As AI agents move from writing code to running businesses, a new layer of infrastructure is emerging to make that shift safe, verifiable and trusted.
This cohort is building it: the guardrails that stop agents from acting on bad context, the runtime access that lets them see inside the software they are changing, and the compliance layers that allow regulated industries to adopt AI without breaking the rules that govern them.
Alongside them are founders tackling problems that have resisted software for decades: getting orbit-ready hardware into space faster, getting property developments approved without months of guesswork, and freeing body corporates and dental clinics from paperwork that was never designed for the people doing the work.
What ties this cohort together is not a sector, but a posture: a willingness to build the parts of the stack that others assumed were too hard, too regulated or too boring to touch and to prove Australia and New Zealand can be where the world’s hardest problems get solved.
Meet the 17 companies joining Startmate’s Winter ’26 Accelerator cohort.
⭐️ Ansight
One-liner: Ansight connects coding agents to live apps so they can inspect, debug, and verify their own work in real time.
Coding agents can write code, but the moment an app actually runs, they're flying blind. Developers are left to reproduce bugs by hand, dig through screenshots and logs, and manually verify everything the agent did - the human becomes the bottleneck for the machine.
Ansight fixes this by connecting coding agents directly to a running app, giving them real visibility into what's actually happening inside it. Agents can inspect the app, take action, and verify their own fixes work before anything ships - turning guesswork into evidence.
Founded by Matt and Martin, who lived this problem firsthand building Red-Point, a complex 3D mobile. Matt is a long-time Microsoft MVP with 15+ years building mobile developer tools like MFractor; Martin led GTM, product and fundraising at Red-Point, growing it to 70,000 users across five continents. Their vision is for Ansight to be built into every serious app, hunting down regressions overnight and delivering fixes by morning, so nothing ships until it's Ansight Verified.
Founders: Martin Mora & Matthew Robbins
Website: ansight.ai/Location: Brisbane, Australia
⭐️ Antares Aerospace
One-liner: Antares Aerospace is building reusable rockets to make getting a satellite into orbit as routine as overnight shipping.
Satellites are now critical infrastructure for the things people rely on daily; GPS, weather forecasting, communications, disaster response, and defence. But getting one to orbit still means waiting your turn in months-long launch queues. Most operators buy a seat on someone else's rocket and fly when that rocket flies, which can mean years of waiting, a fixed orbit chosen by someone else, and no recourse if a satellite fails and needs replacing. It is closer to freight shipping in the 1950s than to anything resembling modern logistics.
Antares is building reusable launch vehicles and vertically integrated Australian manufacturing to make orbital access faster and repeatable, starting with suborbital and hypersonic flight testing to generate early revenue and flight data on the way to full orbital launch.
Founded by Lachlan Bramble and Ronan Kohlhoff, who met building rockets together at UNSW, taking a student program from a 1,000 ft model flight to a 70,000 ft vehicle. Their vision is to make responsive orbital launch real, turning access to space into dependable infrastructure rather than a rare campaign planned years in advance.
Founders: Lachlan Bramble & Ronan Kohlhoff
Website: antaresaerospace.com.au
Location: Sydney, Australia
⭐️ BrandViz.AI
One-liner: BrandViz.AI gets you recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini by fixing your site and publishing content in your voice, so organic pipeline shows up in weeks.
Buyers now research and shortlist vendors on AI assistants before ever talking to sales. If AI doesn't recommend a brand, it's invisible to that buyer, and most marketing teams don't even know it's happening, let alone have the engineering capacity to fix it.
BrandViz runs hundreds of simulated buyer queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, then ships the fixes directly to a client’s site and content - closing the loop end to end rather than simply handing over a dashboard. One flagship client went from invisible to the #1 cited source in their category across major AI platforms in 30 days.
Founded by ex-Google engineers Rushana Maksudova and David Andersen, BrandViz has grown new contract value 77x in three months with no paid acquisition. Their vision is for BrandViz to become the default execution layer for AI search visibility: the standard for how B2B brands get recommended when buyers ask AI.
