How to assess a persons character

 

1. 
   
   

   If you want ot know a persons character, beliefs and values - watch there words and actions when they are pushed to the edge....

or

take them for a game of golf

The Small Business Export Loan - Government Backed Unsecured Finance available for Exporters

 

What is the Small Business Export Loan?

The Export Finance Australia’s Small Business Export Loan  provides small to medium export businesses with loans ranging from between $20,000 - $350,000 

• to cover up to 80% of the costs to secure an export contract or purchase order with an overseas buyer,
•  funding for export market development, 
• equipment finance and 
• general working capital

The loan is an unsecured, government-backed loan solution with an easy online application and fast approvals for businesses with a turnover of more than $250K.

The loans are designed to meet the specific needs of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), to help them take advantage of export opportunities when financial institutions can’t help.

Are you eligible? 

To be eligible for a loan, your business must have:

• an Australian Company Number (ACN)
• an annual revenue of $250,000 – $10 million per year
• been established for at least two years.
•  struggling to get a loan for your business, and do not want to put your house on the line... this is an option to consider!! 

Objective

Export Finance Australia financially supports Australian exports of goods and services that provide a benefit to Australia  -  benefits can include (but are not limited to):

• greater Australian participation in international supply chains
• access to new markets or export opportunities for Australian businesses
• more Australian jobs
• payment of dividends or other financial proceeds from overseas to Australia
• new research and development expenditure in Australia
• Australian access to new products, intellectual property or technology

Timing

Applications open on an ongoing basis.

More Information 

contact Ivan Kaye at www.bsifinance.com.au or https://bsiinnovation.com.au/ 

Source for more information 

https://www.exportfinance.gov.au/how-we-can-help/our-solutions/small-business-export-loan/ 

Songtradr poised to be a unicorn in 2024

2023 was a big year for SONGTRADR the music licensing platform founded by the musical genius   PAUL WILTSHIRE (in Picture )

Songtradr raised $109 million in 2023  at a valuation of $879 million.

Investors included  

• Epic Games — the same company that sold the D2C music sales platform Bandcamp to Songtradr last month 
• WiseTech’s Richard White
• Perennial and 
• Argo.

Investors in Songtradr include the 

• St Baker family office, 
• Regal Funds Management, and 
• Aware Super.

What Songtradr does 

Songtradr is like a B2B version of Spotify, says Paul - with songwriters and producers earning fees whenever a Songtradr client licenses their music. 

Songtradr aims to be an all-in-one music licensing platform for corporates, small businesses, and content creators. Its subscribers can select songs from the Songtradr marketplace or browse from playlists, including ones inspired by popular films and TV shows.

Wiltshire has previously described the platform as a B2B version of Spotify

Morse micro - kicking serious goals

After 7 years of R&D, VentureCrowd portfolio company Morse Micro is on track to produce “hundreds of millions of semiconductor chips” in the next few years, chips that have 10 times the range of conventional Wi-Fi technology and last many years on a single battery! 🤩 

VentureCrowd investors sit alongside high profile venture capital investors including Malcolm Turnbull, Lucy Turnbull AO, Blackbird, The CSIRO's Main Sequence, and superannuation funds HESTA, Hostplus & UniSuper demonstrating once again that crowdfunding is growing up. 🚀 

No longer limited to mum & dad investors investing $50 into the local brewery, crowdfunding has democratises access to some of the best venture deals in the market and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars of new capital into the venture capital sector globally with no signs of slowing down.

And my prediction is 2024 will be the biggest year yet for the fast-growing industry! 😜 

Johnny Quattro Campbell Walshe Jock Fairweather 🦄 Michael Lancaster Lee Hearsey Greig King Jason Kennewell Sherrie Robless Sean Gregory Connie Mckeage Amanda Price Darren Tasker Adrian Bunter Philip Argy Ben O'Dwyer

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.

