A Chinese rocket flew home and landed on its legs. SoftBank paid US$200m for a kit that bolts onto someone else’s excavator.

Issue 10 – Week ending 23 August 2026 – For experts building their first product, globally from day zero.

We’re back and on the verge of spring in the souther hemisphere as Sydney starts to warm up again. And joining us for the this warmer than usual week is Yusuke Jay founder of Cubic Innov8 and co-founder of Vacanti AI.

He’s also running an event tomorrow evening, so be sure to check it out if you’re interested in his new product Vacanti AI – link below and in the comments.

We spotlight the bootstrapped Incsub and global tech on display this week – LandSpace an Aerospace startup from China.

We see Japan raises from the likes of Craif Inc., Letara, Resilire and more …

In the Aussie & NZ corner there were funds secured by – Vessev, Nbryo, Necrete, Seitec and Bower … just to name a few

Then globally we saw funding rounds comes from Gravis Robotics, Callosum, Battery Smart, xpander.ai and Rillet – from the UK, India, Switzerland, Israel and the US of course :).

Don’t miss our have global headlines, our horrible joke of the week and some upcoming events – including our Japan Market Entry webinar with Tyson Batino this Wednesday evening JST – link in the comments.

Finally, if you’re considering becoming a founder, or you’ve already taken the plunge, you might be interested in trying out our brand new founder readiness scoring tool.

All of it packed into this week’s issued number 10!

FX note (applies across this issue): A$1 = US$0.711 = ¥114.0 (US$1 ≈ ¥160.3). Rates as at 21-22 August 2026.

🎤 Ecosystem profile

Yusuke Jay , founder of Cubic Innov8 Group and co-founder of Vacanti AI (Sydney and Kyoto)

Give us your intro and what you’re working on.

Yusuke Jay, raised in Fushimi, Kyoto, based in Sydney for the past 8 years. I run Cubic Innov8 Group ↗, an IT and innovation group spanning Tokyo, Kyoto and Sydney. Our mission is to connect Japan, Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific through technology and purpose, not just as a tech corridor but as a bridge between people, opportunity and ambition. The vision is a region where talent and ideas move as freely as capital already does.

Right now the flagship build is Vacanti AI ↗, an AI job application workspace for the Australian market, co-founded with Masaki Kawakami ↗. It cuts application time from about 30 minutes to 5 minutes, so job seekers, especially international students and visa holders, can actually apply at volume instead of burning out on one resume a day.

What were you doing before this, and what finally made you start?

Before any of this I did back office work at American Express and sold software at Kaseya. People assume founders jump straight from idea to CEO, but I spent years in unglamorous operational roles, including visa paperwork support, before I ever built anything of my own. That grind is exactly why Vacanti AI is built the way it is: for people doing the unglamorous, repetitive work of applying to jobs one after another.

In the full Q&A Yusuke gets into why translation is the easy part of crossing borders, and the specific intros he is looking for right now.

→ Read the full Q&A on Global Day Zero ↗

🌱 Bootstrapping spotlight

Incsub (Albert Park, Melbourne): sells WordPress plugins, managed hosting and site management tools to freelancers and agencies through WPMU DEV, and runs the education blogging platform Edublogs.

When Edublogs launched in 2005, James Farmer was a lecturer in education design at Deakin University, so he was building for a field he already knew from the inside. He has said he built it as a personal side project, separately from the job, and that the university warned him against encouraging staff to use blogs. He went full time on it in July 2007. Twenty-two years later: no rounds, no investors, US$20.8m revenue, about 189 staff. (Latka) ↗

🇯🇵 Japan raises

Craif Inc. (Tokyo): ¥5.3bn / A$46.5m / US$33.1m (Series D, ¥4.8bn equity plus ¥500m debt) miSignal Scan screens cancer risk by organ from a urine sample posted from home, reading microRNA with AI. Distributed through 2,500+ medical facilities and 4,700+ drugstores, 110,000+ cumulative users, now chasing FDA clearance for a pancreatic cancer diagnostic from a San Diego base. Co-led by Granite Integral Capital (Singapore) and Towns. (PR TIMES) ↗