Founders: Rushana Maksudova & David Andersen
Website: brandviz.ai
Location: Brisbane, Australia
⭐️ Clausifai
One-liner: Clausifai helps small businesses create, review, and sign contracts without a lawyer.
Most freelancers, founders, and small business owners can't afford a lawyer, so they end up skipping contracts entirely, using templates that don't actually protect them, or signing agreements they don't fully understand. That gap leads to disputes, exploitation, and lost money on a massive, global scale.
Clausifai fixes this with an AI-powered platform that generates a legally grounded contract from a plain-English description, then explains it back in plain English, flags risky clauses, scores it for fairness, and handles e-signatures — all in one affordable workflow.
Founded by Arshita Dewan, Riniki Das Barman, and Karisa Mahroukh, three friends from Assam now building together in Adelaide. Clausifai reached nine paying customers within 13 days of launch with zero paid acquisition. Their vision is to become the default contract layer for the global economy — where no freelancer, founder, or small business owner needs a lawyer just to sign safely.
Founders: Arshita Dewan, Karisa Mahroukh & Riniki Das Barman
Website: clausifai.comLocation: Adelaide, Australia
⭐️ Coco
One-liner: Coco is the trust layer stopping AI agents from executing actions enterprises haven't approved.
AI agents are moving from chatting to doing inside enterprises - processing payments, handling patient records, approving loans - but they act without knowing the full context. A fraud alert might be active or an approval step skipped, and the agent has no way to know. Existing tools only check permissions and log activity after the fact, so nobody finds out until something breaks downstream.
Coco sits between the agent and the system it's acting on, checking every action against live application context before it executes. If the action doesn't fit the current state, Coco blocks it before it happens instead of flagging it afterward.
Founded by Nguyen Nguyen and Khoa Pham, who hit this exact problem building agents themselves. Their vision is for every enterprise deploying AI agents to run them through Coco first, making trust between agents and the systems they touch the default, not the exception.
Founders: Nguyen Nguyen & Khoa Pham
Website: cocothecreator.com/
Location: Melbourne, Australia
⭐️ Derive
One-liner: Derive is the intelligent notebook that understands reasoning, building the data layer for the future of AI education.
STEM students lose hours every week to silent mistakes buried in their handwritten problem sets, chasing a wrong answer long after the error was made. Tools like ChatGPT and tutoring only catch mistakes after the fact, once the time is already gone. Derive tackles this head-on.
Derive is an intelligent notebook that understands everything on the page in real time. It catches errors fast, tracks strong and weak points, generates targeted practice, and helps students visualise what they are working through. Analysing handwriting in real time gives Derive the deepest insight into how students reason and where they get stuck. Paired with analytics from years of students working that builds a dataset no one else has: step-level records of how reasoning actually happens and what unsticks it - the data layer for the future of AI education.
Matthew Martin and Eden Gibson, two Electrical Engineering students at UQ, built Derive because they were losing hours to this exact problem themselves. Their vision: Derive becomes the surface where every STEM student does their work.
Founders: Matthew Martin & Eden Gibson
Website: derivenotes.com/
Location: Brisbane, Australia
⭐️ develpr
One-liner: develpr helps property developers get build approvals faster.
For developers and architects, assessing whether a site is even viable is a black box. They work through dozens of interlocking rules and consultant sign-offs with no clear view of where a project stands or what might sink it. Months and substantial costs go in before anyone learns the application will be rejected, or the site was never viable.
develpr tackles this with an end-to-end platform that delivers site feasibility assessments within 24 hours, giving industry professionals a central hub to coordinate consultants, documents, and approval milestones. AI handles the heavy lifting, with real town planners overseeing every project from feasibility through to lodgment.
Founded by Liam Taylorwood-Roe, Connor Jones, and James Baker, who combine deep technical, operational, and planning expertise. Their vision is to become the global source of truth for planning intelligence, structuring the world's most fragmented planning data so every council, developer, and consultant builds on top of develpr.
