March in venture was absolute chaos.

AI is accelerating faster than anyone predicted.
Markets are reacting in real time.
Australia’s startup ecosystem just had one of its biggest months in years.

A few things that stood out 👇

🇦🇺 Local wins:

• UpGuard raised $105M
• Fluent Commerce secured $46M
• Affinda doubled to a $220M valuation
• Advanced Navigation became Australia’s latest unicorn
• $250M raised to fund growth-stage tech loans

But the market is anything but linear.

📉 Techstars Sydney shuts down
📉 Major CEO shake-ups
📉 Tech stocks getting hit hard
📈 Stripe up to $159B
📈 Canva still holding at $60B

And then AI…

OpenAI raises one of the biggest private rounds in history.

Anthropic goes from $1B ARR to $19B in just 14 months and is now opening in Sydney.

This is no longer “what’s next”.

This is what’s happening right now.

Meanwhile Canva keeps quietly compounding:

• $4B+ annualised revenue
• 265M monthly active users
• 24B AI tool uses
• 2 fresh acquisitions

March didn’t just move fast.

It changed the tempo.

Gavin and Tobi unpack it all in this month’s venture vlog.

The pace is wild.
The opportunities are bigger.
The gap between builders and watchers is widening.

.

SHOW LINKS

Connect With Gavin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinappel/ 

Connect With Tobi:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiskovron/ 

Show Links:

https://www.ignitionlane.com/ 

https://cubes.co/