sydney
(37)
Eugene Varricchio and the business of being believed
From the retail shop floor to Franki’s video recommendations, Eugene Varricchio has kept asking how customers decide whom to trust. Now back in Australia as CEO of Brands & Marks, he is bringing that question home.
Brent Pearson and the button that became a business
His first idea met a chorus of “buts.” Brent Pearson listened, built Enboarder around the part people wanted, and spent the next decade asking what it takes to make someone feel welcome.
UNSW Founders makes the first startup mistake cheaper
A university can teach you to build something. UNSW Founders adds the awkward questions, the prototype tools and the people who might help you turn it into a business.
Lorikeet wants your missing card to be its problem
The Australian AI company is selling support that can finish the job. Its revealing test is what happens when a customer needs more than a beautifully worded answer.
Fishburners Built a Founder Community. Then It Needed a Rescue.
For 15 years, Fishburners helped Australian founders find their people. Its 2026 rescue asks a harder question: how do you pay for the place that makes those connections possible?
Prezzee lets you give the gift. They pick the present.
The Sydney company turned the forgotten gift card into a digital choice of shops. Now the same idea powers employee rewards, customer incentives and a push into payments.
Kaushik Sen Learned to Market Risk by First Building the Systems Behind It
Before he sold a cybersecurity story, Kaushik Sen wrote software, designed systems for banks and helped build a superannuation startup. That unusual route explains why his marketing starts with the machinery, not the megaphone.
The Challenger Optus Couldn't Beat - So It Bought Instead
amaysim spent a decade undercutting Australia's big telcos with no-contract SIM plans and a name that promised things stay amazingly simple. In 2021 the network it rode on paid A$250 million to own it.
The 137-Year-Old Care Company Building a Home for Every Stage of Ageing
Montefiore began with one communal home in 1889. Today it is trying to solve a more modern problem: how to let people change the level of support they receive without losing the routines, relationships and dignity that make life feel like their own.
Atlassian
Two Sydney graduates put $10,000 on credit cards in 2002 and built the software that runs the world's software teams. Today Atlassian's Jira, Confluence, and AI teammate Rovo power more than 300,000 companies - without ever relying on a traditional sales force.
Bell Resources
Bell Resources is building AI-powered Roadside Hubs that fold ultra-fast EV charging, automated car washing, clean energy and smart retail into a single connected stop.
Before You Buy
Independent property reports and services from a vetted panel of experts.
Audience Republic
Unleash your event's full potential with our all-in-one audience CRM and marketing platform.
Atomi
Atomi is a Sydney-based edtech company that runs an online teaching and learning platform for high school. It pairs short, curriculum-aligned videos with interactive quizzes, AI-driven revision recommendations and real-time analytics, serving students, teachers and schools across Australia and the UK. Founded in 2013 as HSC Hub by Rob Barakat and Thomas O'Donahoo, the company now reaches over a million students and teachers and covers hundreds of subjects across all high school year levels.
Adaca
Adaca is a Sydney-founded software consultancy that builds custom software, embeds senior engineers inside client teams, and helps businesses put AI to work. With over 100 full-time engineers across Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Manila, the firm pairs Australian and New Zealand delivery leads with engineering scale in the Philippines. It offers staff augmentation, managed teams, AI-augmented development, and a staged 'Crawl, Walk, Run' approach to AI adoption, plus Lovelace, its own AI-powered coding assistant.
Evans Electric Pty Ltd
Evans Electric Pty Ltd is a Sydney-based electric machine developer founded by Paul Evans that designs high torque density axial flux induction motors, integrated eAxles, silicon-carbide motor controllers and electromechanical actuation systems for electric vehicles, aerospace propulsion, heavy equipment and industrial platforms. Its patented double-stator, single-rotor axial air-gap architecture aims to deliver the same performance as conventional motors in roughly a third of the volume.
Fortisphere
Fortisphere is a Sydney-based AI transformation, operations and advisory firm founded in 2024 by former Commvault support leader Eugene Trautwein. It helps businesses turn AI ambition into practical results through advisory, benchmarking, workflow redesign, automation and fractional operating leadership, and runs an innovation lab that incubates its own SaaS products - starting with ResumeUplift.com, a tool that helps jobseekers beat AI resume filters.
Manettas Seafood Market
Manettas Seafood Market is a Sydney-based online seafood market that delivers market-fresh fish, shellfish and gourmet groceries to homes and businesses across Australia. Founded in 2016 by third-generation fishmonger Peter Manettas, the company pairs a consumer-facing (B2C/D2C) online fish market with ShoreTrade, a B2B digital trading platform that connects fishers and wholesalers along the seafood supply chain. It sources traceable seafood from producers around the country and offers next-day delivery, chef recipes and specialist cold-chain packaging.
Morse Micro
Morse Micro is a fabless semiconductor company based in Sydney, Australia, that designs Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah) chips for the Internet of Things. Its sub-1 GHz system-on-chips deliver roughly ten times the range of conventional Wi-Fi at a fraction of the power, letting a single access point connect thousands of sensors, cameras and devices across homes, factories, farms and cities. Founded in 2016 by Wi-Fi chip designers Michael De Nil and Andrew Terry, the company has raised more than US$190 million and ships its award-winning MM6108 and second-generation MM8108 silicon to customers worldwide.
mx51
mx51 is a Sydney-based fintech that provides a bank-grade, cloud-native Payment-as-a-Service platform. Spun out of Assembly Payments in 2020, it gives banks, acquirers and payment providers white-label, multi-channel payment infrastructure - in-store terminal software, merchant and support dashboards, analytics and 150+ point-of-sale integrations - so they can serve merchants without building the technology themselves. Its customers include Commonwealth Bank and Westpac, and the platform has processed billions of dollars in transactions across the Asia-Pacific region.