Hinoki (Tokyo): ¥3.1bn / A$27.2m / US$19.3m (Series A) A Japanese permanent holding company buying mid-size SMEs with ¥100m to ¥1bn EBITDA, industrial equipment distributors and building maintenance among them, with a written commitment never to resell. Targets 20 acquisitions over ten years. Backed by Dual Bridge Capital, MIT Investment Management Company and Kampo NEXT Partners. (PR TIMES) ↗

Letara (Sapporo): ¥2.6bn / A$22.8m / US$16.2m (pre-Series A) Hokkaido University spinout building hybrid rocket engines that burn a plastic-based solid fuel stored apart from the oxidiser, so the propellant is not legally classified as an explosive. Smallest prototype fits in a palm. Led by Headline Asia, JIC Venture Growth Investments and Incubate Fund. (PR TIMES) ↗

Resilire (Tokyo): ¥1.73bn / A$15.2m / US$10.8m (Series B first close) Supply chain risk software that keeps mapping past tier 1, refreshing tier 2 and tier 3 supplier data so pharma, chemical and automotive manufacturers can see which sub-supplier an export control or a typhoon actually hits. DNX Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia. (PR TIMES) ↗

Also raised: recri (Tokyo) took ~¥400m for a subscription that fills unsold theatre and kabuki seats, with 110 partner organisations signed. AI Dock (Tokyo) took ~¥260m for full-body MRI plus bloodwork turned into an AI follow-up plan. @UnlimiTech (Tokyo) took ~¥180m for software that mines decades of factory quality records into executable rules, already at Kawasaki Heavy Industries and ENEOS Materials. Quantec (Machida) took ¥100m for laser process engineering. Advance Composite (Fuji), BiPSEE (Tokyo, cumulative now ¥990m), Trash Technologies (Tokyo) and SportsTech Japan (Tokyo) closed rounds at undisclosed amounts.

Takeaway: Letara’s engines use a plastic-based fuel stored apart from the oxidiser specifically so the propellant is not legally an explosive. That is a regulatory constraint solved at the design stage by people who knew the regulation cold. Domain knowledge is not colour, it is the product.

🇦🇺 Australia raises

Vessev (Auckland, NZ): A$27m / US$19m / ¥3.08bn (Series A plus follow-on) Fully electric hydrofoiling passenger ferries. The VS-9 running with Fullers360 has logged over 11,000 nautical miles since January 2025, and the 58-person Auckland yard is aiming at one hull every five weeks by 2027. Blackbird led. Named FlyTahoe on Lake Tahoe as its first US customer in the same announcement. (PR Newswire) ↗

Nbryo (Brisbane): A$10m / US$7.1m / ¥1.14bn (seed extension, taking the round to A$20m) In-vitro cattle embryo production that compresses roughly seven years of conventional selective breeding into about one week. Trials running across Australia, NZ and Europe. Queensland Government put in A$2m alongside the Gates Foundation, AgriZero, Tenacious Ventures, Mandalay Venture Partners and QIC. (Startup Daily) ↗ [Matt: Startup Daily’s URL slug misspells them as “Nybro”. Nbryo is correct, confirmed via SmartCompany, Mandalay Venture Partners and the Queensland Government statement.]

Neocrete (Auckland, NZ): A$4.9m / US$3.5m / ¥561m (pre-Series A, NZ$5.9m) D-Nano additive lets concrete producers swap 30 to 50% of their Portland cement for poor-quality fly ash and volcanic ash. A deployment with Readymix Brunei cut embodied carbon 25% and saved close to $20,000 on a single 3,700 cubic metre pour. Wavemaker led again, with Icehouse Ventures and Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health. (TechNode Global) ↗

Seitec (Canberra): A$4m / US$2.8m / ¥456m (early stage) Passive sensing hardware that detects and classifies activity in contested environments without emitting anything that gives away the operator’s own position. Founded in 2021 by Daniel Stevens, a former RAAF avionics technician with 20 years of service. ACTivate Capital put in A$1.5m, with Beaten Zone Venture Partners and UNSW. (Startup Daily) ↗

