10 Australian Tech Startups to Watch in 2026

Australian startups raised $5.1 billion in 2025. These ten companies are the ones where the money followed something real.

The Australian startup market has matured quickly in the years since Atlassian and Canva demonstrated that globally significant technology companies can be built from Sydney and Melbourne. Cut Through Venture and Folklore Ventures’ 2025 State of Startup Funding report recorded 390 deals across that $5.1 billion, with AI companies absorbing roughly a fifth of total funding. Q4 2025 was the strongest single quarter since records began, with $2 billion changing hands in three months.

The ecosystem now has venture firms with track records, a cohort of experienced founders recycling into new companies, and government programs providing non-dilutive capital to bridge the gap between seed and Series A.

None of that guarantees that any individual company on this list will succeed. What it creates is an environment where companies with genuine product-market fit or real technical differentiation are more likely to get the runway to prove it. The ten below are worth paying attention to for different reasons, and the article names those reasons rather than dressing every company in the same promotional language.

1. Everlab

Founded in 2023 in Melbourne by Marc Hermann (CEO), Dr Steven Lu (Chief Medical Officer), Anshul Jain (Chief Tech and Product Officer), and Sam Kothari (COO), Everlab raised AU$65 million in a Series A in June 2026, led by Airtree Ventures, with participation from Plural, Left Lane Capital, b2venture, and angel investors including Australian Test cricket captain Pat Cummins. The round valued the company at approximately $500 million. Total funding across pre-seed, seed, and Series A now exceeds AU$83 million.

The platform is a preventive health service. Where the Australian health system is built around treating illness when it appears, Everlab is built around finding health risks before they become illness. Members access a suite of diagnostic tests including blood biomarker panels, radiology, physical performance assessments, genetic testing, microbiome testing, and body composition scans. The results are held and interpreted by a clinical team of 180-plus clinicians, and integrated with data from wearable devices to maintain a continuous picture of each member’s health.

By the time of the Series A, Everlab had completed 40,000 consultations for 20,000 individual patients, including corporate members from Boston Consulting Group, BHP, and Bain and Company. More than 21 million biomarker results had been processed, and more than 25% of members had health findings flagged that had not been identified through the existing healthcare system. Hermann said the company had barely touched its seed round capital when investor interest intensified, which is the context in which he describes the Series A as something they were not originally planning. That detail matters more than the round size.

Honest scrutiny: Everlab’s model is commercially attractive to the members it serves, but the members it currently serves skew toward corporate clients and individuals with the means to pay for premium preventive care. Whether the platform can extend meaningfully down the income scale without losing the economics that have made it work is a question the next phase of growth will answer.

Founded: 2023 | HQ: Melbourne | Latest round: AU$65M Series A (June 2026) | Valuation: approximately AU$500M

2. DryFlow Magnetics

Founded in 2024 in South Australia by CEO Brett Boynton, DryFlow Magnetics raised a total of AU$12.5 million in seed and seed extension funding, backed by Orion Industrial Ventures, Virescent Ventures, Taronga Ventures, and Significant Ventures. CSIRO and the South Australian government’s Seed-Start program also provided grant funding. In August 2026, the company held the ribbon-cutting for its first commercial-scale unit.

The problem DryFlow is solving sits at an uncomfortable intersection of industrial and geopolitical urgency. Australian iron ore exports are projected to fall from AU$117 billion in 2025/26 to approximately AU$77 billion by 2030/31 as North Asian steel producers decarbonise and Australia’s higher-impurity Pilbara ore becomes less suited to green steel production.

Australia produces no high-purity iron ore concentrate, partly because conventional wet processing methods are impractical in Australia’s arid iron ore regions. DryFlow’s patented technology, built on the Kuchel Separation Process, produces high-purity iron concentrate at 67% or above without requiring process water.

The first commercial pilot plant was installed at Peak Iron Mines in South Australia. The first modular unit was purchased by US Iron and shipped to California, making DryFlow the first Australian mining technology startup in this category to export a commercial unit. Boynton noted at the August ribbon-cutting that the US interest arrived before the company was expecting it.

The risk for DryFlow is the distance between a working pilot plant and a scaled commercial product that mining companies will integrate at the volumes needed to change the economics of Australian iron ore. The ribbon-cutting is a meaningful milestone. It is not the destination.

