We may only be a couple of weeks into January, but the Australian startup funding tap is already starting to trickle.
This week saw $25.85 million raised across startups in deceased estate management and fitness spaces, while we also report on an exclusive raise by an AI security platform.
EstateXchange: $12.5 million
A startup addressing the challenges of deceased estate management, co-founded by childhood friends, has banked $12.5 million in its first raise.
Backing EstateXchange are Macquarie Capital, OIF Ventures, and billionaire Paul Little’s family office, with business exec Carol Schwartz and Pier 12 Capital chair Christine Christian also on board as angel investors.
The online platform digitises deceased estate management services for professional services firms dealing with executor administration, such as document sharing and verification.
It connects lawyers, accountants and trustees with financial institutions, insurers, and others holding estate assets or providing services, such as a telecommunications company or share registry, offering the afterlife version of a data room, to save estate managers from the duplication of having to submit the same forms repeatedly to different organisations.
Read more on Startup Daily.
Hapana: $7.25 million
A software platform used by gyms and fitness studios globally to manage memberships has raised $7.25 million.
The round for Hapana, founded in 2014, was led by veteran Sydney asset manager Microequities, with follow-on investment from OIF Ventures.
OIF backed Hapana’s 2024’s $17 million raise alongside ASX-listed Bailador Technologies.
Hapana’s platform is a white-label CRM solution for membership payments, retention and loyalty for fitness brands.
Founder and CEO Jarron Aizen said the funding will support the next generation of the platform with AI-powered tools, expand its global team and support growth in key international markets.
“Our customers aren’t just growing; they’re scaling at a pace that demands a total rethink of fitness tech,” he said.
Read more on Startup Daily.
Dam Secure: $6.1 million
AI security startup Dam Secure has raised $6.1 million in seed funding to tackle the security risks created by AI-generated code entering production at scale, with the round led by Washington DC-based cybersecurity and AI investor Paladin Capital Group.
The oversubscribed round also attracted backing from Secure Code Warrior CEO Pieter Danhieux, RecordPoint CEO Anthony Woodward, Innovation Bay founder Phaedon Stough and Tyro Payments chief product officer Steen Andersson. Paladin Capital managing director Mourad Yesayan will join the company’s board.
The raise comes as enterprises rapidly roll out AI coding assistants, accelerating software output while introducing new classes of security risk that existing tools struggle to catch.
Founded by former Zip Co and Secure Code Warrior executives Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff, Dam Secure is building an AI-native application security platform designed to catch “logic gaps” in code. These are logic flaws where code functions correctly but fails basic security expectations, which Dam Secure says traditional code scanners often miss.
Collins, who is also the company’s CEO, told SmartCompany exclusively that enterprises are “rushing to adopt AI to increase developer velocity”, but existing application security tools are struggling to keep pace.
“Existing security tools generate too much noise to work effectively in this new environment,” he said.
Unlike traditional scanners that look for known vulnerability patterns, Dam Secure allows organisations to define security requirements in plain English and automatically enforces those rules across large codebases during development. The company positions itself as complementary to existing application security tooling, focusing on logic-level flaws rather than known vulnerability signatures.
As an example, Collins pointed to a logic flaw disclosed in Volkswagen’s connected car APIs in May 2025, where the absence of rate limiting on a four-digit access code enabled brute-force attacks and exposure of vehicle location data.
“Dam Secure would have simply prevented this by automatically enforcing the logical rule: ‘All authentication endpoints must implement rate limiting,’” Collins said, blocking the flawed code in the developer’s IDE before it shipped.
Under the hood, the platform builds what the company calls a proprietary “Security Knowledge Graph” for each codebase, mapping relationships, data flows and logic paths across the entire system. This allows the platform to reason about how code behaves in context, rather than scanning individual files in isolation.
The platform currently supports Java, C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python and Go, and acts as a security wrapper around AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude and Cursor, regardless of the underlying model.
Dam Secure is currently deployed with six major technology organisations on a private, invite-only basis, running alongside existing application security tools rather than replacing them. Collins said early results show false positives below 10%, comparing this with industry averages, which he says are around 50%, by catching logic errors earlier in the development lifecycle.
The funding will be used to grow Dam Secure’s Australian R&D team to 13 people and build a US-based sales and marketing presence as the company prepares for a broader commercial rollout in 2026.
- This story first appeared on SmartCompany. You can read the original here.