Alistair Faulkner raises US$18m for Darwinium

Founded by the cybersecurity legend Alisdair Faulkner - Fraud and Cyber Security startup - Darwinium has raised an  $18M USD Series A ($28.4M AUD)-  featured in TechCrunch (https://lnkd.in/exu3_9sU)

After a  $10M seed round with investors including Dean McEvoy ,  Naval Ravikant,  Niki Scevak from Blackbird, James Cameron from AirTree , Bardia Housman and Matt Farnell.

Alisdair Faulkner, Ben Davey, Rebekah Moody, Alex Forss, Ed Whitehead, Michael Brooks, Caleb Moore, Colin Goldie, Elias Bizannes. and Ananth Gundabattula , Ph.D

What Darwinium  does 

Darwinium serves the following vertical industries - fintech, eCommerce, financial services and gaming/gambling..

It provides continuous customer protection solutions that take security and fraud prevention to the edge, removing the operational burden of implementing and maintaining API-based solutions. 

The system provides complete visibility and control of every digital interaction – across web, apps and APIs – to separate good and bad behavior, in real time. 

Businesses can make accurate, real-time decisions, and take dynamic, tailored remediation that favors the customer and not the fraudster.

By leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront to integrate at the network perimeter, Darwinium provides a continuous view of user behavior with journey-time orchestration. 

The platform also has integrations with third-party services that further enrich risk decisions with additional intelligence, making it easy for customers to simplify their cyber-fraud strategy by consolidating multiple solutions.

The system uses a fully anonymized version of this data that can be processed and leveraged globally while remaining unexposed/unrecoverable to fraudsters. This streamlines compliance with regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while better preserving user privacy.

The solution has already been adopted worldwide by leading companies across its key verticals.

Opportunity to collaborate with BSI Learning and Diploma of Cybersecurity? Simon Dewar and Kala Philips 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sidewar_amazing-first-couple-of-days-at-the-india-activity-7120660567836495874-3x7R?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Me&u and Mr Yum merge to become the worlds #1 mobile ordering platform

2 startups in the hospitality industry Mr Yum and Me&U- who both started on 2018 and negotiated Covid and investment of $165m are doing a cashless merging to become the #1 mobile order & pay platform on the planet - with Over $2bn in transactions per year in 6,000 venues, across 3 continents. 

A host of the who’s who of investors and advisors have been involved - and are looking for a unicorn type payday!

The team 

Kim Teo (Mr Yum’s co-founder & CEO) as CEO of the merged business, Steve Premutico (me&us founder ) will sit on the board as a non-executive director & me&u’s current Chair Damian Smith will assume Chair of the combined company.

The Money 

Mr Yum raised more than $100 million the last raise being  $89 million in a Series A led by US VC giant Tiger Global in November 2021. 

Investors include 

Steve Baxter’s TEN13, Airtree Ventures, Skip Capital, the family fund of Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar and his wife Kim Jackson, as well as Tennis Australia’s Wildcard Ventures, Broadsheet founder Nick Shelton, Australian NBA star Patty Mills, musician Rüfüs Du Sol, and Kogan founder Ruslan Kogan.

Me&u raised $30 million in December 2022  in a round led by Acorn Capital raising $66 million in total. 

Investors include chef Neil Perry, Urban Purveyor Group founder John Szangolies, and former Facebook, Uber, MYOB and Google execs William Easton, Mike Abbott, Tim Reed, and Jason Pellegrino.

It has dominated the Australian pub ordering market, thanks in no small part to investors Justin Hemmes, CEO of the Merivale, with the app rolled out across his hotels empire.

Me&u has 70% market share of the country’s top pub groups compared to 20% for Mr Yum and 10% for others.

The merged business will supply 6,000 venues collectively, generating around $39 million annually in revenue from processing more than A$2 billion in orders in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA. 

It’s on track to reach profitability in 2024 with significant cash reserves. 

