Canberra-born startup Liquid Instruments will set up an office in Melbourne and hire “dozens” of employees in Victoria, following a $15 million investment from Breakthrough Victoria.
The government-backed venture fund revealed details of the investment on Wednesday, weeks after its funding was cut by $360 million over four years in the state’s 2024-25 budget.
Liquid Instruments was founded in 2014 by a team of physicists and engineers at the Australian National University (ANU), including co-founder and CEO professor Daniel Shaddock, who previously worked as an engineer at NASA’s jet propulsion lab.
Shaddock created measurement technology for gravitational waves while at NASA, and later teamed up with 11 co-founders at ANU to apply the technology to the development of reconfigurable, precision test and measurement instruments.
Whereas traditional test and measurement devices used by engineers, scientists and students are costly, inflexible and designed for single tasks, the devices created by Liquid Instruments can be reconfigured using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and a software platform.
This means that the company’s devices can provide access to up to 14 different instruments via a single device, including tools such as oscilloscopes and lock-in amplifiers.
The company now lists its headquarters as San Diego, California, and prior to the investment from Breakthrough Victoria, had reportedly raised more than $50 million in external funding.
This includes a $28.5 million raise in September 2022, which was led by Acorn Capital, and $12 million in 2019, in a round led by US-based Anzu Partners.
On Wednesday, Breakthrough Victoria said its investment in the company will support its “continued innovation and expansion, particularly in Victoria, fostering technological advancement and creating new job opportunities”.
Liquid Instruments has already been manufacturing products with Victorian partners, and it expects to expand on those partnerships in coming years as it establishes a local presence and hires staff in Melbourne.
It also plans to offer its internship program to undergraduate and graduate students at Victorian universities.
Professor Shaddock said the company is excited to expand into Victoria.
“This investment will allow us to strengthen and grow our manufacturing partnerships in Australia and forge new collaborations with researchers from world-class institutions at the forefront of technology development, including the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, Swinburne University of Technology and Monash University,” he said in a statement provided to SmartCompany.
Breakthrough Victoria CEO Grant Dooley said the $15 million investment “will be felt across various levels of the state’s innovation sector”.
“From stronger manufacturing capability in Victoria to cost-effective lab solutions for researchers, engineers, and students in a single piece of hardware,” he added in the same statement.
Liquid Instruments will join a steadily growing portfolio of local and international companies to receive investment from Breakthrough Victoria since its launch in 2020, including Neo-Bionica, World View, RayGen, Eden Brew and Zena Sport.
The fund, which has invested more than $300 million since it was established, has faced increased scrutiny in recent months, including questions around the transparency of its investments and its operating expenses.
SmartCompany understands the fund’s operating expenses — less a $25 million grant payable for the Jumar bio-incubator and investment-related expenses such as technical due diligence reports and valuations — amounted to $16.1 million in the 2022-23 financial year.
For the 28 months through to June 2023, the fund’s operating costs, less grant payments and investment-related expenses, came to $25.4 million. This figure includes staff costs, consultancies, insurances, IT, communications and Victorian Auditor-General’s fees.
This article was updated at 4.15pm on Wednesday, June 19, 2024, to clarify figures related to Breakthrough Victoria’s operating expenses.
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Eloise is an experienced business journalist and editor, who has held senior editorial roles at SmartCompany since 2014. Prior to joining SmartCompany, Eloise was news editor at Books+Publishing, the trade press for the Australian book industry. Eloise has degrees in media and communications, marketing and business management, and political science. You can follow her on LinkedIn, and Twitter at @ellykeating.
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