australian-founder
(11)
Michael Dorrell and the things the future cannot do without
A move to New York put Michael Dorrell inside a small infrastructure team before Wall Street crowded in. At Stonepeak, he has built a career around the pipes, ports and connections that keep other people’s ambitions moving.
Kevin Gosschalk Changed the Question the Internet Asks
A game designer looked at the web's ugliest security ritual and saw an economic contest. A decade later, Kevin Gosschalk is asking what happens when the helpful shopper and the thief arrive wearing the same machine-made face.
Glen McDermott Learned Branding at Bicycle Speed
From Canberra retail floors to roads across 38 countries, the Red Rock founder built a creative practice around a patient idea: see people clearly, choose a point of view, and make the work matter.
John Goleby Quit University, Shipped Dozens of Duds, and Found a $22 Million Question
Before the funding round, the global offices and the AI platform, there were QUiT T-shirts, a sugar-packet patent and dozens of products that went nowhere. John Goleby’s useful habit was learning which idea to leave behind.
Holly Fowler Built the Social App the Swipe Era Forgot
A lockdown idea, two years of midnight work and one unusually specific product thesis carried Holly Fowler from a Melbourne couch to a Times Square billboard.
Sid Powell Put Wall Street Credit Onchain - Then the Market Made Him Rewrite the Terms
A banker built a faster credit market, watched crypto expose its weakest assumptions, and returned with a more cautious machine. Sid Powell's Maple story is a lesson in what survives when finance meets software.
Matthew Parry Put a Familiar Snack in a Better Can
The Australian marketer did not invent the canister chip. He noticed what families still wanted from it, rebuilt the proposition around simpler ingredients, and spent a decade earning shelf space one retailer at a time.
Todd Sullivan
Todd Sullivan is the CEO and co-founder of Humoniq (YC S25), an AI-native business process outsourcing company that uses voice and text AI agents to run customer support and back-office operations for airlines, airports, OTAs and travel management companies. An Australian software engineer turned repeat founder, he previously co-founded Flightfox (YC S12), a human-powered flight-search marketplace he grew to roughly $22M in annual revenue, and before that Globetrooper, a social travel platform he sold in 2011. He is rebuilding the travel support layer he spent a decade running by hand, this time with AI.
Steve Bisset
Steve Bisset is an Australian-born engineer and serial founder who has built two companies four decades apart in two different industries. In the 1970s he left an 18-month stint at Intel - where his first assignment was finding the first working 8080 chip in a tray of parts - to start Megatest out of his bedroom with $10,000 of vested stock and a housemate from Caltech. Megatest grew into a semiconductor test equipment company, survived the 1985 industry collapse that cut it from 450 people to about 200, listed on NASDAQ in 1993, and was acquired by Teradyne in 1995 for $245 million. In 2009 he co-founded Terrajoule, now Terrajoule Energy Inc. in Palo Alto, on a deliberately unfashionable premise: pair concentrated solar heat with pressurised hot-water storage and a reciprocating steam engine, a machine nobody had manufactured commercially since the 1950s. Terrajoule raised an $11.5 million Series A in 2013 led by New Enterprise Associates with Air Liquide, and Bisset continues to pursue low-cost dispatchable solar as an alternative to PV-plus-battery, with work extending into India.
Tullie Murrell
Tullie Murrell is the CEO and co-founder of Shaped, a New York startup building a real-time retrieval engine for search, feeds, and agents. Before Shaped, Murrell spent about five years at Facebook AI Research, where he created PyTorchVideo, the leading open-source library for video understanding, and was an early core contributor to PyTorch Lightning, a training framework now used by millions of developers. The video models he led powered Facebook newsfeed ranking and Instagram Reels. In 2021 he left big-tech research to package that same personalization machinery into a self-serve product for companies without armies of ML engineers. Shaped went through Y Combinator's W22 batch and raised an $8M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in July 2024.
Dugal Bain-Kim
Dugal Bain-Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Lifeforce, a clinically integrated health optimization platform he launched in February 2022 with Tony Robbins, Dr. Peter Diamandis and Joel Jackson. An Australian-born finance and healthcare operator who went from BlackRock and Cambridge to telehealth, he built Lifeforce after his own fragmented hunt for answers about his changing body at 38. The company tests 40+ biomarkers via at-home blood draws and pairs the data with clinicians, coaching and supplements, on a stated mission to extend healthy lifespan for five million people by 2030.