Hi angels 🤍
May was a big one — macro, raises and AI all moved. This is the fluff-free version: what actually happened, and the so what for where you put your money, time and energy. Here’s your brief going into June.
Aussie Angels is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted — the room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are all in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other all along. These are the girls who get it.
01 — THE MACRO
The RBA hiked another 25bps to 4.35% in May. Headline inflation now tipped to peak at 4.8% in the June quarter (petrol, the Middle East, the usual). Markets are flirting with 4.7% by Christmas; CommBank is praying they don’t. Business confidence still grim (NAB -24). Consumer confidence ticked to 83 — still nobody is buying big-ticket items.
The one gift: the 12 May Budget made the $20k instant asset write-off permanent from 1 July, and lifted VC caps (VCLP $250m → $480m, ESVCLP $50m → $80m).
→ So what: borrowing is dear and customers aren’t stingy, they’re genuinely struggling — #cozzielives is real. Back founders who can grow without burning cash, and tell them to make the runway last.
Over to you: how are we all feeling about the small-business tax changes — permanent $20k write-off, bigger VC caps? Leave a note in the comments. I want to know if it actually moves the needle for your portfolio or your biz plans, or if it’s a headline that changes nothing on the ground.
02 — THE CHEQUE-IN
The boys raised $81m this month.
→ Ordermentum (Sydney hospo SaaS, 45,000+ venues) — $55m from Five V Capital. Boring B2B middleware always prints money. I’m just salty I didn’t do anything in this space back when Matt and I had this exact problem with our hospitality businesses.
→ Arkeus (Melbourne defence drone AI) — $25m Series A at a $100m valuation, led by QIC Ventures.
→ Lume (digital music platform) — backed by Lorde. Coolest cap table of the month, no notes.
Also worth clocking: a former Up Bank crew raised $4m pre-seed for Extraordinary Money (agentic AI for consumer finance, co-led Airtree + Triple Bubble). And ProcurePro pulled $15m for AI-in-construction.
YTD: $1.63B across 69 ANZ rounds, up 64.6% YoY. But rounds under $2m have declined four quarters running.
So what: rounds under $2m keep drying up, so genuinely good early founders can’t get funded. If you’re building, plan your raise around it. If you’re investing, that gap is exactly where angels do their best work — less competition, better entry price.
03 — THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING
The number that keeps me up: in 2025, all-female founding teams got less than 0.5% of VC. Zero. Point. Five.
Three things worth looking at:
→ NSW finally launched its $4m Diversity Pre-Accelerator. UNSW Founders is running Impact X — free 10-week health pre-accelerator, scholarships cover childcare and travel (a novel concept apparently). Apps open 1 July. Newcastle’s FLIP NSW goes statewide backing 188 women founders, 50% reserved for regional. This is angel deal flow in 18 months. Track it.
→ UQ Empower demo day (7 May) — two to clock: Saipriya on RAPID (AI hospital triage — health + lived experience + real pain, the sweet spot). And Katherine building HomeHunter (one-stop rental search, big TAM, fragmented incumbents). Worth a coffee — DM the UQ Ventures team for intros.
→ Also keep an eye on Proseek Bio — Brisbane founder Michelle Hill just closed an oversubscribed $1.5m seed for OC-Triage, a blood test for early ovarian cancer detection. Up to 80% of suspected ovarian cancer surgeries are ultimately benign. She’s fixing that.
So what: women founders get backed early or not at all. If that 0.5% ever moves, it’s because someone wrote the cheque at demo day — not five rounds later once she’s “proven” and twice the price.
04 — THE MARKETING NOTES
Three things to clip and save.
→ Australian Made Week (18–24 May) — Andy Lee’s mockumentary fronted the 40th anniversary of the green-and-gold logo. 93% of Australians trust it. Free trust premium if your product qualifies. Consumer founders, take note.
→ IAB Australia dropped its LLM Prompting Framework on 20 May — aimed at fixing inconsistent AI use across advertising and marketing teams. The first vendor-agnostic playbook, built with Google, Adobe, News Corp and Reddit. The “everyone secretly uses ChatGPT” era is over. Read it before your next brief.
→ City of Melbourne’s “Melbourne at its most Melbourne” (Town Square × Zenith) — leaned all the way into winter apathy instead of fighting it. Masterclass.
So what: the thing people complain about most in your category is usually your strongest brand angle. Melbourne owned the cold instead of apologising for it. Find your version.
05 — THE AI CORNER
AI news this month, because it’s moving too fast to leave out.
→ Google’s Universal Cart landed at I/O (19 May) — one AI cart that follows you across Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail, hunts deals in the background, and can check out on your behalf via its new Agent Payments Protocol. Launch brands: Nike, Sephora, Target, Shopify merchants. The checkout rolls into Australia in the coming months.
→ Mastercard just ran Australia’s first agentic transaction — the agent-buys-for-you era isn’t a US thing anymore. 64% of shoppers say they’ll let AI help them buy, and a fast-growing slice never visit the retailer’s own site at all. My theory? Agentic shopping is fantastic for commodity or repeat items. Fashion? Luxury? Not so much.
→ Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 (28 May) — runs multiple sub-agents at once and works solo for longer stretches. The point for us: building software keeps getting cheaper and faster, so the moat is distribution, not code.
So what: shoppers are starting to ask an AI what to buy, and the AI only picks from products whose data it can actually read. If your listings aren’t structured for machines to find, they get skipped — even when they’d win on a real shelf. Tell every consumer founder or retailer you know to get AI-readable now, while it’s still a head start and not table stakes.
06 — THE MONTH IN ONE LINE
Expensive money, an $81m month, a 0.5% problem, and AI at the checkout. May was loud. None of it gets fixed by the funds alone — it gets fixed in rooms like this, where the people who build, back, buy and consume actually talk.
See you in the chat 🤍
Brooke x
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