Hi Moody divas🤍
July was a big one - a record cheque week, Canberra suddenly acting like it invented AI, and a rebrand (ours, iconic). This is the fluff-free version: what actually happened, and the so what for where you put your money. Here’s your brief going into August.
01 — THE MACRO
A confession from my own July: I’ve been shopping for a car loan. The dealer quoted me 11%, and before that, tried not to tell me the rate at all. Shady. A five-minute phone call of standing my ground later: 7.8%. A bit of research after that: another dealer at 6.4%, the majors at 6.4%. Same girl, same car, same credit score. The only variable was whether I pushed. (I have since also spoken to the dealership owner and extracted charging cables, a servicing package and a discount on the ceramic coating, because if we’re negotiating, we’re negotiating.)
Did they look at a young-ish woman and assume she wouldn’t check? I reckon so. Did they pick the wrong one? Absolutely. The first rate you’re quoted is not the price. It’s a test.
And the same test turns up in much bigger rooms than car dealerships. I’ve just sat it again with promotions and pay rises. More on that when the dust settles.
(Do I even want a new car? Honestly unclear. I’m 35 and after dramatically writing my car own off last year I’m currently piloting my dad’s beach car, a 2006 Toyota Corolla with 550,000 kms on the clock and a second gear you have to negotiate with.
But that’s a me problem. Back to the economy.)
Because money is expensive right now, and here’s where it’s heading. Inflation blinked first. Annual CPI eased to 3.8% in June, under the 4% everyone expected and the softest read since February. Jim Chalmers practically skipped to the podium (the RBA had forecast 4.8%, so this is his version of a soft launch going viral). Underlying inflation is still 3.6%, above the RBA’s comfort zone, so nobody at Martin Place is popping anything. But all four big banks have now called the end of rate hikes for 2026, with Westpac’s chief economist conceding “we took no pleasure in our prior hawkish view.” Girl. Neither did our mortgages. The RBA meets 11 August and, for the first time all year, the vibe is hold.
→ So what: the cost of money has probably peaked, but nobody is going to volunteer you the good rate. Whether it’s a car loan, a mortgage or a business facility, the quoted number is the opening offer. Get it in writing, compare three, and make the five-minute phone call. Mine was worth 3.2 percentage points.
Over to you: what’s the best rate (or freebie) you’ve ever negotiated just by asking? The chat wants receipts.
02 — THE CHEQUE-IN
The half-year scoreboard landed and on paper she’s thriving: $3.5 billion raised by Australian startups in H1, the second-strongest start to a year behind 2022. Now read the fine print, because the fine print is doing a lot of work. Cut Through Venture’s Q2 report shows $1.7 billion across just 64 deals, with Firmus ($725m) and Airwallex ($460m) taking close to 70% of the quarter between them. Two companies. Seventy percent.
The shape of the market got clearer too. When startups do get funded, the cheques are the biggest on record at every stage: a typical seed round is now $4m, a typical Series A $18.6m. And AI took roughly 75 cents of every dollar invested this quarter. It’s in 81% of seed pitches. AI is not a differentiator anymore, angels. It’s the cover charge.
Then July showed off. One mid-month week alone did $606.5m across seven rounds, the biggest week since December 2025:
→ AdvanCell raised $450m (US$315m) in a Series D for targeted alpha therapy in prostate cancer. A Brisbane biotech. A record round.
→ Cover Genius took US$100m from Vista Credit Partners for embedded insurance.
→ Down the stack: VXB’s $5.72m seed for space hardware design, Syngenis’ $4m pre-IPO, BlueNexus’ $2m for no-code AI agents, Early Bird’s $2m for a hangover-prevention capsule (built by ex-Eucalyptus people, funded by C-suites who apparently share our Sunday problem), Rentsy’s $800k and ESGAgent.ai’s $725k.
Notice the shape: in that record week there wasn’t a single round between $6m and $143m. The middle of the market is thin. Elsewhere in the money: PsiQuantum landed a US$125m DARPA contract, its biggest US government award yet, equity crowdfunding quietly raised $40.6m in FY26, up 40%, and female founders took roughly 33% of Q2 capital and 26% of deals.
One caution flag: R&D lender Radium Capital has paused new lending, sending startups hunting for alternatives.
The full Cut Through report is 40 pages of charts. You have a life, so here are the five that matter:
→ The 33% is a mirage. A third of this quarter’s money went to companies with women founders, the best headline in years. Here’s the catch: almost all of it was two giant cheques to two already-huge companies (Airwallex and Liquid Instruments). For the everygirl raising her first round, the odds barely moved. Celebrate the wins. Don’t retire the argument.
→ “For everyone” is out. “For her industry” is in. Investors were asked whether they prefer software built for one specific industry (tools for tradies, for clinics, for salons) or software that tries to serve everybody. 72% said specific. Zero percent said everybody. If your pitch says “it’s for everyone,” investors hear “it’s for no one.”
