July Tech Round-Up - Bumper Travel Tech Edition
Animation by Grok
Dear reader,
This month, we’re proud to be sponsoring WiT, Asia Pacific's leading Travel Tech gathering, as it comes to Queenstown, New Zealand. On 20 and 21 July, over 300 delegates and more than 60 chief executives from multiple countries will convene under the theme 'Innovation at the World's Edge.' This is arguably the most consequential group of travel techies ever assembled in this part of the world.
We’ve also written two essays worth your time. The first, ‘Be famous for something’, explains why an alpine town of 50,000 is betting its next twenty years on becoming the Southern Hemisphere's home of Travel Tech. The second, 'Travel is a cockroach', draws on 76 years and 19 crises to show that travel demand is almost impossible to kill, even when the companies serving it are not.
Enjoy!
Original Thinking From North Ridge Partners
Stunning Queenstown in New Zealand has long had a single-dimensional economy, with tourism as its anchor. We’re trying to do something about that by helping to build a technology industry there, starting with Travel Tech. Read about the town’s ambitions: Be famous for something.
Travel has survived wars, oil shocks, terrorism, recessions, pandemics and repeated predictions of its demise. We’ve analysed travel for the past 75 years to show how demand just keeps building, even in the face of profound disruption. Read how travel is the ultimate survivor - resilient, and almost impossible to kill: Travel is a cockroach.
Short On Time? Hit Play
Our quartet of AI hosts - Jimmy Gemini, Harry Hormuz, Penny Pandemic and Margot Meltdown - reveal how 75 years of crises impact travel, capital, valuations and the future of Travel Tech.
Click here or on the banner below to listen. Enjoy.
Techtonic Shifts
How do the IPOs for the two giant frontier models - OpenAI and Anthropic - compare?
Meta fires a huge shot in AI’s API price war, coming in at a quarter of the cost of rivals.
Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM, but nobody’s buying it, either. IBM shares plummet 25% in a single day.
Asia Pacific Tech News
Fast fashion giant Shein looks set for an IPO in Hong Kong.
The Aussies are overwhelmingly Anthropic’s heaviest users. Who’d have thunk?
Hot chips! AI boom fuels a huge surge in Chinese chip exports.
Software & AI
Hits and Misses: Proving that reports of software’s demise are greatly exaggerated, Oracle reports record Q4 revenues +21%, as Adobe reports record Q2 revenues +13%, and an upgrade.
Launch Codes: Days after the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX agrees to acquire Cursor-maker Anysphere in a $60bn all-stock deal, the largest takeover of a VC-backed startup ever, folding the ~$4bn-ARR coding platform into its xAI division to play catch-up.
A Cautionary Fable: Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5, its most powerful publicly available model, Uncle Sam forces it offline, then access is restored. The most aggressive government intervention yet in a commercial AI deployment.
Playing With Fire: The Jeff Bezos-led physical AI startup Prometheus raises a $12bn Series B at a $41bn valuation to build an "artificial general engineer" for industrial design, with JPMorgan and BlackRock, not traditional VCs, leading the round.
Aerospace & Defence Tech
Hits and Misses: AeroVironment reports FY26 revenues +141% following its BlueHalo acquisition, Babcock reports revenues +8% and Thales upgrades.
Northern exposure: Australia lands A$2.5bn radar export. Canada acquires JORN-derived over-the-horizon radar technology to monitor the Arctic, in Australia's largest-ever defence export.
Bat signal: Australia's MQ-28 flies with allies. The Australian-developed Ghost Bat becomes the first collaborative combat aircraft integrated into a multinational joint-force exercise, flying alongside US and coalition aircraft at Valiant Shield in the Pacific.
Deep pockets: Thales dives for Exail. Thales agrees to acquire Exail at a €3.9bn enterprise value, outbidding Safran to add maritime robotics and inertial navigation to its underwater-warfare portfolio.
Fintech
Hits and Misses: Proving that Fintech is in good shape, Klarna reports Q1 revenues +44%, Chime reports Q1 revenues +25%, and Tiger Brokers reports Q1 revenues +26%.
Size matters: Nuvei buys Payoneer to stop playing second fiddle. $2.75bn deal creates a $3bn revenue platform processing $500bn+ across 190 countries, bringing together licences in China and India, two of the hardest payments markets in the world to enter.
Full stack, full speed: Airwallex at $11bn and accelerating. Airwallex raises $320m in Series H funding at an $11bn valuation, up 38% in six months on 74% revenue growth.
Big Tech meets India stack: CRED's founder is now Meta's answer. Meta invests $900m in India's CRED at a $4.5bn valuation and installs its founder Kunal Shah as global WhatsApp head. Meta has spent years trying to crack payments in India.
Travel Tech
Hits and Misses: Crisis? What crisis? Trip.com reports Q1 revenues +17%, MakeMyTrip reports revenues +6.7% and crosses US$1bn in full-year revenues for the first time.
AI may book the flight. First, it will search 199,999 times. Agentic search threatens to overwhelm airline and distribution systems with vast volumes of costly, low-converting queries. The bots are browsing. The airlines are footing the bill.
Visa checks into travel and reaches for the margin: moving beyond payments into travel distribution, with partners, guides and experiences across 10 destinations. Following the money further up the booking funnel.
Mews is checking out 15% of its workforce. The hospitality software company is cutting about 170 roles as AI reshapes its economics and pushes it from software into hotel operations. Let’s hope a software company knows something about hotels.
Stuff We Found Interesting
Clash of the Titans. Two of the tech sector’s giants - Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk - have traced remarkably similar trajectories, and a collision seems inevitable.
The good news, when it comes to the cost of AI, is that the vendors and service providers are as clueless as you are. The bad news is the same as the good news.
Palantir chief: “Something has gone completely wrong with how AI is sold.”
Tech Investment Banking Across Asia Pacific
Deep specialists in Travel Tech | Software & AI | Aerospace & Defence | Fintech
Singapore · Australia · New Zealand
200 bankers in 17 markets with GP Bullhound
Contact us here.
© North Ridge Partners 2026
Contact us here.
© North Ridge Partners 2026
Singapore, Australia, New Zealand
Like this newsletter? Join the thousands of tech founders, board members and investors who subscribe to Tech Round-Up. Monthly and free - sign up below!