Also raised: Bower (Gold Coast) took A$2m pre-seed led by TEN13 for smart glasses that record what a scientist does and says at the bench and turn it into structured experiment records, already deployed at Mount Sinai in New York. Visaible (Sydney) took A$1m seed from Blacksheep Capital to track how individual hotels get described by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and then rewrite the source material the models are reading. Orivium (Melbourne) opened a A$30m Series B this week with Morgans as lead manager; the round is still open.

Takeaway: Seitec was founded by a RAAF avionics technician with 20 years in the job, and Nbryo is selling cattle genetics to beef producers. Both are people selling into the room they used to sit in.

🌏 Around the world

Gravis Robotics (Zurich, Switzerland): US$200m / A$281m / ¥32.1bn (Series A) ETH Zurich spinout whose Gravis Rack bolts onto excavators that already exist, Caterpillar, John Deere, JCB and Hitachi included, and makes them self-operating. Claims a 30% productivity gain over manual operation, with a US$8m UK contract to retrofit fleets. SoftBank led what is billed as the largest Series A ever in construction robotics. (SiliconANGLE) ↗

Callosum (London, UK): US$100m / A$141m / ¥16.0bn (seed, €85.4m) Tailored Inference routes AI workloads across different models and specialised silicon, with partnerships already signed with Cerebras and Korean chipmaker Rebellions. Founded in 2025 by neuroscientists Jascha Achterberg and Danyal Akarca. Atomico led, alongside Plural, DCVC and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, which had never made an investment before this one. (EU-Startups) ↗

Battery Smart (Gurugram, India): US$19.5m / A$27.4m / ¥3.13bn (Series C at US$430m post-money) Battery swapping network for electric two and three-wheelers. FY26 revenue rose 43.8% to Rs 358 crore while net loss narrowed 12.8%. Rising Tide Ventures led, with Ecosystem Integrity Fund and Blume Ventures. (Entrackr) ↗

xpander.ai (Israel): US$7.5m / A$10.5m / ¥1.2bn (seed) Founded in 2024 by three former AWS engineers. Its enterprise agent Omni scored 90.9% on the GAIA benchmark, and the platform deploys agents across different models and clouds without locking the buyer to one vendor. Pico Venture Partners led, with Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next and SeedIL. (Calcalist) ↗

Rillet (New York, US): US$100m / A$141m / ¥16.0bn (Series C at a US$1bn valuation) AI-native general ledger with 600+ customers and ARR that doubled in three months. CEO Nicolas Kopp says the round came together in under 48 hours while the company was not fundraising. Iconiq led, with a16z and Sequoia returning. (TechCrunch) ↗

Takeaway: Gravis raised the biggest round on this list for a bolt-on kit rather than a machine, and Callosum’s US$100m seed was the UK Sovereign AI Fund’s first cheque ever written. One US deal made the cut this week.

🌐 Global headlines

• Unitree closed up around 629% on its Shanghai debut, raising roughly US$904m at about RMB 444.9bn after retail demand oversubscribed the book about 8,000 times (China, 19 Aug). (Semafor) ↗
• Munich Re is buying cyber insurtech At-Bay for US$575m, picking up a book worth roughly 5% of the US cyber insurance market (Germany/US, 19 Aug). (Munich Re) ↗
• Brazil committed US$444m to national AI infrastructure and split it between vendors, including a ~US$250m supercomputing project with Huawei and iFlytek running alongside US-supplied builds (Brazil, 21 Aug). (Al Jazeera) ↗
• QpiAI opened an 8-inch quantum chip foundry in Bengaluru on about US$35m, currently fabricating flip-chip superconducting processors up to 128 qubits and aiming at 10,000-qubit QPUs (India, 17 Aug). (The Quantum Insider) ↗
• Fairphone shipped in the US for the first time, launching the Gen 6+ at US$649 unlocked with a 10/10 repairability score (Netherlands, 18 Aug). (TechCrunch) ↗

🛠️ Global tech on display

LandSpace (China) flew its Zhuque-3 rocket to orbit and then flew the first stage back and landed it on its legs in Minqin County, Gansu, about eight minutes after liftoff. The 76.6m, nine-engine methalox booster had put the Honghu 03 satellite in orbit first. Post-landing footage shows a fire burning in the aft section, which somehow makes it better.