Founded: 2024 | HQ: South Australia | Latest round: AU$12.5M seed extension (June 2026) | Milestone: First unit shipped to California (August 2026)

3. Heidi Health

Founded in 2019 in Melbourne by Dr Thomas Kelly (CEO), Waleed Mussa (CFO), and Yu Liu (CTO), Heidi Health raised $65 million in a Series B in October 2025, led by Point72 Private Investments, with participation from Blackbird, Headline, and Latitude. The round valued Heidi at $465 million and brought total funding to nearly $100 million. In February 2026, the company acquired UK-based clinical AI pioneer AutoMedica to expand its European footprint.

Kelly founded Heidi after leaving vascular surgical training under what he has described as crushing burnout, a founding observation that is specific, personal, and directly relevant to every clinician using the product today. The platform is an AI ambient scribe: it listens to a patient consultation, generates the clinical documentation including SOAP notes, referral letters, and patient summaries, and integrates with major EHR systems including Epic, Athenahealth, and MedicalDirector.

In 18 months of operation, Heidi returned more than 18 million hours to frontline clinicians. The platform now processes more than 2 million consultations weekly and is used in more than 110 countries across more than 200 medical specialties, including doctors, nurses, psychologists, dietitians, and veterinarians.

100% of KLAS-surveyed Heidi customers said they would repurchase, which is the hardest metric in healthcare software to earn. The platform is built on Google’s Gemini with HIPAA and GDPR compliance as standard. It is free for individual clinicians at the core tier, which is how it achieved global distribution at the speed it did.

The competitive landscape is the main risk. Abridge, Suki, Nabla, and DeepScribe are each well-funded and targeting the same clinician base. Heidi’s advantage is its global distribution footprint, its free entry point, and its developer-friendly API and Epic in-workflow integration. Whether the freemium model converts to enterprise revenue at the scale the $465 million valuation requires is the open question.

Founded: 2019 | HQ: Melbourne | Founders: Dr Thomas Kelly, Waleed Mussa, Yu Liu | Latest round: $65M Series B (October 2025) | Valuation: $465M | Scale: 2M+ consultations weekly, 110+ countries

4. Cuttable

Founded in 2023 in Melbourne by Sam Kroonenburg (CEO, co-founder of A Cloud Guru, sold to Pluralsight for $2 billion in 2021), Jack White, and Ed Ring, Cuttable raised $5.7 million in a March 2026 round that doubled its valuation to AU$100 million. Total funding across three rounds now exceeds AU$16 million. Investors include Square Peg Capital, Rampersand, Airtree Ventures, and Glitch Capital, with the round also funding the opening of a New York office.

The platform automates advertising creative for ecommerce brands. It connects to a Shopify or ecommerce store, reads the brand’s products and visual identity, and generates ready-to-run image and video ads optimized for Meta Ads Manager, Google, and TikTok without requiring a human creative team to produce each variant. Kroonenburg’s stated structure: seven to eight engineers shipping products faster than A Cloud Guru did with more than 100.

What distinguishes Cuttable is the founder’s track record alongside the growth metrics. Kroonenburg is not a first-time founder testing a category. He built and sold a $2 billion company. The company works with more than 200 brands in Australia, New Zealand, and the US. The New York office signals the US expansion is operational rather than aspirational.

The honest limit: AI advertising creative is a competitive space with well-funded US incumbents. The question for Cuttable is whether Kroonenburg’s execution speed and the product’s head start in the Australian market can translate into durable US market share before those competitors reach equivalent quality.

Founded: 2023 | HQ: Melbourne (New York office, 2026) | Founders: Sam Kroonenburg, Jack White, Ed Ring | Latest round: $5.7M (March 2026) | Valuation: AU$100M

5. Firmable

Founded in 2023 in Melbourne by Leigh Jasper (Co-CEO), Paul Perrett (Co-CEO), and Karthik Venkatasubramanian (Chief Product Officer), Firmable raised $14 million in a Series A in March 2026 led by Airtree, with participation from existing investors. Total funding stands at approximately $19.7 million. All three founders previously worked together at Aconex, which was acquired by Oracle for $1.6 billion, and Perrett later became CEO at MessageMedia, which sold for $1.7 billion.

The problem Firmable solves is unglamorous but real. Australian B2B sales teams trying to identify and qualify prospects have historically been poorly served by US-built tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo.io, which have strong coverage of US businesses and weak, often outdated coverage of Australian companies. Firmable built an Australian-first B2B data platform: comprehensive, continuously updated intelligence on Australian companies, enriched with AI-driven web data aggregation, large language model-based extraction, and entity resolution.

It then adds precision buying signals: leadership changes, hiring surges, funding rounds, and technology shifts. Autonomous AI agents act on those signals by enriching CRM records, prioritising accounts, and drafting outreach.

