Adelaide tech company HappyCo raises $10m

Adelaide grown  HappyCo, led by CEO Jindou Lee, now based in SF, has just completed a $10m Series A round from a batch of AUSTRALIAN Venture Capital Firms. 

HappyCo, founded in 2011, is a real estate technology company, that builds mobile and cloud solutions to enable real-time property operations. It is the leading real-time operations platform for inspecting, managing and monitoring residential properties and commercial facilities, and is used to manage more than 1.2 million units by companies such as Airbnb, Softbank/Fortress and Vicinity Centres.

Leading the Series A round was Sydney based  Alium Capital Management (Rajeev Gupta ) Tempus Partners (Alister Coleman) and PieLab Venture Partners,  (Chris Rolls) Larsen Ventures and Sandalphon Capital. 

The question for the capital raisers is “how do you get access to these funds? Where do I get the key? What do I need to do?

Alister Coleman gave us a clue.... “We are thrilled to back a laser-focused team that has achieved international success and a global customer base, yet retained its engineering talent and roots in Adelaide.”

If you are a  successful technology company looking to scale we would like to work with you with a view to helping you connect to people and money! 

If you are interested to find out more send me your contact details or join me at one of our bbg forums or nsstermind groups go to www.bbg.business 

Innovation in Australia: Rich Arnold on Crypto Currencies

Innovation in Australia: Rich Arnold on Crypto Currencies: Crypto currencies: Enough friends have asked for my thoughts that I finally wrote them down in as brief a form as I was able: Crypto currenc...

Bitcoin Price December 3 2018 ???

       

IZero - Cryptos and capital

The Bob Pritchard Column 

tZero is  raising $250 million, finishing up some acquisitions, and building an ecosystem to challenge Wall Street. tZero is the application of blockchain to capital markets or Wall Street and eliminate a lot of opportunities for fraud and manipulation. The platform integrates cryptographically secure distributed ledgers with existing market processes to reduce settlement time and costs, increase transparency, efficiency and auditability.

 

A year ago, they issued the world's first public blockchain security - common stock. A prominent Wall Street entity has said that 100% of the stocks and bonds being issued on Wall Street could be 100% tokenized in five years. That means the current architecture and systems of Wall Street will become obsolete over five years.

 

 
There have been a lot of suspect types of elements involved in bitcoin. But there are some criminals who used US dollars, too. But that shouldn't get people to overlook the fact that the underlying technology -blockchain - is going to remake civilization as we know it.

 
What people get wrong is the stories about silk road and people selling drugs on the internet and stuff, speculation,  and market manipulation etc. But, the main event is the technology underlying it, this new type of technology called blockchain, which you can think of as like a ledger. That is a magic ledger. People can have copies of the ledger and when you change one place, it changes everywhere. And it's cryptographically protected and immutable. So we can finally have a version of the truth that is the truth. And we don't have to rely on third parties manipulating the reality to color our viewpoint. We know that the laws of mathematics have cryptographically protected it.

 
So we can totally protect credit cards, capital markets, land titling, birth and death records. There's all kinds of aspects of government that can be made foolproof and in a way so there's no corruption.  So governments have started joining blockchain. Blockchain also gives society complete surveillance of government.

 
Blockchain is in its infancy and there are sure to be some learning curves, there always is with any technology, but there is no doubt it will have a profound effect on society, governing and business.

Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something that is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value.             Eric Schmidt, Former CEO of Google

Tim Draper believes in Bitcoin

Tim Draper, one of the workd’s leadind VCs and early investor  in the internet expects that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be the primary means of payment in five years.

"In five years you're going to walk in and try to pay fiat [a government-backed currency like the U.S. dollar] for a Starbucks coffee, and the barista is going to laugh at you, because they're going to say, 'What is this? Are you counting out pennies? Give me shells?' venture capitalist Tim Draper said Tuesday on CNBC's "Fast Money."

"They're not going to use fiat. Five years from now, none of us will be," Draper said. "Because all of this engineering effort, all that excitement, this focus is really on bitcoin and all of the cryptos around it. And I think that's what we're all going to be using and paying with."

Starbucks' Executive Chairman Howard Schultz has hinted in the last two months about how the company may use the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies for a consumer payments application. 

"I think blockchain technology is probably the rails in which an integrated app at Starbucks will be sitting on top of," Schultz said last week on Fox Business, echoing remarks from a January conference call.

