Fusion, defence AI, a $53B bid for PayPal and the Founder of VFlik
Issue 06 – Week ending 19 July 2026 – For founders building beyond their own borders.
We’re trying a few new things this week …
Firstly, we now have video for each founder we feature (it will always be at the founder’s own choice of course tho) – but Sky Dominic gladly agreed to show his face on camera this week!
We also have a joke of the week (yes many of them will be Dad Jokes or オヤジギャグ – but isn’t that you want – with some Startup/Tech/AI flavour added to keep it on topic!
This week’s is – What do you call a chatbot pirate? (check inside for the answer)
Plus, we’ve now got a founder to watch space all packed into this issue.
That’s on top of Capital Raising annoucements:
In the Japan corner – Starlight Engine Ltd., Star Signal Solutions Inc., 株式会社InnoJin and more
Down Under we feature – ESGAgent.ai – AI Agents for ESG Compliance, Hyades + BlueNexus.
Around the globe we have – Helsing, PixVerse, Chai Discovery and Emergent.
Plus our global headlines, upcoming events and programs on offer.
That’s it from us this week – we’re really looking to boost the impact and info that we add in each week’s issue – so if you have any feedback, want to be featured or know a way we can become even greater – I’d love to hear from you.
Plus, as always – reach out if I can be of help in any way.
Thanks,
Matt ☕️
FX note: figures converted at roughly A$1 = US$0.69 = ¥112. Rounded.
Ecosystem profile
Sky Dominic – founder, vFlik
Give us your 15 second intro and what you’re working on.
Hi, Sky Dominic here, 20 plus years in the media and entertainment business. 300 plus sets, done pretty much every job on set there is. Directed a micro drama series that hit 100 million plus views. Now I’m building VFlik, ticketed virtual cinema. Filmmakers premiere their film, audiences buy a ticket, everyone watches together, globally, live. A box office, not another streaming library.
Are you avoiding AI, somewhat into AI, or all in on AI?
I’m all in with AI, but maybe not the way people expect. I’m not technical, never learned to code, and I built the entire VFlik platform with AI as my engineering team. I treat it exactly like I treat a crew on set. I don’t need to operate every piece of gear myself. I need to know what good looks like and call it. I direct, it builds, I review the cut and send notes. Same job I’ve always done, but with different crew. At the end of the day, I’ll always get a second opinion, from humans, to double check what AI has built for me.
Why build beyond your own borders?
I’ve lived this one, not just studied it. I started in Australia, then spent five years working in Asia, Taiwan mostly, and came back to Sydney to build my career from the bottom up. Film distribution is still sold border by border. A film’s rights gets carved up, country by country, while the audience watching it doesn’t think in borders at all. I saw it first hand directing a show that pulled 100 plus million views from everywhere at once.
The demand was already global, the infrastructure wasn’t. That’s the market gap. Most products cross borders faster than the business behind them does. The rights, the payments, the trust, the local relationships lag way behind. With VFlik, I built the screening room to be borderless from day one, so the audience for any film on the platform is global from the moment it premieres.
Where can people usually find you?
These days, it’s all VFlik. We’re in closed beta right now, on the cusp of launch, and I’m not opening the doors until it meets the standard I want. My film, work and credit are on IMDb and my portfolio is at skydominic.com.
What’s one thing people find surprising about you?
I’ve worked 300 plus sets and touch almost every department on the way. Actor, gaffer, focus puller, editor, producer, first AD, director, DOP, sound. People assume that’s just a resume but it’s actually the whole reason VFlik exists. I’ve watched films die not in production but in the gap between picture locked and finding an audience. That gap is the market VFlik monetises. I’m not guessing at the problem, I’ve lived it from every seat on set.
How can you help others, and what do you need help with?
Happy to help however I can, 20 years of knowing how film sets actually run, what it takes to finish a film with no money and a good look inside the vertical micro drama world where people outside it don’t fully understand yet, just ask. What I need right now, first independent filmmakers with a finished film who want a real premiere. Chapter-based tickets, a 70-30 split back to them. No subscriptions, no ads, no algorithm deciding who sees it.
Second, audiences who genuinely love indie films and want to watch it together, globally, rather than alone in the queue.
And third… I’m raising 100k to get VFlik launched on a path to 3 million to make it the default home for independent premieres within about 18 months. If you back creator economy or media infrastructure or you just want to see how ticketed virtual cinema work up close, reach out. Thank you.
🌱 Bootstrapping spotlight
Everflow – Partner Marketing Platform (United States): partner and affiliate marketing analytics platform. Founder Sam Darawish grew it from roughly US$400K of his own capital to about US$30M ARR with 1,200+ customers and ~120 staff, no VC or outside equity ever raised. (SaaS Club) ↗
Traction point: ~US$30M ARR and 1,200+ customers, fully self-funded.
🇯🇵 Japan raises
Starlight Engine Ltd. (Tokyo): ¥6.06B / A$54M / US$37M (Series funding). A Kyoto Fusioneering group company chasing fusion power generation via the industry-led FAST tokamak project. (創業手帳 / Sogyotecho) ↗
Star Signal Solutions Inc. (Tokyo): ¥450M / A$4.0M / US$2.8M (funding round). JAXA-derived space situational awareness tech, building a global network to track satellites and debris. (創業手帳 / Sogyotecho) ↗
ZeamiCyberSecurity (Tokyo): ¥50M / A$450K / US$310K (funding round). Enterprise-grade cybersecurity SaaS. (創業手帳 / Sogyotecho) ↗
株式会社InnoJin (Tokyo): Series C, round undisclosed; cumulative ¥950M / A$8.5M / US$5.9M. University-founded eye-care startup pairing online ophthalmology with regulated software-as-a-medical-device. (PR TIMES) ↗
Also raised in Japan this week: Bitee (¥24M, gourmet AI recommendation app), ROBOTS (robot control platform), Sinumy Corporation (hands-free authentication, backed by Miraidoor), The Blueprint (immersive video and XR), and Frontier Innovations’ Space Tech Accelerator (satellite data for sustainable palm oil sourcing). Amounts undisclosed except Bitee.