What their customers say 

What the key clients have said about the companies at www.drinkdigest.com

Justin Hemme’s of Merivale - arguably the king of the Pub market in Sydney - said that Me&u has been a game changer for his business - and that Iit’s exciting to see two Aussie-born start-ups join forces to unlock the future of hospitality on a global scale. 

“Together they are revolutionising service, operations and experience in the hospitality industry – I look forward to seeing what lies ahead.”

Australian Venue Co CEO Paul Waterson said: “I vividly remember the day in 2019 when we implemented Mr Yum in our venue Hopscotch for the first time. Not having to leave your seat to get a beer still feels as magical to me today as it did that day. Now seeing the two global leaders in the space come together to further develop the mobile ordering space is exciting for the Australian hospitality sector and our customers.”

Stevan Premutico said it was “a rare opportunity to see two strong Australian companies coming together to take on the world”.

Australia has the highest penetration of QR code table ordering globally - its time to go global!!

AJE another Aussie fashion Success story

Edwina Forest and Adrian Norris, the co-founders of AJE have  developed one of Australia’s fastest-growing fashion brands - 15 years in the making of an overnight success - A brand that is often compared to Zimmermann, 

AjE (an acronym for “Adrian joins Edwina”, ) is for women in touch with their inner girl and  now employs about 500 people and turnover  over $100m with healthy margins  (By comparison, Cue has 1200 employees, Zimmermann has 900.) 

Beth Glancey is the new chief executive of AjE. (Whose sister is chief of staff at Atlassian), 

Forest and Norris have assembled an amazing board , which includes former Bank of Queensland CEO Stuart Grimshaw and they have a small group of committed Investors ,  Shareholders and advisers

 Investors 

• Norris and Forest retain the majority share 
• Norris’ father 
• James Roche (an executive director at Roche Holdings, a mining group) and 
• Thomas Mort, whose family owns the Bodalla dairy business (Mort also runs TSM Investments)

The journey 

Adrian Norris and Edwina Forest met while 

Edwina had  a fashion shop in Noosa called Strada - stocking brands such as Kit Willow, Josh Goot and Sass and Bide while  Adrian was a fashion editor. 

They decided to take the plunge and together developed the aje brand . Adrian moved to Bali in 2007 where he set up production .

Their business model was a mix of wholesaling and direct-to-consumer, opening their first store under Hugo’s in Sydney’s Potts Point.

 Their physical stores were pumping while  their wholesale business was chewing cash !!

“We were working our arses off and had nothing to show for it,” says Norris “Retail was the way to make money,” 

“People would pay us straight away, instead of this big long production cycle where you might never see the money, or you might see $1000 nine months later instead of the $30,000 the customers  owed you.”

Between 2011 and 2015, AJE  closed its wholesale business  and opened  two new stores in Chapel Street, Melbourne, and James Street, Brisbane. 

With the money that began flowing in, they hired their first staff members and the flywheel was created !!!

Ending AJE’s wholesale business was a game changer and the retail business became a cash cow .

AJE dipped its toes back into wholesale in 2015 with larger accounts - and can be found in David Jones, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue in the US, La Samaritaine in France, Selfridge’s in the UK and Etoile in the Middle East, as well as online at Net-a-Porter and Matches Fashion. 

 They launched AJE Athletica in 2021 –  as the athleisure wear became popular - and there are now 15 standalone Athletica stores and in August, the brand hosted its first-ever runway show.

A Secret Sauce of Success 

Glancey describes Adrian Norris  as a “force of nature with a financial nous. 

- Having coaches and mentors have been a game changer - says Adrian . he employs three different personal trainers, a mental health coach, a life coach and an energy healer named Tiki. 

- Remaining humble 

Despite the company’s success, edwina says she still feels humble -“I look back and think, ‘how did we survive?’” 

The people who love the Brand 

Tanya (my daughter) wearing AJE for her wedding :) 

Where to from here 

This year, AJE showed at Australian Fashion Week for the ninth time 

Next year it plans to open in New York. 