→ This is a ten-year relationship. The typical journey from first cheque to a big growth round has stretched to about a decade. Longer than most marriages. If you’re building, set up your life, your equity and your expectations for the long game, not the two-year sprint the movies promised.
→ The angels’ opening. Small rounds are at their quietest in years, which means less of a scramble to get into good early deals. And investors have stopped telling their companies to just survive: 70% are now advising a proper raise, up from rescue-round territory. Confidence is coming back from the bottom up. If you’ve been waiting to write your first small cheque, the queue is shorter than it’s been in years.
→ So what: if you’re building, pitch the specific problem you own, not the platform dream. If you’re investing, the thing to watch this half isn’t another mega-round. It’s whether companies actually get sold or listed, because that’s when investors finally see real cash back, and half of them say those conversations are already happening. Watch the exits, not the headlines.
03 — THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING
→ Melanie Perkins launched the Global Goals Platform, pointing Canva’s user-feedback playbook at democracy itself. Wollongong’s 220,000 residents got first access on 24 July. When the woman who built a $40b company decides her next product is democracy (as in, the concept), pay attention.
→ Giant Leap partner Rachel Yang called time on “fixing the founder”, arguing women-founder programs keep teaching founders to navigate a broken system when it’s the VC process that needs redesigning, with public pipeline reporting to match. Loudest thing said in venture this month.
→ NSW’s MVP Ventures grants put just over $1m into 22 startups, with roughly half the funding going to women-led, Indigenous and regional businesses. From 322 applicants. The odds were long; the girls delivered.
→ Main Sequence promoted Alejandra Romero to principal to lead semiconductor, quantum and AI hardware investing at the $1b deep tech fund. More women holding the pen on frontier-tech cheques, please.
→ And squeaking in just before the July bell: Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks closed a $4m seed for Ovum, building the first longitudinal dataset for women’s health, valuation tripled, Medibank already signed.
→ So what: nobody on this list waited to be invited. They rebuilt the process, the fund, and in Mel’s case, the democracy. Back yourself accordingly.
04 — THE MARKETING NOTES
Three to clip and save:
AI visibility is the new SEO. Tracksuit acquired Hall, the Sydney startup tracking how brands get described inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Your customers are asking a chatbot about you and you have no idea what it’s saying. That’s now a measurable, buyable problem.
You can’t buy this. Tadej Pogačar wore Geelong brand Dopamine Lab’s yellow nasal strip, completely unsponsored, during his Stage 14 Tour de France win, then again the next day. Co-founders Nick Allitt and Daisy McCulloch’s strip reached him via a teammate who bought a pack at a Geelong race in January. European orders are now flooding in. Product good enough that athletes use it uninvited beats any ambassador deal ever signed.
Taste is the moat. Canva shipped Code 2.0, generating sites 75% faster and betting its design pedigree can save businesses from the generic vibe-coded look. When everyone can ship a website in an afternoon, looking like everyone else is the real cost.
→ So what: all three are the same lesson. Making things got free, so being distinctive got expensive. Spend on the parts a machine can’t fake: taste, credibility, and a product people brag about unprompted.
05 — THE AI CORNER
Canberra ended its hands-off era in one week. A new Office of AI inside the PM’s department (now headed by Fergus Hanson), rules forcing large data centres to add as much power to the grid as they use, and world-first copyright rules giving artists control and payment. Anthropic is pressing from the other side, tying a potential US$15b Australian investment, 1.4GW of data centre capacity, to copyright clarity. Victoria went further, moving to ban employers using AI to track worker behaviour or read emotions from biometric data.
Meanwhile the rest of us kept using the stuff: Australia now ranks first in the world for Claude usage per capita. The world’s biggest AI girlies, officially, per capita. And Melbourne’s Heidi became the sole ambient-AI supplier for up to 70,000 NHS clinicians, the largest procurement of its kind in NHS history. A Melbourne startup, taking the notes for the British health system. Casual.
→ So what: the rules of the AI economy are being written right now, in our time zone, and billions in investment are hanging on the drafting. If your work touches content, data or customers (so, everyone’s), the compliance settings you choose this year become your defaults. Choose them on purpose.
06 — THE MONTH, WRAPPED
July, by the numbers: inflation down to 3.8%, $606.5m raised in a single week, a $450m record round out of Brisbane, AI taking 75 cents of every VC dollar, a third of Q2’s capital going to female founders, and US$15b riding on one copyright decision. A barbell market, a regulating government, and women quietly taking the frontier seats.
And one more number: on 28 July, this community changed its name. ANGELS became MOODY, and within hours the chat had produced better brand copy than most agencies (”this feels like the sign for us all to take up space, own our mood and embrace our points of difference”. Thank you, Jennifer.). Sophie has already volunteered her forehead for the logo tattoo. Same girls, same group chat, new era. The market spent July rewarding conviction and specificity. So did we.
See you in the chat 🤍 Brooke x
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it, and we are in a Mood.
This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.
From Sydney to London. Every city, growing weekly.
🔗 We launched the directory. Want to be listed? Fill in the form and we’ll add you.