Takeaway: Japan’s biggest week wasn’t SaaS. It was fusion and space, both games you can only win with partners well beyond your borders.
🇦🇺 Australia raises
BlueNexus (Sydney): A$2.0M / US$1.4M / ¥224M (seed). A no-code “agent management platform” letting domain experts build and deploy AI agents in ~20 minutes; led by M31 Capital with Antler. (SmartCompany) ↗
ESGAgent.ai – AI Agents for ESG Compliance (Brisbane): A$725K / US$500K / ¥81M (seed). Klean Technologies automates climate, safety and governance reporting for heavy industry; led by Japanese VC DNX Ventures. (SmartCompany) ↗
Hyades (Auckland, NZ): A$910K / US$630K / ¥102M (pre-seed). Builds AI models from map-based data, satellite images, drone footage and radar; led by Icehouse Ventures. (Startup Daily) ↗
A quiet week across the Tasman: these were the only three ANZ rounds reported inside the window. Just Meat Protein’s A$1.05M from Inghams and Gridcog’s A$13.5M Series A both landed the week prior, so they belong to the last issue.
Takeaway: a Brisbane climate-reporting startup taking Japanese VC money is the whole thesis in one line: capital and customers rarely live in the same postcode.
😂 Joke of the week
What do you call a chatbot pirate?
Arrrrrrrrr-tifical Intelligence … 😅
🌏 Around the world
Helsing (Munich, Germany): US$1.8B / A$2.6B / ¥292B (Series E). Europe’s biggest defence-tech round to date, at an US$18B valuation, with plans for a first US drone plant. (CNBC) ↗
PixVerse (Singapore): US$439M / A$636M / ¥71B (Series C extension). AI video generation past a US$2B valuation, expanding into world models and interactive entertainment; Alibaba among backers. (TechCrunch) ↗
Chai Discovery (San Francisco, US): US$400M / A$580M / ¥65B (Series C). AI models for molecular design used by Lilly and Pfizer, now valued at US$3.8B; led by Index Ventures. (Fierce Biotech) ↗
Emergent (Bengaluru, India): US$130M / A$188M / ¥21B (Series C). AI app-building tool hits unicorn status at US$1.5B just over a year after launch, used in 190+ countries; led by Creaegis. (DealStreetAsia) ↗
Takeaway: Germany, Singapore, San Francisco, Bengaluru. Four continents, one week. Pick your customers first and the flag on the HQ matters less every year.
👀 Lookout for
Founder: Donna Luu (based in Tokyo, Japan) – co-founder of Seidr – restoring structure, human agency, and sovereign truth to the scaling enterprise.
🌐 Global headlines
Stripe and Advent International lob a US$53B takeover offer for PayPal at US$60.50 a share, potentially the largest fintech acquisition ever. (CNBC) ↗
Apple Intelligence clears China’s cyberspace regulator, running on Alibaba’s Qwen and Baidu models, nearly two years after its US launch. (Engadget) ↗
China’s Dongfang Suanxin unveils the DF1000, a 14nm, HBM-free 3D-stacked AI chip it claims beats Nvidia’s H200 on memory bandwidth while sidestepping US export curbs. (TrendForce) ↗
Anthropic pulls Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield off Y Combinator duty and onto its compute team, betting operator-scale judgement is now a frontier-AI bottleneck. (Tech Funding News) ↗
Global startup investment hit a record US$510B in H1 2026 as the AI boom accelerated funding, IPOs and M&A. (Crunchbase News) ↗
Thought of the week – Many people ask me how to get into Japan.
Usually the product isn’t ready for that question yet, and nobody wants to hear it on a first call. So, I put it in an assessment instead. Two minutes, free. It tells you whether to start with the webinars or go straight into our Japan entry program.
Programs open for application – Japan Webinar Series – EOIs open for Session 01.
Six sessions on the craft most Japan-entry content skips: building a tech product Japanese users actually want and trust. It opens on why your product won’t work in Japan yet, and what to fix before you spend a yen – live and recorded.
Upcoming sessions & event recaps
Build My Deck. Live.:
Wed 5 August (Sorry rescheduled from 22 July) 7pm JST / 8pm AEST. Two founders, no deck, 90 minutes: both pitch decks built live using AI tools and the IC communication framework, with Thom Peace, Matt Ainsworth and Ryan Ahamer .
Free, online, seats limited. Register on Luma ↗
Missed our Founders Across Borders – Session 1 last Friday?
Then catch the recording – Matt co-hosted the first session with Karen Onuma-Mielke, co-founder and COO of GlobalDeal. Treating your first market as a hypothesis not a home, why Starbucks won Japan and lost Australia, when to set up a Delaware C Corp (and when waiting is smarter), and how to pick your second market when “just go to the US” is the wrong default.
The Q&A alone is worth it.
Know a founder building past their own borders? Forward this to them.
That’s it from us this week – we’re really looking to boost the impact and info that we add in each week’s issue – so if you have any feedback, want to be featured or know a way we can become even greater – I’d love to hear from you.
Plus, as always – reach out if I can be of help in any way.
Thanks,
Matt ☕️