melbourne
(14)
The Agency That Made Time Its Best Pitch
AMPR sells attention, but its real product is continuity - the patient, unglamorous work that keeps brands culturally legible long after the launch party ends.
The SEO Agency That Put a Bandicoot on the Balance Sheet
Optimising protects million-page migrations, teaches restaurant chains to win the search for dinner, and gives one percent of revenue to the planet. Its wager is that technical discipline and a conscience can occupy the same spreadsheet.
Ten betting brands. One Amused Group.
Behind Bet Nation, BetDeluxe and eight other Australian wagering brands sits a Melbourne company with its own technology arm. Its bigger bet is on the people and software that can keep the whole portfolio moving.
Easygo built the casino. Then it built the crowd.
The Melbourne company behind Stake and KICK is joining gambling, livestreaming and game development under one roof. Its most useful lessons begin where the first version stopped working.
The Startup That Put a Number on Your Steak
For a century, beef and lamb have been graded by a person squinting at a carcass. MEQ Solutions built the hardware and AI to give the industry a number it can trust - and got the USDA to sign off.
King Kong Put Its Money Where the Marketing Metrics Are
The Melbourne agency built its pitch around a nerve-rattling promise: improve a qualified client’s results by 30 percent within 90 days, or keep working for free. Behind the swagger is a tightly engineered business of funnels, media buying, conversion work and sales education.
Treasury Wine Estates
The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
Atisama Therapeutics
Atisama Therapeutics (formerly Rage Bio) is a Melbourne-based clinical-stage biotech developing precision splice-switching oligonucleotide (SSO) therapies for chronic inflammatory disease. Its lead asset, RB042, is an inhaled RNA drug that targets the RAGE receptor to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) - a condition affecting hundreds of millions worldwide with few disease-modifying options. Spun out of a collaboration between IP Group Australia, Monash, Murdoch and the University of Western Australia, the company raised a $29M Series A in 2025 and advanced RB042 into Phase 1 clinical trials in 2026.
Andromeda Robotics
Andromeda Robotics is a Melbourne-founded, San Francisco-based robotics company building Abi, a colourful humanoid companion robot designed to reduce loneliness in aged care and assisted living. Abi holds conversations in more than 90 languages, remembers residents across visits, and runs group activities, working alongside care teams rather than replacing them. Founded in 2022 by Grace Brown, the company deploys Abi to care homes on a subscription basis and raised a $23M Series A in September 2025 led by Forerunner.
Zetaris
Zetaris is an Australian enterprise data company building an open, agentic data lakehouse that lets organizations query and prepare data across many disparate sources without moving or copying it. Founded in 2013 in Melbourne by Vinay Samuel and Jason Jaesung Jun, the platform uses federated, in-place querying with intelligent multi-engine routing (Spark, Trino, Presto, DuckDB) and a unified semantic layer to feed private, governed AI workloads. It positions itself as a control plane for enterprise AI rather than another business-intelligence tool.
Matthew Elsley
Matthew Elsley is co-founder and CEO of QSIC, an AI-driven in-store audio and retail media platform used by 7-Eleven, McDonald's, Coles Express and other chains across three continents. Founded in Melbourne in 2012 with schoolfriend Nick Larkins, QSIC bootstrapped for years before raising a $4M Series A from Carthona Capital and a $25M Series B led by Hedosophia in January 2025. Elsley relocated to Dallas to run North American growth as QSIC rolled out Gulp Radio to 12,000 7-Eleven, Speedway and Stripes stores.
Andrew Lacy
Andrew Lacy is the Founder and CEO of Prenuvo, the company making proactive whole-body MRI scanning a mainstream healthcare tool. A Melbourne-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Tapulous - the mobile gaming company behind Tap Tap Revenge, acquired by Disney in 2010 - before pivoting to healthcare. At Prenuvo, he has raised $177M in total funding (including a $120M Series B in 2024), grown the company to 110,000+ members across 17 North American clinics, and secured FDA clearance for AI-powered body composition analysis, with plans to expand into Europe and Australia.
Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott is the CEO of 1Breadcrumb (now rebranded as Breadcrumb), a construction safety and compliance platform replacing paper-based site workflows with real-time digital systems. With over 25 years of leadership across health tech, government tech, and construction technology, Elliott has guided 1Breadcrumb from a Melbourne startup to a global platform trusted by 300,000+ site workers across Australia, the UK, and North America. In 2024 he relocated to San Francisco to lead the company's US push, and in 2025 he orchestrated the acquisition of rival SignOnSite to create the dominant construction safety platform in the ANZ market. He is also an active angel investor with Melbourne Angels.
Brian Park
Brian Park is the CEO of Skillest, the world's leading remote sports coaching marketplace that connects athletes with elite coaches through asynchronous video analysis. A Silicon Valley veteran who was the 95th employee at Yahoo and co-founder of Yahoo! Messenger, Park pivoted to sports tech to democratize access to elite coaching - putting a world-class coach in every athlete's pocket. Under his leadership, Skillest has grown to 600+ coaches, 200,000+ golfers, and secured partnerships with Stephen Curry's UNDERRATED Golf and Arccos Golf, becoming the digital coaching standard in golf and expanding across multiple sports.