the june cap table report
the month the RBA sat on its hands, a femtech finally got paid, and agentic ai checkout went live in australia
Hi divas🤍
It’s EOFY, tax time, the pointy end of the financial year. Quiet on top, busy underneath: rates held, confidence slipped, the headline raises looked huge, and the real action was in the small cheques. Fluff-free as always: what happened, what it means, and the so what for your money, time and energy.
a quick EOFY confession, because you need to hear it
I spent two days processing expenses and I want you to learn from my pain. I put through $22k of reimbursements I’d let pile up since February. Twenty-two thousand dollars, sitting in a company account instead of mine, earning me precisely nothing. Imagine that in a high-interest account or an ETF the whole time, quietly compounding, instead of decomposing in a folder of receipts because I couldn’t be bothered.
Three tax-time nudges. I’m not an accountant and this is a big-sister yell, not financial advice:
→ Claim expenses monthly, not yearly. Money parked in someone else’s account isn’t working for you.
→ If you run a business, the $20k instant asset write-off is permanent from 1 July, so a considered purchase is worth a chat with your accountant.
→ Book that accountant now. Their July is carnage, the good ones find deductions you never will, and they pay for themselves.
The math is the math: idle money is a decision, usually an accidental one. Right. On to June.
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01 - THE MACRO
→ The RBA held the cash rate at 4.35%, its first pause this year after three rises in a row. The cash rate is the dial the Reserve Bank turns to make borrowing cheaper or dearer. A breath, not a turn back down.
→ The twist the headlines missed: reported inflation eased to 4%, but mostly because the petrol discount pulled fuel down. The measure the RBA actually watches, underlying inflation (which strips out volatile stuff like fuel), kept climbing to 3.6%, its highest since late 2024. The number that decides your mortgage is the quiet one, and it’s still going the wrong way. Translation: another rate rise in August is still on the table.
→ Consumer confidence fell to 80.6, a fourth drop this year, with households rating their finances 7.5% worse than a year ago. People are nervous and buying less.
→ Three things change on 1 July: the $20k instant asset write-off becomes permanent for sub-$10m businesses; the fuel-excise relief halves (32c to 16c a litre, about $11 more per tank, then gone by August); and a world-first law bans Coles and Woolworths from gouging on groceries, policed by the ACCC.
→ So what: money is expensive, underlying inflation is still rising, and customers are scared. If you’re building, grow without burning cash. If you’re backing or advising, favour the ones who can. Either way, make the runway (the months of money a business has left) stretch.
Over to you: does the permanent write-off change anything for you, or is it a headline that lands as nothing on the ground? Tell me in the comments.
02 - THE MARKETS
A quick read on the big markets, because they set the mood your customers shop in.
→ Housing The national home value index posted zero growth in May, its first stall of the cycle, with auction clearances near 50%. Perth, Darwin and Brisbane are still throwing a party; Sydney and Melbourne have gone home early, down 2.1% and 3.2% from their late-2025 peaks. The budget’s proposed cuts to property-investor tax breaks could thin the crowd further.
→ Commodities (the raw stuff we dig up and sell). In Westpac’s June read, gold slipped 2.5% on higher global rates, copper jumped 5.6%, and iron ore ticked up 1%. Oil eased as the US-Iran standoff looked to settle, which should finally take some heat out of petrol and inflation.
→ Retail The twist: even with confidence in the gutter, discretionary spending (the nice-to-haves) actually rose 2.1% in May, led by clothes, cafes and travel. But that's one sale-driven month in a cautious year, Deloitte tips discretionary growth to crawl from 2.5% last year to 0.7% this year. Shoppers are out, but only when there's a deal.
→ ETFs (baskets of shares you buy in one trade, now how most people invest). The local market is on track to pass $400B this year, with over $5B flowing in a month. The every girl is quietly becoming an investor, one automated transfer at a time, buying the whole market instead of picking winners.
→ So what: the average customer’s house has stopped climbing, her petrol relief is fading, and her savings compound in the background. Wealth feels flat and cautious. That’s the mood the whole market is selling into, so value and trust beat hype.
03 - THE CHEQUE-IN
June’s money came shaped like a barbell: heavy at both ends, thin in the middle. A few enormous late rounds, a pile of tiny first cheques, little in between.
→ At the top: Airwallex raised US$320M at a US$11B valuation, up 37%, and Everlab took a $65M Series A for preventive health, with Pat Cummins on the cap table (the list of everyone who owns a slice). The cricket captain. No notes.
