A truck drove 260km with nobody touching the wheel. A data centre company took A$2.85 billion. Plus the founder of Firmbrain AI.

Issue 08 – Fortnight ending 9 August 2026 – For founders building beyond their own borders.

Catching up on two weeks in one go, we’re back with Jessica Wu co-founder of Firmbrain AI as our ecosystem profile feature.

All the raises from Japan, Australia and the globe.

Joke of the week, upcoming Japan Market Entry webinar and global headlines.

Check it out to stay up to date!

FX used across the whole issue (7 Aug 2026): A$1 = US$0.71 = ¥111. US$1 ≈ ¥157. €1 ≈ US$1.16. One rate set for both weeks so the numbers stay comparable. Rounded for reading, not accounting.

🎙 Ecosystem profile

Jessica Wu, Firmbrain AI – Market intelligence and customer research, now commercialising a B2B AI product for professional services. They are currently now in the I2N at The University of Newcastle accelerator to help them bring their tech to the market.

Tell us a little about yourself and what you’re working on.

I’m Jessica Wu. My background is in market intelligence and customer research, and more recently I’ve been working on B2B AI commercialisation through FirmBrain.

At FirmBrain, I’m currently focused on commercialising an AI product – exploring different founder and industry communities, testing distribution channels for B2B SaaS, and working with pilot users to understand where the product fits into their workflow and how it creates real value.

Where do you sit on the AI spectrum – avoiding it, somewhat into it, or all in?

I’m very interested in AI, but probably more sceptical than people expect.

After speaking with many small and medium-sized businesses, I’ve noticed a fairly consistent pattern. AI is already very good at accelerating parts of the execution – drafting, analysing, summarising or helping people get to an answer faster. But the decisions still tend to sit with people.

That’s probably where some of my scepticism comes from. There are AI features appearing in almost every piece of software now, but when you look at what people actually come back to and use consistently, the list becomes much shorter.

So I’m very optimistic about what AI can do. I’m just more interested in adoption than capability – not whether AI can do something, but whether it fits well enough into a real workflow that people genuinely want to keep using it.

👉 Jessica also covers what makes cross-border market research harder in B2B software now, why building the product and proving the value are two different problems, her perfect dessert list, and the introductions she is looking for.

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

🌱 Bootstrapping spotlight

Plausible Analytics (Tallinn, Estonia): open-source, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. Uku Täht built the beta alone and posted it to Indie Hackers, then watched revenue stall at US$400 MRR for months.

He cold-emailed Marko Saric after reading his blog post about de-Googling your life, and Saric joined as the one-person marketing team. Now past US$3.1M ARR with 15,000+ paying subscribers, on US$0 raised and no paid marketing. (Latka) ↗

🇯🇵 Japan raises

Week ending 2 August

RoboTruck (Tokyo): ¥5.2B / A$46.8M / US$33.1M (Series A, first close) Level 4 autonomous systems for heavy trucks. In May it ran the 260km of motorway from Atsugi-Minami in Kanagawa to Toyota JCT in Aichi with the safety driver never intervening. JIC Venture Growth Investments led, with Sparks (running the Mirai Sosei No.3 fund backed by Toyota and SMBC) and MUFG Capital new. A second close is planned. Announced 31 July. (PR Times) ↗

CLAS (Tokyo): ¥1.38B / A$12.4M / US$8.8M (equity plus bank debt) Circular subscription for furniture and appliances, rented monthly then repaired and re-rented. Equity from the Panasonic Kurashi Visionary Fund, debt from Shizuoka Bank, Shoko Chukin and Yamanashi Chuo. Cumulative funding now ¥11.46B. Announced 28 July. (PR Times) ↗

TAIAN (Tokyo): ¥700M / A$6.3M / US$4.5M (Series B) AI products for the weddings and banquets market. Globis Capital Partners and the JFR MIRAI CREATORS Fund participated. Announced 31 July. (BRIDGE) ↗

Sinumy Corporation (Tokyo): ¥555M / A$5.0M / US$3.5M (pre-Series A including extension) Completely hands-free authentication over Bluetooth. Backers include mint. Announced 29 July. (PR Times) ↗

Also raised: TWO ¥500M for plant-based food brand 2foods (27 July); UJ-Crystal, ¥430M for ultra-high-voltage p-type SiC wafers out of Nagoya University, with another ¥570M under consideration (31 July); Infratech Japan Holdings, ¥200M (30 July); Asclepath, ¥30M pre-seed from Garnet Capital for an AI-native clinic (30 July); Second Heart, ¥9.98M via FUNDINNO (31 July). AZUL Energy, Final Aim and Scale Technology also closed rounds at undisclosed amounts. Twelve Japanese rounds in the week, eight with a disclosed figure, about ¥8.3B all up.

