The New MVP Ventures Program: Round One Opens 4 December 2023

A new-look MVP Ventures Program has finally been announced — with the aim  to support innovative businesses throughout their commercialisation journey. 

The program provides funding to help startups progress from the proof of concept stage to the MVP stage of development within the product lifecycle. 

Businesses can receive up to $50,000. 

The new maximum cap of $50,000 will enable the program to assist at least sixty businesses across NSW with the commercialisation of their products and processes. 

Don't miss the first round of applications

• Applications Round 1 Opens: 4 December 2023
• Applications Round 1 Closes: 4:30pm AEST, 30 April 2024

You will need to submit  your application on time, and also make sure that your application is strong, well-written, and in line with the program's guidelines — this is where we come in.

BSI Innovation  have been doing these grants and have been working with government for the past 25 years! 

Let me know whether i can refer you to Mick Peter or Kylie!

Phantom raises $2m to reduce plastic waste - taking global climate action #gc-af

Melbourne based  Elliot Costello of Phantm has raised a seed round of $2m  to help  build a platform to help brands the world's replace fossil plastics with natural materials - and save money doing so! 

Investors include Dan Bennet’s  Salus Ventures and Matt Browne’s Blacknova, Salus Ventures and Ali Hamed’s CoVentures 

Only about 10% of the world's $930Bn plastics industry is recycled - solving this problem can help  building environmental resilience - creating a unicorn by doing good! 

They are helping the likes of Starbucks to become plastic free by  replacing their  plastics with natural materials such as seaweed, fungi, cellulose, pulp and biodegradable PHA-based materials.

They get this right - and they have a path to going global!

Phantm notes the plastic industry is currently valued at more than US$600 billion ($934 billion) with consumption expected to nearly double by 2050 at the current pace of growth. It says only 9 per cent of plastics are recycled globally, with contamination and mixed plastics often hampering recycling efforts.

#backingheroicfounders 

 

What does Melbourne based asset tracker - Airtrack and USA video messaging platform Loom have in common?

They have both been acquired by Atlassian to strengthen its Jira base! 

What does Airtrack do?

Founded by Mike Jones and Fulvio Inserra,

AirTrack Software, a cloud-based platform for monitoring databases, it gives a complete and accurate picture of a company’s  assets, services, and all critical assets within their organisations, minimising operational risks, costs and attack surfaces,” 

The AirTrack acquisition builds on Jira Service Management’s rapidly growing customer base which currently sits around 50,000 globally. It will provide them with  a fuller, more accurate picture of all critical assets, minimizing operational risks, costs, and attack surfaces

AirTrack builds on Atlassian’s previous investments in service management, including Opsgenie for alerting and on-call management, Code Barrel for automation, Mindville Insight for asset and configuration management, ThinkTilt for low-code/no-code forms, Halp for conversational ticketing, and Percept.ai for cutting-edge AI capabilities.

The Airtrack  buyout also comes on the heels of a US$975 million ($1.5 billion) deal for video messaging platform Loom- founded in 2016.

What does loom do? 

Loom is a web based to to record a user’s face and screen simultaneously, and it eventually became a popular way for geographically distributed companies to implement asynchronous video; that is, for people to send messages to their colleagues that they could reply to in their own time, as an alternative to real-time conferences.

It’s clients 

clients including Tesla, Disney, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and more. 

Mike Cannon Brooke’s enthuses -  Loom helps bridge the collaboration gaps for dispersed teams in deeply human ways - We believe that asynchronous video and AI will drive the next evolution of team collaboration. And the combined strengths of Loom and Atlassian can deliver some amazing products in these areas.”

“Loom’s vision is to empower everyone at work to communicate more effectively wherever they are, and by joining Atlassian, we can accelerate their mission to unleash the potential of every team,” said Loom co-founder Joe Thomas.