Innovation

Backed by US$120 million in venture funding, Stanford professor Christina Smolke’s company Antheia just completed its first scaled production of a key drug ingredient. 

Chef Neil Perry tasted food-tech startup Nourish Ingredients’ first product – a vegan animal fat made with precision fermentation – unveiled at SXSW Sydney yesterday.

Two of the four Big Four banks have adopted ConnectID, a new digital identity solution created by Australia Payments Plus (AP+), as Australia moves to prevent fraud and identity theft.

New import bans have sent retailers scrambling to prove their supply chains are free from cotton originating from places like China’s Xinjiang region — or else risk millions in seized merchandise. 

Australia’s preeminent tech executive sat down with Forbes Australia on the first day of SXSW Sydney, and didn’t hold back on the nation’s opportunity to lead in key sectors globally. Robyn Denholm is the Chair of the Tesla Motors board as well as the Australian Tech Council, and a partner in Australia’s leading VC firm Blackbird Ventures.

Gibran Huzaifah bred fish to pay his university fees, then built eFishery into a company involving 300,000 fishponds. He’s expanding to India and elsewhere.

The deal concludes over a year of negotiations between Microsoft and regulators in the U.S. and U.K.

Atlassian—the team collaboration software company cofounded by Mike Cannon-Brookes—said Thursday it has agreed to buy video messaging platform Loom for $975 million, betting more work will be done remotely in the future.

OLEG VORNIK, a Russian kid from New Zealand, took American start-up DroneShield to Australia to make anti-drone defence systems that are now used all over the world, including the conflict in Ukraine.  

Aussie gaming web3 startup Immutable, last valued at $2.5 billion, has joined Amazon Web Services to accelerate the onboarding of game studios to web3, it says.