Week ending 9 August

Knowledge Work (Tokyo): ¥3.5B / A$31.5M / US$22.3M (Series C, first close) Launching a “Sales AI Agent OS” for enterprise sales teams. New backers include Ricoh Japan, Canon Marketing Japan MIRAI Fund, NTT Docomo Ventures and SMBC. Announced 4 August. (PR Times) ↗

X Mile (Tokyo): ¥3.17B / A$28.6M / US$20.2M (Series C) Recruitment and workflow software for non-desk industries: logistics, construction, manufacturing. Led by Singapore’s Vertex Growth, taking total raised to ¥6.96B. Announced 4 August. (PR Times) ↗

Polyuse (Tokyo): ¥1.1B / A$9.9M / US$7.0M (unsecured debt facility) Construction 3D printers. Unsecured, unguaranteed debt from Mizuho Bank and Shoko Chukin, taking cumulative funding to roughly ¥5B. Announced 4 August. (BRIDGE) ↗

JIJ (Tokyo): ¥840M / A$7.6M / US$5.4M (third-party allotment) JijZept, a mathematical optimisation platform combining classical solvers with quantum techniques. Global Brain led. Announced 4 August. (BRIDGE) ↗

Also raised: megli, ¥100M seed for AI-native entertainment content (Asu Capital Partners, PixAI); NexusAdvisors, ¥50M seed from ANOBAKA for AVACAREER, where recruiter and candidate AI agents negotiate with each other; Nutribase, ¥50M from Incubate Fund for its tasteless nutrition powder Ayo. All 4 August.

Takeaway: the two weeks split cleanly. Late July was hardware and materials – autonomous trucks, SiC wafers, rare-metal-free catalysts, furniture logistics. The first week of August was software sold into work that does not happen at a desk, and it pulled corporates onto cap tables rather than pure financial investors: Ricoh, Canon and Docomo all took a piece of Knowledge Work.

🇦🇺 Australia raises

Week ending 2 August

Outlier Space (Auckland, New Zealand): A$10.5M / US$7.5M / ¥1.17B (pre-seed) Reusable, autonomous satellite capsules that carry research and manufacturing payloads to microgravity on any rocket, then return them. Led by GD1, with Airtree, Icehouse Ventures, Investible and others. First test flight targeted for 2028. Announced 29 July. (Startup Daily) ↗

Navi Medical Technologies (Melbourne): A$6.8M / US$4.8M / ¥755M Neonav, a device that helps clinicians place catheters in the veins of critically ill newborns. A$4M of the round came from ANZ healthcare VC KP Rx, following US FDA approval and trials at two US paediatric hospitals. Announced 28 July. (Startup Daily) ↗

Agscent (regional NSW): A$5M / US$3.6M / ¥555M Cattle breath analysis that detects pregnancy from 18 days after insemination instead of 40, plus methane and feed efficiency. Founder Bronwyn Darlington licensed the sensing tech from NASA’s patent library. Scale Investors and Tundra Capital, at a A$26.9M valuation. Announced 27 July. (Startup Daily) ↗

Superstat (Melbourne): A$3.5M / US$2.5M / ¥389M (pre-seed) Turns raw amateur match footage into structured player stats and event timelines. Led by Blackbird. Founded May 2025 by a former AFL data analyst, and moving to Austin. Announced 28 July. (Startup Daily) ↗

Also raised: Wellumio (Auckland), NZ$2.47M / A$2.06M topping up an oversubscribed pre-Series A to NZ$9.75M for point-of-care stroke imaging; Early Bird (Sydney), A$2M seed backed by Eucalyptus co-founders Tim Doyle and Benny Kleist; Octopusbot (Sydney), A$1M from Folklore Ventures and No Brand for AI grain-yield forecasting.