With  25pc of sales being  overseas, Norris wants NYC to be the first of many international stores and a stepping stone to ultimately showing at New York Fashion Week. 

In 2022, retail sales grew by 279 per cent and revenue was up 217 per cent, and there is a rumour  that Country Road Group wants to buy the Brand!

Norris is looking at AJE being a unicorn in the not too distant future !

I for one think that he will achieve his goal sooner than later!

Inspired by The Fashion issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday,  August 25 inside The Australian Financial Review.

Life as an entrepreneur

Who can relate ?

Being an entrepreneur you go through more emotions than the weather during a day in Melbourne! 

• I’m excited
• Ugh this is hard - I shouldn’t have 
• It’s working
• Shit - I messed up
• This is awesome 
• I think I’m going bankrupt - how to pay the wages
• I’m good - why do I doubt myself
• I shouldn’t have - I sick 
• I’m an overnight success - life is great! 

Help us keep Australia Awesome

Australia is leading the way with a global collaboration between  institutional investors and the Australian governments on global climate change 

 25 organisations with approximately US$8 trillion (AU$12.2 trillion) in assets under management are identifying ways on how we can create a net zero global economy .

So who are some of the Investors ? 

 Aviva Investors, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Brandywine Global, HESTA, Nordea, Robeco and Schroders are facilitating the collaboration - supported by 

Achmea, Ardea Investment Management, Brown Advisory, Candriam, Colchester Global Investors, Fidelity International, First Sentier Investors, IFM Investors, Insight Investment, Jupiter Asset Management, LGPS Central, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Munich Re, Neuberger Berman, Pendal Group, QIC, Rest and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Asset Management.

Some of the goals include 

• Closing the gap between current action and a Paris-aligned emissions reduction trajectory;
• Establishing  detailed, credible, and economy-wide net zero transition plans with supporting policy mechanisms, budget expenditure and investment structures;
• Building greater climate adaptation and resilience across the economy and community to avoid worsening disruption and damage from physical risks;
• Improving disclosure of sovereign exposure to climate risks and opportunities consistent with international standards.

PRI Chief Executive Officer, David Atkin, said institutional investors understand that sovereign responses to climate change will be critical drivers of global action and capital allocators could be strong allies in helping accelerate the necessary economic transition.

“Collaboration  between sovereigns and investors can help make this happen says David Atkin - head of pRI https://www.unpri.org/climate-change

Robeco’s chief engagement officer, said he was heartened by the level of engagement to date 

Duncan Smith 

Head of APAC Communications, PRI  
duncan.smith@unpri.org 

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/climate-change-information

https://www.climatechange.environment.nsw.gov.au/australian-climate-change-observations#:~:text=Australia's%20climate%20has%20warmed%20since,night%2Dtime%20temperatures%20have%20increased.

Key points

• Australia is experiencing the effects of global climate change.
• Our average land and sea temperatures have increased.
• Despite large natural variation we are also seeing changes to rainfall patterns, increased fire danger, and rising sea levels. 
• Most of the changes observed over recent decades will continue and worsen in the future. 

Current outlook for Australia

Most of the changes observed over recent decades will continue into the future. Projections suggestthat for Australia:

• hot days will become hotter and more frequent 
• the time in drought will increase across southern Australia
• snow depths will decline 
• extreme rainfall events will become more intense 
• sea levels will rise 
• oceans will become more acidic.

The NSW and Australian Regional Climate Modelling (NARCliM) project.

A startup Investment of Note!

Apple’s first investor mike markkula - who invested $250k for  1/3 of Apple - the investment would Morle be worth $930billion 

He invested in Steve Jobs - he believed in Steve and invested in him and his idea…. had trust courage and faith that Steve would succeed and boy - did he ever!! 

Do you have someone that you believe in - and have invested in? 

