liked this and are keen to join >8550 legends getting health tech and innovation news dropped direct to your inbox, subscribe to What the Health, linked in the comments below! 💜 📩

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