hello and welcome back to The Exchange’s weekend report. If you’re reading this on australiabusinessblog.com and want to get the letter in your inbox, head here.

Your regular host Anna Heim is off this week for a well-deserved vacation, so I’m stepping back into my old role as a newsletter writer. Honestly, it’s nice to write this note, so thank you for having me.

Today we take a look at the good news from the venture market we covered this week, but with an added global perspective. We’re broadening our lens a bit to get more general numbers to better understand whether the good news from the United States holds up elsewhere. Call it a look abroad in honor of Anna. To work! — Alex

The good

In the United States, venture capital activity is holding up better than we expected. That is good. Perhaps even better, enterprise interest in software startup looks downright robust. That’s important because most startups are software companies; if software startups are healthy, the tech startups are generally doing well. And given the great influence of the United States on startups in general, then startups everywhere should be good, right?