The National Reconstruction Fund has $15B to deploy. Until this year it had never done a venture debt deal. The first one went to a Brisbane drone company.
The product
Emesent’s Hovermap is a laser-scanning unit that lets drones fly themselves through underground mines, tunnels and collapsed spaces where there is no GPS. It builds detailed 3D maps of places people can’t safely go.
The traction
Hovermap is used at more than 200 mine sites worldwide, with BHP, Rio Tinto and Glencore among its customers. Emesent spun out of the CSIRO in 2018.
The defence angle
The same tech is moving into defence reconnaissance, where GPS gets jammed on purpose. Emesent says the US Army selected Hovermap as one of six winners in its Soldier Readiness Enhancement program.
The money
- $15M SAFE note from Main Sequence, New York’s Orion Resource Partners, QIC, NGS Super and Hostplus
- $10M in venture debt from the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, its first
- Funds go to product development, the Cortex AI platform and expanding manufacturing at Wacol in Brisbane
- A team of 109, with about 20 new roles planned
My read
Everyone is chasing software. The hardest moats get built where software can’t even get a signal: underground, off grid, GPS denied. Australia keeps producing serious companies in the unglamorous physical frontier, and this is another one.