
20 Australian Startups to Watch

Over the last couple of months, I've been researching our ever growing eco-system.
I looked at funding, product fit and then connected up with the founders to uncover some of the most exciting. No messing around, let’s get straight into it;
SYDNEY

Veromo
Veromo is a platform to get your business off to the ground by streamlining and automating most of the setup process of starting a business. Veromo was born through creating a positive solution to counter a frustrating experience faced by Founder’s Luscheyne Mellon and Andy Giles when setting up their first business together.
While the world had become more connected the process for starting a business was still fragmented. Veromo have now created an affordable self-serve platform that helps new business owners start their business in a fraction of the time. Their first round of funding circa $935k helped to get their MVP to market.
They’ve just kicked off a new cap raise Series A, seeking further investment to progress their product ecosystem. From here Luscheyne and Andy have their sights set on providing a fully integrated, one-stop digital solution for SMEs to launch a business from anywhere in the world.
Sprout Stack
Sprout Stack is revolutionising how fresh produce is grown and distributed, without compromising the environment. The Sprout Stack team have achieved this by using vertical hydroponics in a highly controlled environment called the Sprout Stack Farm; a modular, location agnostic and highly automated hydroponic farm.
They are built using insulated shipping containers, which allows us to precisely control the environment inside. This results in year-round, chemical free, locally grown fresh produce. Founders Francisco Caffarena & Michael Harder have built 3 fully functional Farms, with their own IoT automation system, that will enter production progressively over the coming months.
Already Sprout Stack are supplying fresh produce to local restaurants and shops in Sydney’s North Shore. They are also in conversations to appoint their first third party operators and planning expansion to other cities in Australia.
Uno Home Loans
Uno Home Loans is the first platform to help you search, compare and settle a home loan all in one place with as much or as little help as you need from a team of experts. Uno imagines a world where people can connect their bank accounts, upload some documents and in a matter of seconds are presented with the best options for their current and future needs, with complete visibility to everything on offer.
Founder Vincent Turner has over 15 years experience as a fintech entrepreneur. His first company, Pisces, built mortgage software used by over 90% of Australian banks, processing $50bn/year in mortgages. His latest venture, Uuno, is Australia’s first digital mortgage service.
Launched mid-2016 Uno has recently secured $16.5m investment from Westpac. They have been growing 30% month on month since their launch, gone from zero to 38 staff and expect to double that by the end of 2018.
Persollo
Persollo is the world’s first platform for targeted social selling powered by data and AI. The platform allows brands and influencers to convert social and digital media engagement into sales in less than 15 seconds.
Designed for social media and mobile, Persollo’s single-page checkout allows click through payments straight from any social network and through the key influencers. Founded by Olga Oleinikova and Kyrylo Medvediev in late 2015, Persollo has helped 700+ businesses across 16 countries to increase their conversion to a brag-worthy 300% from social media.
Those clients include the likes of New Balance, Australian UGGs Original, HotelsCombined and Marie Claire. Backed by Telstra’s muru-d, Persollo is gaining huge credibility and has been noticed as an Australian startup to watch by the Australia Herald, winner of Visa™ People’s ChoiceAward, “The Everywhere Initiative” and they’re being featured on Channel 7’s Dream Academy.
INAMO
INAMO develops wearable products, including waterproof accessories, wristbands and key-rings, that double as a contactless prepaid bank card to make life more convenient for consumers when making contactless payments.
Founder & CEO Peter Colbert, is on a mission to free you from your wallet & looks to the day that INAMO’s customers will be able to use their wearable products to catch public transport, access buildings, as ticketing for festivals, and even your gym membership.
In May 2017 the company announced a successful seed funding round of $1.5 million led by Club Investible & private investors.
The Yield
The Yield is an AgTech solutions company which develops IoT-based solutions for agriculture and aquaculture. They’re on a mission to transform food and farming practices by building safe, scalable digital technology.
The Yield’s end-to-end technology Sensing+ combines farm sensors, data, predictions and apps for growers. Founder Ros Harvey is an experienced entrepreneur who is passionate about utilising technology to play a role in the sustainable governance of the planet. Since launch in 2014, their first product Sensing+ has won numerous awards, including four at the TasICT Awards, two at the IoT Hub Awards and being named finalist in the Microsoft World Partner Awards.