The founders built Aconex into an international construction management platform from Melbourne and sold it for more than a billion dollars. Firmable’s US expansion is the next phase of testing whether the data approach that works in Australia can be rebuilt for other markets with their own data structures and coverage challenges.

Founded: 2023 | HQ: Melbourne | Founders: Leigh Jasper, Paul Perrett, Karthik Venkatasubramanian | Latest round: $14M Series A (March 2026)

6. MaryTechnology

Founded in 2023 in Sydney, MaryTechnology has raised approximately AU$7.96 million across three rounds, backed by investors including Empress Capital, Gilbert and Tobin, and Sydney Angels.

The product focuses on a specific and underserved problem in legal practice: the construction of chronologies. Litigation lawyers spend substantial hours manually assembling chronological records of events from documents, emails, contracts, and communications. Mary automates this process. The AI reads document collections, identifies date-stamped events and references, and builds a structured chronology that the lawyer can review and edit rather than construct from scratch.

The legal technology market in Australia is less mature than its US and UK equivalents, which creates an opportunity for a focused specialist tool to establish a defensible position before well-capitalised global legal AI platforms arrive with equivalent functionality. MaryTechnology’s backing from Gilbert and Tobin, one of Australia’s leading corporate law firms, as an investor rather than merely a customer, signals practitioner-level validation of the product’s usefulness.

The honest uncertainty is whether the chronology use case is the foundation of a broad legal AI platform or a feature that a larger platform will absorb. That is the central question the next two years will answer.

Founded: 2023 | HQ: Sydney | Total funding: approximately AU$7.96M

7. estateXchange

Founded in 2023 in Australia by Sarah Poole and Marielle Yeoh, childhood friends who have known each other for more than three decades, estateXchange raised AU$12.5 million in its first funding round in January 2026, backed by Macquarie Capital, OIF Ventures, and Paul Little’s family office, with angel investors Carol Schwartz and Christine Christian also participating.

Deceased estate management is a problem that touches almost every Australian family at some point. When someone dies, their executors must notify and coordinate with financial institutions, insurers, telecommunications companies, share registries, and superannuation funds that each hold assets or provide services connected to the estate. Each organisation typically requires the same set of documents submitted separately.

estateXchange digitises this coordination, creating a verified environment where lawyers, accountants, and trustees can share documents once and connect to the financial institutions, insurers, and service providers that need them.

The honest question for estateXchange is adoption speed on the institutional side. The platform’s value depends on financial institutions and other organisations connecting to it, which requires integrations and processes on their end. Building that network takes time and negotiation, and the speed at which it grows determines how useful the platform is for the legal and accounting professionals who would use it daily.

Founded: 2023 | HQ: Australia | Founders: Sarah Poole, Marielle Yeoh | Latest round: AU$12.5M (January 2026)

8. Oscorp Energy

Founded in 2024 in Sydney during the Antler residency program by CEO Ani Goswami, Dhiren Rami, and Dr. Chandrakant Bothe, Oscorp Energy raised AU$1.3 million in pre-seed funding in June 2026, led by European VC Atlas via its AI VB fund, with support from Antler and Antipodean Capital. The company is collaborating with ASX-listed battery recycler Livium as a design partner.

The problem is specific and the commercial urgency is real: an Australian Council of Recycling study estimates between 10,000 and 12,000 battery-related fires annually in waste and recycling streams in Australia. These fires start when lithium-ion batteries, discarded in general waste or recycling bins, are punctured or crushed by waste processing machinery.

Oscorp builds AI-powered vision and robotic systems that detect battery-containing objects moving through waste streams in real time and remove them before they cause fires. The system combines AI vision, edge computing, and robotics. The longer-term vision is a broader Vision OS platform that provides real-time operational intelligence for entire waste facilities.

At pre-seed with fewer than ten people, Oscorp is at the earliest meaningful stage. The Livium partnership provides a real-world deployment environment, which is the most important thing a hardware startup can have at this stage. The fire safety problem is real and the economic cost of a single facility fire is significant. The honest limit is that building durable robotics for an industrial environment is a genuinely difficult engineering challenge that takes years and multiple iterations to get right.