Founders: Liam Taylorwood-Roe, Connor Jones & James Baker
Website: develpr.com.au
Location: Sydney, Australia
⭐️ EstiMate
One-liner: EstiMate AI helps construction teams quickly generate accurate construction estimates.
Construction companies either have to spend thousands on a quantity surveyor or spend days reviewing drawings, measuring quantities, calculating materials and labour, coordinating subcontractor packages and preparing professional estimates. Much of this work is still completed manually through spreadsheets and repeated document reviews, slowing tender turnaround and increasing the risk of missed scope or inconsistent pricing.
EstiMate AI allows residential builders, commercial contractors and specialist trades to upload project documentation and generate detailed, itemised estimates in minutes. Rather than relying on generic templates, the platform applies construction-specific quantity, pricing and labour logic informed by real builder and project data.
Founded by Ashton Dobbin and Baylin Spencer, who bring real construction industry grounding to the build. Their vision is for EstiMate AI to become the default estimating platform for the construction industry globally, expanding into budgeting, procurement, project intelligence and cost tracking to become the financial operating system for construction from first estimate to final invoice.
Founders: Baylin Spencer & Ashton Dobbin
Website: estimateai.com.au
Location: Melbourne, Australia
⭐️ Forward
One-liner: Forward sources borrowers globally, structures their documents, and matches them to the best private credit fund, providing everything needed to kickstart the transaction from the minute a deal is submitted.
Small and mid-sized businesses increasingly rely on private credit for debt funding, but finding the right fund remains slow and fragmented. Deals arrive through scattered broker networks with inconsistent documentation, incomplete information and little indication of whether they fit a fund’s investment mandate. Fund managers spend hours reviewing opportunities that may never have been viable, while strong borrowers struggle to reach the right source of capital.
Forward turns messy, broker-submitted information into a structured deal proposal that private-credit funds can assess immediately. Its agentic engine organises the borrower’s documents, identifies missing information and matches each deal with the funds whose mandates it fits - reducing manual analysis and helping both sides move towards a transaction faster.
Founded by Daniel Yoon, Riley Janjis and Darryl Luo, Forward combines private-credit dealmaking experience with the technical capability to build a new origination system for the industry. Their vision is for Forward to become the global origination layer for private credit: structuring and routing every deal to the right source of capital from the moment it is submitted.
Founders: Daniel Yoon, Riley Janjis & Darryl Luo
Website: useforward.co
Location: San Francisco, CA
⭐️ Glowback
One-liner: GlowBack puts client retention and rebookings on autopilot for beauty and wellness businesses.
Clients don't leave service businesses because of bad experiences — they drift away when relationships aren’t maintained between visits. Most salons and similar businesses operate without the systems to consistently manage this - retention rates can drop as low as 40%, when upwards of 70% is considered healthy, leaving thousands of dollars of repeat revenue sitting dormant in their client lists. Owners know personalised outreach works, but don’t have the time to message hundreds of clients individually.
GlowBack plugs into a business's existing booking system, analyses client history and behaviour, and automatically runs personalised, two-way SMS conversations that bring clients back to book - done-for-you, with no owner effort required.
Founded by Maddi Coleman, a former commercial lawyer who experienced the problem firsthand as a client who quietly stopped booking after being forgotten. Her vision is for GlowBack to become the autonomous operating layer for service businesses worldwide, managing client relationships end-to-end from the world's largest behavioural dataset on the service economy.
Founder: Madeleine Coleman
Website: glowback.techLocation: Melbourne, Australia
⭐️ Hyperlocalise
One-liner: Hyperlocalise lets product teams launch globally in days using AI agents to localise every customer touchpoint.
Localisation is still a manual, fragmented process. Growth and marketing teams juggle disconnected tools, endless review loops, and handoffs between translators, reviewers, and market leads - turning what should be a quick launch into weeks or months of delay.
Hyperlocalise brings that entire workflow into one agentic system. Teams give direction, and the agent executes the translation, adaptation, and asset localisation while preserving brand voice and market context - compressing a process that normally takes days into minutes.
