Four Australian startups have raised a combined total of more than $73 million across hospitality technology, climate tech, digital health, and maternal care this week.
May has been a notable month for Australian founders chasing capital, with four rounds closing across sectors as different as café ordering systems and maternal health wearables. Taken together, they tell a story about where investor confidence is sitting and which problems are attracting serious money.
Hospitality gets its infrastructure moment
The largest round of the month belongs to Ordermentum, the Sydney-based platform that connects food and beverage suppliers with venues across Australia. The company raised $55 million from Five V Capital, a private equity and venture firm managing more than $3.3 billion in assets, at a valuation above $150 million. The deal followed a competitive global process run by investment bank Barrenjoey and included a secondary component allowing earlier investors to partially exit.
The capital will fund AI-focused product development, new hires, and targeted acquisitions. The company has already been embedding AI tools into its platform, including demand forecasting, automated reordering, and product recommendations for venue operators.
Cooling AI’s thirst
While Ordermentum’s round was the headline, a smaller raise from a Sydney climate tech company addressed one of the less visible problems created by AI’s rapid growth.
Enaxiom, founded in 2023 by Bijan Rahimi and Tia Collings, raised $1.8 million in seed funding to deploy its data centre cooling and water efficiency system, Hydrocool. The round was led by Epic Angels, a Singapore-based all-female investment collective, with support from BlackNova and Antler. The company has now raised $2.7 million in total.
AI data centres are among the most water-intensive industrial facilities in operation. Enaxiom’s system targets the heat rejection layer of the cooling stack, working alongside modern liquid cooling technologies including direct-to-chip and immersion cooling. It uses non-potable water, including wastewater streams, and is designed to recover high-quality water as a by-product.
The company’s technology is based on a decade of prior research and is protected by a patent. The seed capital will fund commercial deployment of Hydrocool, expanded headcount, and accelerated entry into the US market.
A funding gap hiding in plain sight
ANDHealth, which describes itself as Australia’s digital and connected health commercialisation engine, this week awarded $9 million in funding to five startups through its ANDHealth+ acceleration program: Australis Scientific (NSW), Corcillum (SA), Earflo (WA), Kraken Coding (NSW) and More Good Days (VIC). The program received a record 65% increase in applications compared to the previous four cohorts.
The funding announcement was accompanied by new data from ANDHealth’s FY2026 Industry Sentiment Survey that painted a stark picture of the sector’s funding environment. The digital and connected health industry in Australia has grown at a 55% compound annual growth rate since 2018 and is projected to surpass $45 billion by 2033, according to ANDHealth. Yet despite that trajectory, 86% of digital health SMEs surveyed cited access to capital as one of their top five challenges, up 26 percentage points from 60% in ANDHealth’s FY2023 survey.
Monitoring what matters most
Oli, a Sydney-based medical device company developing a wireless wearable that monitors maternal and foetal signals, raised $6.5 million in a Series A3 round. The round was backed by Scale Investors, Clare Ventures, and the University of Sydney. It follows a $1.8 million Series A2 in 2024 and a $4.7 million Series A in 2022. Oli has now raised $13 million in private capital alongside more than $9.5 million in non-dilutive grants.
The funding will support the completion of pivotal clinical trials running across seven sites in Australia and the United States, regulatory submissions with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the US Food and Drug Administration, and the establishment of local manufacturing operations.
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