Innovafeed -a bug company raises close to $500m

Innovafeed (founded in 2016 ) is a bug business cofounded by  Bastien Oggeri, Aude Guo & Clément Ray.  that has raised a fresh  $260m in a raise led by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fundmaking total raise $460m 

Source: Innovafeed

Other investors include 

• Paris-based Creadev 
• Singapore state-owned fund, Temasek, 
• global agricultural commodity traders ADM and Cargill, 
• Future French Champions (a joint venture between Qatar Investment Authority and Bpifrance), 
• ABC Impact, IDIA Capital Investissement and Grow Forward
• La Caisse d'Epargne Hauts de France, Groupe Crédit Agricole, 

BNP Paribas, Arkéa and Société Générale contributed €38m in debt financing.

What it does 

Innovafeed operates two plants in northern France that convert the larvae of the black soldier fly into thousands of tonnes of insect oil and meal for pets, fish, chickens and pigs. 

The black fly has the ability to eat any kind of waste food. 

Bugs are high in nutrients and is a climate-friendly way of feeding fish and animals because the process uses maggots fed with agricultural byproducts, like rotting vegetables, on a fraction of the land needed for livestock. Soy and fishmeal, the traditional bedrock of animal feed in Europe, require a lot more space and can be harmful to the environment. 

“Every factory we build, it’s around 50k tonnes of CO2 avoided,” Oggeri estimates. 

“We won’t replace your burger at the moment — but we can start with snacks and sport nutrition [food],” he says. 

Buggy Growth 

Innovafeed are looking to build insect farms in the US and Asia, with the company targeting up to 20 sites, cofounder Bastien Oggeri tells Sifted. 

The company says it has signed contracts worth more than €1bn over the next 10 years.

Dutch insect farmer Protix has raised over $100m to date. Global competitors include Canada’s Enterra Feed and US company EnviroFlight. 

Rabobank, a Dutch lender, predicts that global insect production could reach 500k tonnes a year by 2030, up from just 10k tonnes in 2020.

https://sifted.eu/articles/innovafeed-animal-feed-insects

The World’s Biggest Bug Farm Wants to Decarbonize Fishmeal

With five floors of insect incubators, Innovafeed’s newly expanded plant in France can produce 15,000 tons of insect protein per year. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-28/the-world-s-biggest-bug-farm-wants-to-decarbonize-fishmeal?in_source=embedded-checkout-banner

Research says that people want sustainable food

 More than half of U.S. consumers say they want sustainable food, according to a 2019 survey by the International Food Information Council, a nonprofit. Three out of fivepeople in the U.K. are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly food options, according to a survey of 1,000 people by professional services firm GHD released in November. 

VCs and Employees cash out 💰 for over $500m from SafetyCulture

SafetyCulture founded by  Luke Anear raises $34 million while planning a $500 million VC share sale at a $2.7 billion valuation.

Safety Culture turnover is $132m (32% up from previous year )- valuing it at 20X revenue !

Anear said the funding and the turn to profitability would take them to the flywheel -  giving them  an “infinite runway”

It’s our understanding that $500 million will payout  Blackbird and Index Ventures  who have invested for 10 years as well as employees who have participated in their share scheme.

This should free up equity to allow you to investment  from US VC at a higher valuation giving a payday for the funds LPs ands empmoyees! 

Blackbird also sold $150m of Canva shares  last week,

What does Safetyculture do ?

It helps keep your workplace safe easily and affordable by providing an extensive library of resources crafted by safety experts who understand the complexities of health and safety programs. Safe Work Method Statements (SWMS), Management Plans and much more are available to help you meet compliance standards, protect employees and keep your business running smoothly.

Examples of products you can buy from their extensive library  are quality management systems for $700 , quality management systems for $30and risk management plans for $50!

Any company, large or small  can create their  own safety library with their own logo on a saas model! 

IK note!  A Learning Platform  should fit into this space - which boards well for the likes of Edtech, BSI learning be a part of the #nexttechrevolution !