Draper has invested in Skype and Tesla, and is a founding partner of leading venture capital firms Draper Associates and DFJ. He bought nearly 30,000 bitcoins in a 2014 U.S. Marshals Service auction. He told CNBC in December he was still holding all those coins. If that is still the case, Draper's holding is worth $322.5 million at Tuesday's bitcoin prices.

"This is the most excited I've ever been as an investor, and I was right there at the beginning of the internet," Draper said Tuesday.

Where Silicon Valley and AUSTRALIAN Innovation Connect

Source :- https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2018/02/26/meet-the-conference-founder-thats-flying-silicon-valley-vcs-to-silicon-koala-a-k-a-australia/amp/

360 Silicon Valley Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and executives have chartered a 747 to collaborate with and potentially invest in AUSTRALIAN Innovative companies .

They are coming for a three-day conference billed as “A celebration of the human beings who find themselves at the uncertain intersections of culture and industry and choose to make a difference”

“A long flight is pretty boring, and you have to take a whole day off to travel,” said Martin Talvari, founder of Myriad and Myriad Air, which will be transporting these passengers. “So [I thought,] why not make it an experience on its own?” 

What a great way to get to know like and tryst one another!!!

 You get to  spend a couple of riotous days attending sessions and parties, and fly back with the same crew. “It’s a unique experience,” said Talvari, adding that people from the debut flight last year still arrange meetups and catch ups.

 And, like much of Silicon Valley, it’s what you make of it.

 The plane will be full of awesome crazy Australian founders and US investors,” he said. “We want to have a good mix of people.”

The Australian Innovation Ecosystem

In the last couple of years, the startup ecosystem in Australia has grown significantly, helped in part, by large government investments, similar to the startup boom in Israel. Here, Myriad is supported by the Queensland Government’s $513 million Advance Queensland initiative.

 “The flight experience will provide those on board, including some of Queensland’s own entrepreneurial talent, with 14 hours to network, collaborate, inspire and showcase our rapidly growing entrepreneurial ecosystem,” former innovation minister Leeanne Enoch told the Brisbane Times. 

Australia ranks 8th out of 38 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recognized countries, when it comes to starting a new business, with the majority of employment growth related to startups. In particular, the Australian fintech industry has had a median 200% revenue growth, with 25% of companies surveyed reporting a 700% growth.

 However, apart from a few unicornoutliers such as Canva and Atlassian, most people aren’t too aware of the latest in Australia entrepreneurship.....

How to get there and who will be there?

A number of free seats are being given away by lottery every month to encourage students and low-income people to attend, and the remainder will be filled with a mixture of people, many related to the different governance bodies. 

For example, the plane is provided by Qantas who also has a venture arm now, and have made clear who they’d like to see on board. The same goes for The Queensland Government and their investment in Myriad “They want the people who come to have strategic value,” said Talvari.

Currently a number of high profile flyers (and speakers!) have been confirmed, including Jodie Fox, founder of Shoes of Prey (raised $25.9 million), Yael Eisenstat, International Security Advisor, Former FBI, NSA , Marvin Liao, Investor 500 Startups, Ian Thorpe Australian swimmer  and Naveen Jain, Founder, Investor Moon Express, Viome and Tony Conrad, partner at True Ventures and co-founder of about.me.

It’s definitely extreme to send VCs halfway across the world, but there’s no doubt that those who participate will have a unique experience that will help them get Australian entrepreneurs firmly on their radar. “There’s a wealth of talent and entrepreneurial spirit here, and Myriad Air will play a key role in fixing the collaboration vehicle by creating an unprecedented direct link to Silicon Valley, “ said Talvari. “The country has an early adopter mindset that makes it ideally suited for innovation.” He could be right about that.

The Myriad Conference 

Inagine attending the conference, going to in coworking spaces, bars, and offices. There will be  hundreds of mini-events, and the community really will connect - 

While the jet plane full of VC’s is the hook to this event, there’s far more to this than the aerial part. The 3-day conference is a fusion of continents and cultures and an opportunity of collaboration and learning. 

The promotional material called it “more Burning man than CES” 

Think SXSW scene, with a mix of music, design, and art alongside the technology part of it all. “The best way to design an experience is good food and good music — that [equals] good business,” says Talvari

The current goal: 5000 attendees, $17 billion of VC funds represented and 200 top speakers.

When? May 16-18, 2018.

Festival tickets are available for purchase here.

Zara Stone reports on the intersection of technology and culture. You can find more of her work atwww.zarastone.net. Follow her on Twitter and on Facebook.