Startups stories

Commonwealth Bank teams with OpenAI on AI and cyber training to close skills gaps for 1 million Australian small business customers.

Zepz has bought fintech Pomelo to bolt credit cards and lending onto its remittance brands, deepening its push into cross-border finance.

Australia’s Propel-AIR 2.0 robotics sprint launches in Brisbane, uniting ARM Hub, MassRobotics and innovators for a week of AI showcases.

Canada’s early-stage bio-based firms added $896.4m to GDP and nearly 2,000 jobs, as Ottawa eyes a slice of a $4T global market.

Unicorns beat Global 2000 on core domain security, yet weak registry locks and scant DNS redundancy leave major gaps in cyber defences.

First Media joins MMC as an LP, boosting the venture fund’s media-for-equity firepower with wider digital, social and TV ad reach for start-ups.

Airwallex acquires Korean fintech Paynuri, securing local payment and FX licences as it accelerates its expansion across Asia-Pacific hubs.

Aspire embeds Deel’s Employer of Record tools to let startups hire, pay and manage overseas staff from a single cross-border finance platform.

Gen Z ‘lily padding’ is pushing UK employers to ditch rigid promotion ladders and design flexible, personalised career paths to retain staff.

OpenAI rolls out USD $8-a-month ChatGPT Go across the US and prepares to trial clearly labelled ads for free and Go users.

Canada is investing CAD $92M in four quantum start-ups to speed up fault-tolerant computing for industrial and defence uses.

British Columbia inks Karnataka life sciences pact in Bengaluru push to deepen biotech, medtech and digital health trade ties with India.

Restaurant delivery platform Sessions hits 14th place in The Sunday Times 100 Tech list after three-year CAGR of 177.04%.

FinTech Australia opens entries for the 2026 Finnie Awards, marking the programme’s tenth year with revamped categories and a new Sydney venue.

Pax8 taps former Microsoft Asia channel leader Sarah Bowden to spearhead APAC sales, marketing and partner growth from 2026.

Cloudflare acquires UK AI marketplace Human Native to give creators more control and pay for data used to train and run AI systems.

A little-known research network, built before the cloud, now underpins Canada’s AI, biotech and climate science - but its future is uncertain.

MongoDB bakes Voyage 4 AI models into Atlas and automates vector search, targeting scalable, production-grade retrieval applications.

London’s Cyb3r Operations raises $5.4m to expand real-time monitoring of third-party cyber risk as supply-chain threats intensify.

London wellbeing rewards platform incentifi raises GBP £150,000 pre-seed to run pilot with employers, including Specsavers practices.