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Christopher Sampson and the apple that needed no introduction
A frustrating checkout helped Christopher Sampson find a problem worth solving. Building Tiliter taught the engineer how much else has to work before a good idea reaches the shopping aisle.
Marcel Herz and the problem with an avocado
He went to Australia without a career plan. A few years later, Marcel Herz was teaching supermarket cameras to recognise produce - and discovering how much business hides inside a small, everyday problem.
Misha Cajic and the business of filling in the blanks
Before he co-founded Avarni, Misha Cajic built airports for people who flew on their computers. Now the former Atlassian product manager is helping businesses see the emissions hidden in their everyday paperwork.
Dr Aengus Tran and the education of a builder
Before Harrison.ai, there was a student ticketing app, a family steeped in mathematics, and a teenager learning to call Sydney home. Aengus Tran’s story is about turning an ability to code into an ability to build with other people.
Evan Wong
Evan Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Checkbox, a legal AI company he started in Sydney in 2016 and now runs from New York. Checkbox builds an AI 'legal front door' that lets in-house legal teams intake, triage and automate routine work through a no-code, drag-and-drop platform. A serial entrepreneur who launched his first company at 17, Wong studied Commerce and Law at UNSW, was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2019, and in early 2026 raised a US$23M Series A that valued Checkbox at roughly US$100M. His customers include large enterprises such as PepsiCo, SAP, Telstra and Woolworths.
Gurinder Nagra
Gurinder Nagra is the founder and CEO of Furno Materials, a South San Francisco climate-tech company building the world's first modular, energy-efficient cement plant. Born in India, raised in rural Griffith, Australia, and trained as a geoscientist at UNSW and Stanford, he traded a boyhood cricket dream for a fight against cement's outsized carbon footprint. Furno's compact kilns use oxyfuel combustion to make ASTM-certified cement at lower cost and far lower emissions; in 2024 the company's cement tested at twice the ASTM strength standard, closed an oversubscribed $6.5M seed round, and Nagra landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
John Lai
John Lai is a Taiwanese-Australian entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of MixerBox, a Palo Alto-based AI super-apps company backed by Y Combinator. A former competitive programmer who won the Australian Championship and a silver medal at the ICPC world finals, Lai parlayed his University of New South Wales computer engineering degree (with First Class Honours and the University Medal) and a Harvard master's degree into building MixerBox in 2012. The company's portfolio of daily-essential mobile apps has surpassed 300 million downloads worldwide, and MixerBox became the largest developer in the ChatGPT Plugin Store by plugin count. Investors include Y Combinator, Adam D'Angelo (Facebook's first CTO, Quora CEO), and Paul Buchheit (Gmail creator).