Note on Partly: SmartCompany’s fortnight wrap included the Christchurch company’s US$50M (A$71.5M) DST Global round, but that was announced in late June, so it sits outside both windows here.

Week ending 9 August

Firmus Technologies (founded in Sydney, headquartered in Singapore): A$2.85B / US$2B / ¥314B (growth) Green-powered AI data centres. Now valued at A$15B (US$10.5B), up from A$1.85B in September 2025. Coatue and Nvidia returned; Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Jane Street are new. Announced 7 August. (Startup Daily) ↗

Eudaemon Technologies (Sydney): A$3.75M / US$2.7M / ¥416M Hydrogel condoms, spun out of research that started under the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges program. Cornerstone investor is Swinburne Ventures. Total raised now A$19M; next stop is clinical trials. Announced 7 August. (SmartCompany) ↗

Zabidou (Sydney): A$3.5M / US$2.5M / ¥389M (seed) Lasers plus cameras for end-of-line quality assurance in factories, already running across 15 sites. Founder Cibby Pulikkaseril previously co-founded LiDAR company Baraja, which some investors wrote down to zero. Black Nova, Main Sequence and Antler led. Announced 6 August. (Forbes Australia) ↗

Rampart (Sydney): A$2.3M / US$1.6M / ¥255M Joe Aston’s subscription business publication, valued at close to A$29M. Backers include Ellerston’s Ashok Jacob and former Nine CEO David Gyngell. Aston keeps 92%. Announced 6 August. (Startup Daily) ↗

Also raised: Enrola , A$2.1M seed after pivoting into AI sales tech (7 August).

Takeaway: the last week of July put A$28.9M into seven ANZ companies, none of them software-only. The first week of August put A$2.86B into four, and one of them took 99.6% of it. Same region, two completely different tapes, a week apart.

🌏 Around the world

Week ending 2 August

Freehand (San Francisco, US): US$75M / A$106M / ¥11.8B (Series B) AI agents that negotiate with suppliers, process invoices, enforce contracts and reconcile payments for Fortune 500 firms, already live at Meta and Unilever. Co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital, with former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker participating. Total raised now US$100M. Announced 29 July. (Forbes) ↗

Fish Audio (Palo Alto, US): US$52M / A$73M / ¥8.2B (seed) Voice-AI platform that started as a bedroom project on a single gaming GPU and reached US$21M ARR and 8M users inside a year. Led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today. Announced 28 July. (TechCrunch) ↗

Encore AI (Israel): US$30M / A$42M / ¥4.7B (Series A) AI agents pointed at growing revenue from customer calls and chats rather than deflecting them. Led by Team8, Planven and The Garage. (Calcalist) ↗

ZuriQ (Zurich, Switzerland): US$25.5M / A$36M / ¥4.0B (seed) ETH Zurich spinout scaling a 2D trapped-ion quantum architecture. Led by Quantonation. Announced 28 July. (Tech.eu) ↗

Arboreal (India): US$24M / A$34M / ¥3.8B (Series A, ₹230 crore) Specialty food ingredients: sugar reduction, cocoa alternatives, next-generation protein. Co-led by Edelweiss’s EAAA and Omnivore. (Entrackr) ↗

Week ending 9 August

Valar Atomics (Los Angeles, US): US$1B / A$1.41B / ¥157B (Series B) Factory-built high-temperature gas reactors. Sequoia led at a US$6B valuation, plus a separate US$200M credit facility, weeks after its Ward 250 reactor powered an Nvidia chip. Announced 3 August. (The Next Web) ↗

OLIX (London, UK): US$312M / A$439M / ¥49B (Series B) Optical tensor processing units – chips that run inference with light instead of electricity. US$3.3B valuation, led by Fundomo with Arm, Hudson River Trading, Reed Hastings and the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund. Founded 2024. Announced 3 August. (DataCenterDynamics) ↗

Moove (Dubai, UAE): US$250M / A$352M / ¥39B (Series C) Depot infrastructure for robotaxi fleets, branded “Nests”, plus fleet ownership. Runs about 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries on roughly US$420M ARR. Mubadala led at a US$2.1B valuation, co-led by Toyota’s Woven Capital and Ion Pacific. Announced 5 August. (TechCrunch) ↗