In April this year, the team announced a successful Series A funding round of $6.5 million, with significant investment from global corporations Bosch, KPMG and AgFunder. This funding takes investment in the company to $11.5 million in two years.
Pennybox
Pennybox is an app that teaches kids about money, banking and finance in a fun, practical and highly gamified way. The platform uses the traditional ‘pocket money’ concept as the entry point to engage kids and parents on skills related to money from an early age.
The goal being to empower kids to learn real-life money concepts such as budgeting, setting savings goals, negotiating, banking, interest, and debt. Before Pennybox, Co-Founder Reji Eapan was a finance analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS. The second half of Pennybox, Co-Founder Adam Naor, left a 7 year career with Google to combine his passion of finance and tech.
To date they have raised 250k from external investors and won the NSW MVP grant. Pennybox has had 5,000 families join the private beta and they are scheduled to launch to the public early July.
Mad Paws
Mad Paws was created to fill in the ever growing need in the pet boarding market for affordable, and local pet accommodation whilst still maintaining the care, love, and attention pets received at high-end, expensive, pet boarding services.
It’s pet minding for the share economy. Founder Alexis Soulopoulos founded Mad Paws after graduating from University of Sydney Business School. After just eight months of operation, the startup raised its first venture capital round of $1.1 million to further accelerate its growth.
Mad Paws is now Australia’s number one pet services marketplace and is expanding fast. The platform has over 150,000 pet owners on board and secured themselves a partnership with PETstock and Bondi Vet.
HIVERY
HIVERY build prescriptive analytics tools, leveraging data using AI and Machine Learning to find new humanly impossible patterns that drive new profits. HIVERY was born following a big data hackathon that brought together Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking, serial entrepreneurs from the Coca-Cola Founders platform, and Charles Gretton, Matthew Robards, and Menkes van den Briel, data scientists with backgrounds in AI and Operations Research.
In its latest incarnation, the data-driven platform is planning optimal retail strategies around occasion, brand, package, price, and channel. It is optimising the scheduling of promotions and eliciting meaningful customer segments on the back of e-commerce platforms.
The team at HIVERY plan to continue to develop AI SaaS products in the retail and FMGCs space, as well as set up offices in USA and Japan as the majority of the company’s revenue is already in these markets.
MELBOURNE

Plattar
Plattar is an Augmented Reality app builder & content management system. FounderRupert Deans and his team have been working on the SaaS platform for 2 years before officially launching February 2017.
Seeing that AR was difficult and costly to create and considering this was the case in website development before the likes of WordPress, Rupert knew there was an opportunity to create the world’s first Augmented Reality enablement platform for businesses and individuals to create, manage and deploy Augmented reality and mixed reality experiences.
Plattar has already raised $1.1 million capital from News Corp to continue their plans for world domination in this space.
TRIBE
Launched in 2015, TRIBE is a marketplace that connects social media content creators with leading brands to transform word of mouth recommendations. Founder, Jules Lund, well known TV & radio host designed the platform as a personal workflow solution to assist with his own time management of brands offering him payment to post on his social accounts.
Today TRIBE has 13,000 influencers in the app and 2600 brand campaigns through the platform and has secured $5.35 million in Series A funding to support their global expansion.
Afterpay
Afterpay is the new way for Australians to pay. Their easy-to-use payment process allows shoppers to buy their product today and pay it off in 4 equal fortnightly instalments. Afterpay believes in evolving the retail status quo to provide customers a better way to shop. Through Australian innovation, Afterpay has evolved layby enabling shoppers to buy more of what they love, more often.
Launched in 2014 by Nick Molnar, Afterpay floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in May 2016 and partners with hundreds of Australia’s leading retailers such as Cue, Marcs, General Pants, Glue, Topshop and Hype DC. Their process is now available both online and in-store.
Afterpay was awarded “FinTech Innovator in Payments” at the inaugural FinTech Awards 2016 and “FinTech Organisation of the Year” at The Finnies, May 2017.