Founded by Minh Cung and Hans Bui, a team with proven global expansion experience. Minh spent years living this exact problem: four years building global localisation infrastructure at Canva, including its Magic Translate feature, and recently leading localisation engineering at Heidi Health. Hans anchors the product side, drawing on his work managing payment solutions and partnerships at Samsung, where he contributes to global flagship launches, and his earlier experience developing eCommerce solutions at Tyro Payments. Their vision is for Hyperlocalise to become the intelligence and execution layer for global growth - the platform every company uses to launch successfully in every market with hyper-local elements, not just translate into it.
Founders: Minh Cung & Hans Bui
Website: hyperlocalise.comLocation: Sydney, Australia
⭐️ Orva
One-liner: Orva is building the agentic layer for healthcare systems, starting with dental operation rooms.
Dental professionals are drowning in operational administration, including tooth and gum charting, clinical notes, referrals and patient communications. This takes clinicians away from patient care and limits how many people a practice can effectively support.
The deeper problem is the infrastructure underneath these workflows. Many dental patient-management systems are legacy platforms with limited or no API access, leaving important clinical processes manual, fragmented and dependent on repetitive data entry. This has stifled innovation in the healthcare system for decades and is a poor foundation for the wave of AI agents to come.
Orva is addressing both layers of the problem. It is building API infrastructure that allows AI agents to interact with legacy dental systems, alongside a voice-first clinical assistant that completes charting and documentation directly within a practice’s existing software. Clinicians can dictate findings as they work, while Orva structures and enters the information in real time reducing keyboard work without forcing practices to replace their current systems.
Founded by Akash Mokashi, Erika Orogo, and Saurabh Bachawe, a team combining dental expertise with real technical firepower. Their vision is to make healthcare interoperable for every clinician, patient and system. They are starting with API infrastructure and intelligent digital assistants in the operating room.
Founders: Akash Mokashi, Erika Orogo & Saurabh Bachawe
Website: tryorva.io/Location: Christchurch, New Zealand & India
⭐️ SecurityBreak
One-liner: SecurityBreak is the AI Threat Intelligence company that helps organisations detect, investigate, and stop attacks against AI systems.
Companies are deploying AI faster than they can secure it. AI agents, models, MCP servers, and AI applications are becoming part of everyday business, but most security tools have no visibility into how these systems are attacked or abused. Attackers can manipulate prompts, compromise AI workflows, poison data, or misuse AI agents without triggering traditional security controls.
SecurityBreak helps security teams understand what is happening across their AI ecosystem. It detects attacks, explains what happened, provides actionable threat intelligence and gives defenders the visibility they need to secure AI.
Founded by Thomas Roccia, who has spent more than 15 years in cybersecurity, including at Microsoft and McAfee. Thomas is the author of a best-selling cybersecurity book, a regular speaker at leading conferences including BlackHat, DEFCON, and BSides, and the creator of several widely used open-source security projects. His work has been recognised with multiple industry awards, including the SANS Difference Makers Award for Innovation. His vision is for SecurityBreak to become the trusted source of AI Threat Intelligence and the early-warning system for attacks targeting the AI ecosystem.
Founder: Thomas Roccia
Website: securitybreak.io
Location: Brisbane, Australia
⭐️ Sunburnt Space Co
One-liner: Sunburnt Space lets researchers test in zero gravity quickly and affordably using reusable rockets.
Testing for space is broken. Existing methods are prohibitively expensive, chronically overbooked, and can only simulate one environmental condition at a time. This makes it nearly impossible for researchers and companies to iterate quickly on the technology that will eventually fly.
Sunburnt Space fixes this with "Zero-G-on-demand": fully reusable suborbital rockets that fly to the edge of space and return payloads intact. This transforms their customers’ access to microgravity from a rare, one-off event into an affordable and accessible utility
Founded by Brad Younger, Sam Cain, and Robin Biskupic, a team pairing proven commercial execution with genuine engineering firsts. Brad exited his software company in 2023, while Sam and Robin became the first Australian students to build a liquid rocket engine. Their vision is for Sunburnt Space to become the testing ground for the future space economy - the platform anyone building space hardware turns to, from benchtop to orbit.
