TRO | Cardinia Ventures Backed Chronosphere Acquired for US$3.3b

Your Meliora briefing on how GenAI and Creativity are unlocking a brighter, smarter future.

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Meliora Company
November 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Subscribe | 24th November, 2025

In this fast-moving GenAI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. Cardinia Ventures Backed Chronosphere Acquired for US$3.3b

Palo Alto Networks will acquire Chronosphere for $3.3b, marking one of the biggest observability deals in recent years. Chronosphere - backed by Australia’s Cardinia Ventures - has developed observability software that helps engineering teams spot problems quickly and keep cloud applications running.

Here’s why this matters: As AI scales, complexity scales with it. Chronosphere’s exit is a sign that observability has moved from developer tooling to essential infrastructure as demand for compute grows. Clive Dickens, International Managing Partner of Meliora, was an early investor [via Cardinia Ventures] in the business and this acquisition is proof of a core belief of ours: the next wave of value won’t just come from building intelligence, but from building the systems that keep that intelligence understandable, visible and under control. Congratulations to Rob, Martin & the Chronosphere team.

2. iHeart Radio Launches AI Short Form Videos

This week iHeartRadio has launched Highlights, an AI-driven short-video layer inside its app (powered by Genuin), letting listeners watch shareable clips of their favourite shows and podcasts, seamlessly integrated into the listening experience.

Here’s why this matters: Short-form video is becoming an introductory point for discovery of new audio offerings. This news builds on patterns we have seen over the past few weeks, with Spotify adding Clips and last week’s news on Disney+ exploring UGC short form video. It’s clear that GenAI is enabling short-form video as the universal discovery layer for - well, everything! Whilst short-form video for audio businesses is nothing new, it’s only recently that we’re beginning to see it embedded as part of the product experience rather than an off-platform companion. With GenAI removing many production bottlenecks, we’ll be watching with interest to see which media company is next to launch an innovative short-form video strategy next.

3. Google Ramps Up Agentic Retail For Christmas

Google has launched a suite of AI shopping tools for the holiday season, including conversational queries in AI Mode, real-time store calls through “Let Google Call,” and an agentic checkout that can monitor price drops and complete purchases via Google Pay. An integration with Shopify as part of the first wave means we expect this to rapidly gain momentum.

Here’s why this matters: It’s a big opportunity for normalising agentic commerce as we move into the holiday season. Organisations like Google and OpenAI are focussed on trying to reduce friction in agentic commerce to increase consumer trust and therefore usage habits. For retail leaders, the implication is clear: the next frontier isn’t just visibility, it’s integration - and it’s critical to get ahead of this tectonic shift in the future of online purchasing behaviour earlier rather than later - because habits created this holiday season will last through 2026 and beyond.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

This week we’ve been going deep on agentic AI in the lead up to the holiday season and can recommend this great report by Bain & Company on the impacts of agentic commerce. The report gives great insight into how agentic agents are already impacting online commerce, and how retail leaders should think about their customer journey in this new era of shopping behaviour.

Our team has been using Tellet.ai to conduct a number of research interviews over the last few weeks as part of an exciting project for one of our Growth Partners. Tellet is a GenAI app that enables customer research - however the key is that your research participants can reply to research questions in voice notes- making research participation low friction and seamless, as well as much faster and more comfortable. We have had great feedback from our research participants and it’s been simple and easy to use. A big tick from us.

This week, along with Gemini 3, we’ve been road-testing Nano Banana Pro. For those playing along with image generation at home, Nano Banana Pro is significantly better than previous models at generating text in images - as well as adding hyper-context. Finally we’re getting somewhere with a GenAI image generation model that is a primed for real world use!

The Story of Omny Studio’s Podcast Pivot

It’s Melbourne, 2011. Three founders have a big idea: personalised radio. And whilst they're busy trying to solve that particular problem, they'll build something else entirely. With thanks to our Strategic Partner 18Sixty, this week we bring you The Story of Omny Studio’s Podcast Pivot.

Meliora Associate Spotlight

Brendan Collogan - Australia

Brendan Collogan has a wealth of commercial experience in digital products and content strategy, along with a profound understanding of content economics and commercialisation.

Anthony Abbott - Greece

Anthony is a strategic and outcomes-driven product leader with over 20 years of international business experience in the media and entertainment sector, specialising in digital audio and streaming.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.