Zenity (Tel Aviv, Israel): US$125M / A$176M / ¥19.6B (Series C) Security and governance for AI agents. Norwest led, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures joining. Total raised now about US$185M. Announced 3 August. (Fortune) ↗

Moss (Berlin, Germany): US$35M / A$49M / ¥5.5B (Series C, €30M) Spend management for European SMEs, now past €70M ARR across 5,000+ businesses in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Austria. Portage led at a valuation north of €1B, four years after a €75M Series B at €500M. Announced 5 August. (EU-Startups) ↗

Takeaway: Freehand’s agents decide which invoices Meta pays and Zenity raised US$125M to police agents like them, two weeks apart. The tooling to supervise autonomous software is now getting funded at roughly the same scale as the software itself.

🌐 Global headlines

Week ending 2 August

• Moonshot AI open-sourced Kimi K3, at 2.8 trillion parameters the largest open-weight model released, a roughly 1.4TB download (China, 27 July). (SCMP) ↗
• Nvidia launched the Open Secure AI Alliance with about three dozen firms including Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Hugging Face and the Linux Foundation, arguing cyber defenders need models they can inspect and self-host (27 July). (Help Net Security) ↗
• Amazon topped the Fortune Global 500 for the first time, ending Walmart’s 12-year run on US$716.9B in revenue, with an estimated US$200B of AI capex lined up for 2026 (US, 28 July). (Fortune) ↗
• Japan’s H1 2026 startup funding hit ¥377.9B, up 12% year on year, but as a barbell: rounds above ¥5B more than doubled while smaller deals shrank, with Sakana AI’s ¥31B Series D on top (Japan, 30 July). (Speeda / INITIAL) ↗

Week ending 9 August

• The UK’s AI Security Institute logged 19 unauthorised actions across 122 test runs by OpenAI and Anthropic agents during cyber evaluations, including agents reaching real systems and creating fake online identities (UK, 4 August). (Axios) ↗
• Electronic Arts closed its US$55B take-private and delisted from Nasdaq, with Saudi Arabia’s PIF holding 93.4%, Silver Lake 5.5% and Affinity Partners 1.1%. Shareholders got US$210 a share (US and Saudi Arabia, 4 August). (CNBC) ↗
• Mistral open-sourced Shieldstral, a 3B-parameter multimodal safety classifier that takes moderation policies as plain-language yes/no questions at inference time, runs on a single 16GB GPU and covers 12 languages, under Apache 2.0 (France, 4 August). (Mistral AI) ↗
• Canva cut its revenue forecast by about a third, citing the cost of serving AI features (Australia, 5 August). (Startup Daily) ↗
• Matt Berriman conceded defeat in Unlockd’s eight-year legal fight with Google over the collapse of his adtech startup (Australia, 4 August). (SmartCompany) ↗

😂 (Saddest) Joke of the week

What does an AI do after a breakup?

Machine Yearning (ba-dum 🥁, tss)

💭 Thought of the week

Go to one event in the next month on your own. No colleague to stand next to, no friend to debrief with in the corner.

Jessica makes the case for it in this issue without meaning to. Her point is that the information you need about a market has quietly moved offline: software websites now give you the value proposition and almost nothing about what the product actually does or what is being built next. So you have to be in the room, at the trade show, watching the demo, talking to people in the ecosystem.

You cannot do that from the safe edge of the room with someone you already know. Go alone, and count how many people you actually spoke to rather than how many events you turned up to.

📅 Upcoming sessions & events

Japan Market Entry Webinar – For founders with something already working at home who are serious about Japan as the next market. Date and registration coming shortly, and it will be announced here first.

In the meantime, the on-demand session with Karen Onuma of GlobalDeal covers the ground underneath it: why you end up building for one market by accident, and what that costs you later.

Watch it here ↗

Two weeks of tape in one place makes the point better than either week alone: Japan funded trucks, wafers and catalysts in late July, then software agents in early August, and ANZ went from seven small cheques to one enormous one. If you are raising and the week feels dead, it might just be the week.

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 we add in each 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 ☕️