Founders: Brad Younger, Sam Cain & Robin Biskupic
Website: sunburntspace.com.auLocation: Sydney, Australia
⭐️ Tailor
One-liner: Tailor uses AI to cut multi-stakeholder document approvals from weeks to days - automating the full cycle from feedback collection to final sign-off.
Regulated organisations lose weeks to multi-stakeholder document approvals that should take days. Feedback arrives scattered across inboxes and document versions, conflicts go unresolved, and nobody can trace why a decision was made. AI drafting tools have made this worse, not better, by flooding the same overloaded review queues with more content.
Tailor fixes this with a sovereign, Australian-hosted platform that collects feedback from every stakeholder in parallel, reconciles conflicts against an organisation's own policies, and produces a single, citation-backed document ready for sign-off.
Founded by Bridget Goldsworthy and Knox Hart, who spent years inside major Queensland programs like Cross River Rail and the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, living this exact problem firsthand. Their vision is for Tailor to become the global decision layer for regulated work - the system every government and enterprise runs its agreements on.
Founders: Bridget Goldsworthy & Knox Hart
Website: tailor.au/
Location: Brisbane, Australia
⭐️ Quarter
One-liner: Quarter is the way modern body corporate management should work - best in class software and people supporting owners, not vested interests.
Running a body corporate the old way is hard work: chasing levies, organising meetings, staying on top of financial reporting, insurance and maintenance compliance. That’s a heavy load for an unpaid volunteer role. So most committees hand it to a management firm.
When they do, owners lose control of the homes they love and visibility of the finances. Worse, the sector is riddled with conflicts of interest: ABC's Four Corners found owners losing tens of millions a year to undisclosed commissions on insurance and contractor referrals.
More than four million Australians - one in six - already live under a body corporate (UNSW City Futures, 2024), and the share is rising on both sides of the Tasman. Committees need a better option.
Quarter is the new body corporate manager: a service that simplifies the complexity and administration of running a committee, putting owners back at the centre of managing and enjoying the homes they love.
Founded by Michael Dowse and Matt Cowley, Quarter combines deep domain experience with proven execution. Michael chaired a self-managed body corporate for six years and built Hnry's payments and banking technology. Matt scaled Five Good Friends into one of Australia's 15 largest home care providers (KPMG, FY24) and its sister platform, The Lookout Way, which processes over $1 billion in home care funding annually.
Their vision: body corporates as a benefit of urban living, not a burden, with owners empowered to run their own communities.
Founders: Michael Dowse & Matt Cowley
Website: quarter.nz
Location: Wellington, New Zealand & Melbourne, Australia
⭐️ Veltora
One-liner: Veltora allows data centres to optimise their operations by predicting data centre failures before they happen.
Data centres power the AI industry, yet they're still run on spreadsheets, manual processes, and fragmented tools. This leads to 6-12 month construction delays, millions in reactive downtime, and poor coordination across power, cooling, and supply chains because no system exists that can reliably forecast what's coming across the facility's lifecycle.
Veltora fixes this with a multi-agent system that continuously monitors and coordinates decisions across supply chain, cooling, power, and operations, surfacing risks 60-90 days ahead and recommending or automating the right response before problems ever materialise.
Founded by Aan Mehta, a Computer Science student at UNSW who has been coding since age 10 and built Veltora's entire multi-agent architecture and MVP solo. Her vision is for Veltora to become the predictive intelligence layer running underneath data centres worldwide, covering the entire facility lifecycle from planning through ongoing operations.
Founder: Aan Mehta
Website: veltora.net/
Location: Melbourne, Australia
The founders will now begin our 12-week Accelerator, working alongside mentors, operators, investors and alumni across Australia and New Zealand to build companies with the potential to define global industries.
The program will culminate in Winter ’26 Demo Day (October 20), where the cohort will present what they have built, followed by a week in San Francisco to pitch to US investors.