No private Chinese company had recovered an orbital-class booster on land before, and Zhuque-3 did it on its second flight ever, after an abnormal combustion event ended the December 2025 attempt. (Spaceflight Now) ↗ | Watch the landing ↗

🧭 The bit nobody taught you

You know your industry. You have probably never had to find a customer. One thing a week on product, marketing or sales, for people who have done neither.

This week: build the bolt-on, not the machine.

SoftBank just led a US$200m Series A for Gravis Robotics, the largest ever in construction robotics. Gravis does not make excavators. They make a rack that bolts onto the Caterpillars, Deeres, JCBs and Hitachis already sitting on site, and makes them drive themselves. Thirty percent productivity gain, a US$8m UK retrofit contract, and not one machine built.

First-time founders coming out of an industry almost always do the opposite. They have twenty years of knowing exactly what is broken, so they design the replacement for the whole broken thing. Then it takes three years, and nobody wants to rip out the system they already trained forty staff on.

The bolt-on is easier to build, easier to sell, and it rides on a purchase decision someone already made. Ask yourself what tool everyone in your field already pays for and quietly complains about. Then work out what clips onto the side of it.

😂 Joke of the week

Why did the robot go to therapy?

Unresolved issues with its motherboard.

(Reader’s Digest) ↗

💭 Thought of the week

Yusuke’s line in the full Q&A is that translation is easy and earning local trust is the part nobody can shortcut. James Farmer had the same advantage from the other direction, sitting inside a university while building the thing universities needed. Being on the inside of a field is the one asset a first-time builder already owns and usually forgets to count.

Action: name the one person in your field who would take your call today and tell you the truth about an idea. If you cannot, there’s a challenge for the days left in August 🙂

📅 Upcoming sessions & events

Zepi Rooftop #14: Vacanti AI launch party

Monday 24 August, 5:30pm to 8:00pm, Sydney Polytechnic Institute, Haymarket Hands-on session building a profile from an existing resume and getting match scores against real Australian roles, then networking. This is the launch of the product Yusuke talks about in this issue’s profile. Register ↗

Entering Japan: what it really takes for founders and business owners

Wednesday 26 August, 7:30pm AEST, online.

Me and Tyson Batino , who has 15 years on the ground, JLPT N1 and 120+ businesses set up in the market. No pitch. We get into why products that win at home stall in Japan, GK vs KK vs branch office, the annual and minimum taxes nobody warns you about, what actually works in B2B versus B2C, and how to tell if you are ready.

Questions answered live. Register ↗

AI Salon Sydney: Building AI with Trust & Security

Thursday 27 August, 5:30pm, UTS Startups, Ultimo Geoff McGrath on IP ownership and employee use policies, Frank Yoo on AI-powered security, Tim Lea on verifying synthetic media. Currently showing a waitlist. Register ↗

Founder Fridays Sydney – September

Friday 4 September, 4:00pm, Stone & Chalk Tech Central, Haymarket. Free. This month’s guest is Adrian Bunter of Sydney Angels, who has been through 100+ transactions across raises, IPOs, acquisitions and spin-offs. Founders only, no service providers. Register ↗

James Farmer was lecturing at Deakin when he started Edublogs, and his own university told him off for encouraging staff to use blogs. Twenty-two years on he owns all of it, and nobody else owns any of it.

Know someone with fifteen years in an industry and an idea they keep not starting? Send them this.

PS – If you are working on anything exciting, happy to chat, offer pointers and introduce relevant people. DBS (don’t be shy) and reach out for a ☕️!

Cheers – Matt 🙃