Founded: 2024 | HQ: Sydney | Founders: Ani Goswami, Dhiren Rami, Dr. Chandrakant Bothe | Latest round: AU$1.3M pre-seed (June 2026)

9. Flyweel

Founded in 2025 in Queensland by Reuben Scheckter and Matteo Calo, who met during Antler’s residency program, Flyweel raised AU$2.41 million in pre-seed funding in June 2026 led by Ten13, with support from Antler, QIC, and angel investors including Mollie CEO and former Klarna CTO Koen Köppen, Zip co-founder Larry Diamond, and Stake co-founder Matt Leibowitz, as well as a US customer. The financial products launch is heading to the United States first, where adoption has been strongest.

Flyweel describes itself as building the financial layer underneath ad spend. Advertising budgets flow through businesses in ways that create working capital problems: brands commit spend to platforms weeks or months before they see revenue from the customers acquired by that spend, and agencies often front media costs on behalf of clients before receiving payment. Flyweel is building financial products designed around the specific cash flow patterns of advertising, providing credit and payment infrastructure calibrated to how ad spend actually works.

The investor composition is notable: the former Klarna CTO and Zip co-founder investing at pre-seed are people with direct experience building fintech infrastructure at scale. Their participation reflects an opinion that the founding team understands the market. Flyweel is at an early stage, and fintech is a category where regulatory complexity, credit risk, and capital intensity create structural challenges that many early-stage companies underestimate. The US-first commercial focus is the right instinct given the scale of the US advertising market relative to Australia’s.

Founded: 2025 | HQ: Queensland | Founders: Reuben Scheckter, Matteo Calo | Latest round: AU$2.41M pre-seed (June 2026)

10. Chime Labs

Founded in 2025 in Sydney by Alexis Griveau (CEO) and Mathew Pretel, both former Google leaders, Chime Labs raised AU$900,000 in pre-seed funding in April 2026, led by 500 Global with participation from angel investors.

The product answers a specific and demonstrably costly problem. Australian tradies, the electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and builders who run their own small businesses, miss an estimated 270,000 calls every day. Every missed call is a missed job booking. Chime Labs estimates that a single missed call can cost a trade business up to $12,000 per month in lost revenue. The AI receptionist answers calls around the clock, qualifies the inquiry, and books the job directly into the business calendar, integrating with platforms like ServiceM8 that tradies already use for job management.

Griveau and Pretel came to the idea directly: they watched friends and family members running trade businesses lose work to phone calls they could not answer while on a job. The founding observation is specific and the founders are building their first version for the market they directly observed rather than a market they researched at a distance.

At $900,000 in funding with a three-person team, Chime Labs is at the earliest possible meaningful stage. The product roadmap beyond the AI receptionist, including quoting, invoicing, and lead generation, points toward a full back-office platform for trades businesses. The risk is execution speed in a market where several similar AI voice products are being built simultaneously for the same customer segment.

Founded: 2025 | HQ: Sydney | Founders: Alexis Griveau, Mathew Pretel | Latest round: AU$900,000 pre-seed (April 2026)

What Australia’s 2026 Startup Cohort Actually Reveals?

The ten companies above cover a wider range of industries, founding stages, and funding sizes than any comparable Australian list from five years ago would have. That breadth is itself the story.

The earliest Australian technology companies to reach global scale were primarily software and payments companies. The 2026 cohort includes health infrastructure (Everlab, Heidi Health), industrial hardware (DryFlow Magnetics), recycling robotics (Oscorp Energy), legal AI (MaryTechnology), estate administration (estateXchange), fintech infrastructure for advertising (Flyweel), and AI tooling for trade businesses (Chime Labs). The ecosystem is spreading across the specific problems that Australian companies, investors, and researchers are best positioned to address.

Several of the most interesting companies here are not doing what was expected of them.

• DryFlow is solving the material science constraint that prevents Australia from upgrading its iron ore before export, which is a harder problem and a more defensible solution than incremental software improvement.
• Oscorp is building robotics that intervene physically in a real-time industrial process because a dashboard cannot stop a lithium-ion battery from starting a fire.
• estateXchange is building the institutional network that makes document sharing between legal practitioners and financial institutions actually work, which is where every previous attempt at this problem has failed.

Heidi Health is the most globally validated company on this list. Two million consultations weekly across 110 countries is not an Australian success story. It is a global one that happens to have been built in Melbourne by a doctor who left surgery because the administrative burden of the job broke him before he could fully practise it. That personal origin and the product’s free entry point are both structural advantages that late entrants cannot replicate.

Most companies on this list will not reach their potential. That is the honest baseline. What makes them worth watching is that each is working on a problem where, if they do succeed, the commercial value is real and the competitive position is genuinely difficult to replicate. That is a more interesting kind of startup than the ones that are easy to evaluate and easy to duplicate.