Startup investment OG analysis company Techboard has gone to the dark side of startup funding in Australia and discovered a literal goldmine.
The WA startup data firm’s recently released report: Unannounced investments in Australian Startup and Tech Companies 2025 suggests that only a third of Australian startup investment is revealed publicly, with more than 750 unannounced investments going unreported.
Techboard has been collecting data on Australian startups since 2015 and building a national funding dataset for since mid-2017.
Founder and CEO Peter van Bruchem said they estimated 1100 Australian startup and tech companies received external investment in 2025, while the publicly announced deals featured 379 raises by 361 companies, collectively worth $5.2 billion. The challenge, he said, is that the size of the investments remains unknown.
“I find it quite interesting that the trends visible from analysing possible unannounced investments do not directly match the trends we see from looking at announced deals. It actually appears likely that the unannounced investments may tell a very different story,” vam Bruchem said.
“I suspect that these differences are due to a number of factors such as actual or perceived newsworthiness of capital raises considering their size, valuation or sector the company operates in. The level of publicity may also be linked to a founders’ access or perceived access to journalists or press coverage.
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“It must also be said that companies are not always interested in getting coverage of capital raising activities and sometimes they have an active desire to keep a raise out of the public domain.”
While Startup Daily does its best to cover all raises, including it a weekly wrap up in partnership with sister publication SmartCompany, called Cheque in, many remain unreported, and sometimes, it can take months, or even years, before funding is revealed.
ASIC insights
In a bid to create a better picture of overall investment activity Techboard began analysing filings with the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) cross-referencing it with announced deal data in the context of share issuances.
Techboard has tracked more than 8300 companies and initially tested the theory with the fintech sector.
van Bruchem said they realised th share issuance data can provide some probative value and they’re not looking to acquire additional ASIC data to confirm unannounced investments, the size of each investment, the valuation and details of unannounced investors.
“Until we have the full investment data service operational we are working on a service to provide access to our share issuance data which underlies this report so that our customers can see which companies are showing signs that they have raised capital,” he said.
They looked at share issuance data over the eight years from 2018 to 2025, and identified 3547
companies with possible investments. In total, 1021 or 29% of that figure had previously announced investments, with 2526 (71%) having no investment announcement.
Quantum of transparency
van Bruchem’s report found “marked differences between activity levels by category” between announced and possible unannounced investments.
“For example, the primary category that led with announced deals was AI companies with 165 announced investments compared to 79 announced Medtech investments,” the report says.
“When we look at possible unannounced investments we identified an additional 274 for AI companies, compared to 302 for Medtech, indicating that a higher proportion of AI investments appear to be announced, or that there is a higher level of investment transparency for AI investment compared to Medtech.
“In our primary categories AI companies had the highest rate of investment transparency (the proportion of
possible investments that were announced) at 38%.”
van Bruchem suspects that fintechs have the lowest transparency level with only 15% of all possible investments being announced.
The categories with the highest levels of investment transparency were space and satellites with 39%, legaltech with 44%, robotics with 43% and quantum with 83% of possible investments being announced.
You can download the full report here.