→ The spread underneath was wide: QuantX Labs ($7M, defence quantum clocks), DataMasque ($5.6M, realistic fake data so AI can train without exposing real customers), New Energy Transport ($5M, electric trucks), Flyweel ($2.41M, the money layer under ad spend), SavvyWise ($1.56M, AI for Australian tax), and Oscorp ($1.3M, AI robots pulling fire-risk batteries out of recycling).
→ Little guys, big backers: two Queensland teams off to Y Combinator at $700k each, Alloovium (construction AI) and Gutgutgoose (personalised probiotics), plus grassroots-sports teamwear platform Nardo ($1M, with Socceroo Tim Cahill on board).
→ One to watch: Nitrosend’s $700k seed, the Adelaide AI email platform from the Hartley brothers, who sent six billion emails at their last company before selling it. Second-time founders, back in the ring.
📊 Venture capital raised by Australian startups, 2019 to 2026 On track for ~$4.3B if the year holds this pace ($1.8B banked, ~$2.5B more expected). Up on 2025’s $2.9B, still well below the 2021 $6B peak. Source: Dealroom.co, updated 18 Jun 2026.
→ So what: the big funds are piling back into the safe, late rounds, which leaves the early-stage gap wide open. Early is where a community like ours makes the most difference, whether you’re building one of these, backing one, or cheering one on.
04 - THE GIRLS WHO ARE BUILDING
All-women founding teams still get about 2% of the country’s venture capital.
Two. Percent.
→ Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks, Ovum. $4M seed after tripling her valuation, led by Admiralty Capital with Antler, Giant Leap, Brisbane Angels and the Alice Anderson Fund. She started it after doctors dismissed her own chronic migraines, and has built the first dataset that tracks women’s health over time: 60,000+ health insights, 113,000+ AI conversations, and partners already signed in Medibank, Fernwood, Sweat and Menopause Friendly Australia. Lived experience, real data, real distribution.
→ The fix to track: Minderoo put up to $8M into Startmate to back women, where 43% of companies have a female co-founder versus 24% across the industry. That’s what moving the number looks like.
→ So what: she gets backed at the start or not at all. If that 2% ever moves, it’s because someone wrote the cheque early, not five rounds later once she’s “proven” and twice the price.
05 - THE MARKETING NOTES
Reaching customers split into two lanes this month: the free kind and the paid kind.
→ Earned (attention you don’t pay for): the creator economy took centre stage at Cannes Lions in June, 250+ creators on the ground with their own official track. The quiet admission from brands: they lean on creators because they can’t make enough good content themselves, and creators can. At home it’s heading past $1B this year. The shift that matters: from one-off gifting to ongoing partnerships, and from big names to micro-creators (10k to 100k followers) who convert because their audience trusts them.
→ Paid: retail media is advertising you buy inside a retailer’s stores, app or site. News Australia’s Suddenly launched one and signed BWS, 300+ in-store screens. Woolworths and Coles had this to themselves; now News Corp wants in, which means more ad space and higher costs to be seen.
→ So what: if you’re a founder with little cash, a few micro-creators in a real relationship beat one pricey celebrity post, and beat renting shelf space before you have loyal customers. Earn attention first. Pay for it once the maths works.
06 - THE AI CORNER
Two things to actually know from June.
→ Where the money goes: applied AI beats general AI. Every June raise solved one specific, painful job, Everlab on preventive health, Ovum on women’s health data, DataMasque on safe training data, Oscorp on battery fires. Nobody got funded for vague “AI for everything.” Whether you’re building, backing or betting your career on a sector, that’s the test: one real problem, solved better than a human can.
→ Where the customer goes: agentic checkout went live here, a first for our region. Agentic just means an AI that can act for you, like finding a product and buying it. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol launched in Australia on 17 June with THE ICONIC, Adore Beauty, Bunnings, Kogan and Petbarn, feeding product and price data straight into Google so people buy inside Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail without visiting the shop. The clever part: THE ICONIC stays the “retailer of record,” keeping the customer and the loyalty. It gave up the storefront, not the relationship.
→ So what: discovery is shifting from “rank on Google” to “be readable by the AI.” If a product’s data isn’t formatted for an AI to understand and recommend, it gets skipped at the moment someone’s ready to buy. If that’s your product, or one you back or advise, get the data AI-ready now, while it’s still an edge.
07 - THE MONTH IN ONE LINE
Expensive money, a flat housing market, a barbell of raises, a femtech that finally got paid, a 2% problem, and an AI doing the checkout. None of it gets fixed by the funds alone. It gets fixed in rooms like this, where the people who build, back, buy and consume actually talk.
See you in the chat 🤍 Brooke x
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