PurePonics
Growing pure food by aquaponics in urban farming. More taste, less waste and grown close to where you live and eat. Founded by entrepreneurs Steve Gleeson and Paul Hopper,PurePonics is an innovative AgTech startup combining Aquaculture and Hydroponics to produce fresh, safe and sustainable food, with no use of chemicals.
Since the company’s inception in 2016, they have sourced specialist researcher Yoni Sharon from Israel, built facilities in Geelong, begun to generate their first revenue stream through production and will soon be looking for more investment to accelerate their expansion across Australia and beyond.
Uptick
Uptick offers a suite of cloud-based solutions for organisations that manage, maintain and audit buildings. Their facility management product Uptick FM allows easy ticketing and tendering for works reported by tenants, while their Uptick FS product is used by fire protection, airconditioning and electrical contractors allowing for scheduling, asset management, defect reporting and invoicing of works.
Upticks’ platform allows each of these ‘property stakeholders’ to manage their respective workflows via Uptick and access and engage with the building’s data via the “bSecure” platform. The team have secured their second round of funding, a $1.6 million investment from venture capital firms Tempus Partners and Equity Venture Partners.
Unlockd
Unlockd is an enterprise mobile platform that rewards consumers when they unlock their mobile phone. The revolutionary ad and content funded mobile platform provides consumers a value exchange whether it be discounts off their mobile phone bill, free data or premium entertainment content, in exchange for viewing ads, content or offers upon unlocking their smartphone.
Unlockd was founded in 2014 by Matthew Berrimanin Melbourne, they have since since grown to New York and London. They have major content and advertising partners include Twitter, Yahoo, MoPub, McDonalds, British Airways, Doritos and Uber.
ResponSight
Every user has a behavioural fingerprint; a unique, nuanced way they use their own computer. Behavioural fingerprints can be monitored to detect malware and attackers, who don’t behave the same way as a typical end user. Investing in detecting security breaches as early as possible allows organisations to take control.
ResponSight’s behavioural analytics monitors usage and detects non-users sooner, where others still fail. Founded by Jeff Paine the idea for ResponSight was first pitched at BlueChilli’s Disrupt@Scale startup program and they were announced the winners in February 2015. In 2016 they raised $1.15 million in a seed funding led by Carthona Capital, with follow on investment from Black Sheep Capital.
Timelio
Timelio is a high growth FinTech company with an online marketplace for invoice finance and supply chain finance. Timelio brings together growing businesses directly with a network of investors who fund their invoices.
Wife and Husband Founders, Charlotte andAndrew Petris, noticed how tough it was for Australian SMEs trying to grow a business without access to adequate finance. It was very clear to them that the industry had not kept pace with changes in technology.
Timelio was created to bring together SMEs directly with investors. Timelio has raised $5.5 million in capital and aspire to be the first Australian fintech to fund $1 billion to Australian SMEs.
Nura Headphones
Nuraphones are personalised to you, understanding how you hear the moment you put them on and filling the gaps in your hearing. We all hear differently and this is the secret to sound clarity that is perfect for you.
Nuraphones was founded in April 2015 in Melbourne byKyle Slater, Luke Campbell and Dragan Petrovik. A team of music lovers, they combined their expertise in engineering, acoustics, biology, and hearing science to create the nuraphone. Now all music listeners can find their perfect sound, automatically.
Nuraphones attracted US$1.8 million on Kickstarter, making it the most-funded Australian campaign ever. nura announced it had raised $6 million in seed capital, bringing its total funding to more than $8.5 million.
The Lumery
The Lumery is a unique collective of MarTech & AdTech experts providing brands with Advisory, Strategy and Execution services on the applications they have today, and will have in the future.
Tired of the ‘buzz word approach’ around MarTech, Founders, Rajan Kumar,Ben Fettes and Simon O’Day believe that brands have traditionally had limited options to call upon when seeking agencies who have real experience in helping leading organisation’s not just leverage the technology available to them — but actually deliver business results.
In less than 6 months the team has set up shop in Cremorne and have a talented team servicing clients including Australia Post and Jetstar.