MyPass Global
MyPass Global is an Australian B2B SaaS company that runs a worker-owned digital Skills Passport and compliance platform for highly regulated, high-risk industries such as mining, oil and gas, energy and construction. Workers store verified qualifications, licences, medicals and background checks in one place and grant employers permission to view them, while site owners and contractors get real-time visibility of workforce compliance. Founded by Matt Smith and headquartered in Perth and Sydney, the platform serves more than 1,500 organisations and over 160,000 verified workers, and raised a A$7.5M Series A led by OneVentures in February 2025 to expand across the Americas.
Hello Molly
Hello Molly is an Australian online women's fashion retailer founded in Sydney in 2012 by university graduate Echo Liu. It sells trend-led, affordable dresses, occasionwear, swimwear, tops, bottoms, rompers, shoes and accessories directly to a global, mostly Gen-Z and millennial audience, releasing over 100 new styles a week. Built on data-driven trend-spotting, in-house design and heavy use of social media and influencer marketing, the company grew from a A$50,000 loan into a business exceeding A$100 million in annual revenue, with roughly half of sales coming from the United States.
Liam McKessar
Liam McKessar is a fashion and lifestyle brand marketer who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at ANINE BING, the Los Angeles-based, Scandinavian-inspired label. An Australian who studied economics at the University of Sydney before crossing into fashion media, he has built brand and communications strategy for Vogue, Diane von Furstenberg, LoveShackFancy and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. He is known for blending editorial instinct with a commercial, omnichannel mindset - the kind of marketer who cares as much about how a customer is greeted in a fitting room as about the campaign that got them through the door.
OpenAgent
OpenAgent is a Sydney-based proptech company that helps Australians choose the right real estate agent to sell their home. Founded in 2013 by former McKinsey consultants Zoe Pointon and Marta Higuera, it analyses every property sale in Australia and pairs that data with human consultants to give sellers a free, personalised shortlist of local agents. The service is free for homeowners and monetises through referral fees paid by agents on successful sales, and it also runs free consumer tools such as OpenEstimates, property reports and suburb profiles used by more than two million visitors a year.
Syenta
Syenta is an Australian deep-tech semiconductor company building next-generation chip-to-chip interconnects for the AI era. Spun out of the Australian National University, it has developed a proprietary process called Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) that deposits and patterns metal in a single step, producing micron-scale interconnects across large packages with fewer process steps. The technology targets the 'memory wall' that limits AI and high-performance computing, aiming to raise interconnect density and bandwidth while cutting manufacturing cost and waste. Headquartered in Sydney with a new development facility in Tempe, Arizona, Syenta has raised more than A$37 million, with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining its board.
Tiliter
Tiliter is a Sydney-based computer-vision company that turns ordinary camera images into structured operational data. It began by solving product recognition at retail scale - identifying fresh produce and unbarcoded goods at self-checkout with high accuracy and no stickers - and has since expanded into a broader platform of AI 'Vision Agents' for verification, inspection, counting, damage detection, OCR and cleanliness auditing across retail, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and industrial operations.
upcover
upcover is a Sydney-based insurtech turning slow, paperwork-heavy commercial insurance into an instant, digital experience for Australian small businesses, startups and scaleups. Its platform lets a business get a quote by answering as few as two questions, buy cover, receive a certificate of currency instantly and even finance the premium in one click. Through insurance APIs and white-labelled journeys, upcover also lets other brands and platforms embed business insurance directly into their own products. Founded in 2019 and led by co-founder and CEO Skye Theodorou, the company works with around 40 insurers and serves roughly 60,000 businesses.
VentureCrowd
VentureCrowd is one of Australia's original equity crowdfunding platforms, launched in Sydney in 2013 out of alternative investment manager Artesian. It lets everyday and wholesale investors put money - from as little as A$250 - into early-stage startups, property developments and impact-focused ventures that were once the preserve of institutional venture capital. Led by co-founder and CEO Steve Maarbani, a former PwC partner and corporate lawyer, the platform has channelled over A$300 million into private companies, construction projects and sidecar funds, positioning itself as a bridge between the Australian 'crowd' and high-growth private markets.
Liam Millward
Liam Millward is the co-founder and CEO of Instant, a Sydney-based ecommerce retention-marketing platform he started at 17 with CTO William Gao. Instant helps online brands recover abandoned carts, re-engage shoppers and lift revenue through AI-driven email, SMS and audience tools. By his early twenties the company worked with hundreds of brands, drove tens of millions in incremental revenue, and raised an $18 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures at a roughly $100 million valuation, backed by Blackbird, TEN13 and Reinventure. Millward is known for a relentless focus on profit and execution speed.
Michaela Wessels
Michaela Wessels is the CEO and co-founder of Style Arcade, a Sydney-born retail analytics platform that has become the intelligence layer behind fashion brands including The Iconic, Princess Polly, White Fox, Aje, Christopher Esber and Dion Lee. A former merchandise planner at Truworths, Lacoste and The Iconic, she built the product she had wanted while buried under Excel; the company raised an $8M Series A led by Acadian Software in late 2022 and has since expanded to New York and London.