Connecting people and seeing the ripple effects is profoundly rewarding; it can steer new directions and change lives. SXSW Sydney is looking to provide international opportunities to Australian talent to create a year-round node of connections.
Global expansion in business, whether you’re selling a product or promoting talent, is often slow. It’s expensive, and tricky to get started on, especially in a physically distant country like Australia. But when a city plays host to more globally connected, cross-industry innovative events, like SXSW Sydney, magic happens. Connections speed up, the world shrinks and new markets open, and you can suddenly be seen.
What we’re watching emerge is beyond a conference circuit—it’s a year-round innovation pipeline linking Australia with the world. What matters about events is the people they bring into the room – the unexpected ones and the ones you came hoping to find.
Often, when we connect people, the reason is strategic and the business objectives are clear. Other times, it’s instinct. Either way, there’s something profoundly rewarding about seeing the ripple effects as things pan out. Having influence and using it to recommend exceptional talent is powerful. Making introductions with real commercial potential is rewarding. It can steer new directions and change lives.
Take Sunflower.ai, an Australian company offering multilingual live captioning. After making a recent introduction to their service, co-founder Chuhao Liu sent through a note.
“Thank you so much for the kind introduction…the exposure from the event has been incredible! Since then, we’ve expanded internationally, working with clients across the USA, Canada, Korea, and Singapore.”
In addition to these international customers, Sunflower.ai are now delivering services for ICC Sydney, GIANTS Netball, and even ministerial campaign events. This kind of momentum doesn’t come from luck. It comes from showing up to the right stage at the right time and being ready.
What Chuhoa’s message highlights for us is the emerging pattern of companies increasingly finding accelerated pathways to global markets and new networks – including via strategic use of international events. By being prepared and focusing some resources on these opportunities, it’s possible to compress time and fast-track meaningful and valuable relationship building. But it does take work and follow-up.
In the case of SXSW Sydney, there is a growing synergy between Sydney and our counterparts in the US and now Europe – creating a year-round node of connections that can go some way to provide international opportunities to Australian talent and companies. It is possible via this structured pathway for founders and companies to build momentum locally, test and refine their stories, before leveraging that foundation for launch into other markets.
DermR Health’s story is one such case study. Fresh from winning the Sydney Pitch Grand Final, CEO Stefan Mazy took to the stage in Austin to present the company’s groundbreaking DermR® Patch, which offers a non-invasive approach to determining if skin lesions are cancerous, eliminating the need for painful biopsies.
As Mazy put it, “being a founder in a start-up is a hard, gruelling job not for the faint-hearted, so recognition from these global innovation platforms adds immensely to our credibility and has accelerated our market entry timeline significantly.”
Australian climate tech innovator Uluu, also demonstrated the power of this approach when they claimed the prestigious 2025 Innovation Award for Sustainability Solutions in Austin. The company is pioneering the production of a natural material derived from oceans that is climate positive, home compostable, and capable of replacing plastics at scale.
Working across both fabric applications and rigid products, Uluu is positioned to disrupt multiple industries currently dependent on conventional plastics. The company’s co-founder, Julia Reisser, was a featured speaker at SXSW Sydney 2024, where she discussed strategies for mobilising venture capital towards startups creating positive environmental impact.
Another Australian company using this strategy is Springboards.ai, who secured second place in the ‘Enterprise, Smart Data, FinTech & Future of Work’ category in Austin’s Pitch this March.
Springboards.ai is challenging conventional approaches to AI-powered creativity tools. Built for strategists and creatives, their AI tool is “fuelling wild, unexpected, original thinking.”
“Being recognised globally at SXSW Austin is obviously massive for us as we begin to build our presence in the USA,” say co-founders Pip Bingemann and Amy Tucker, who developed their tech in response to creativity challenges in advertising, including shrinking budgets, increasing client expectations, and competitive pitching pressures.
What links all these stories is access. Access to global stages. To media coverage. To feedback loops. To meaningful collisions that otherwise might take years to engineer. The bringing together of tech, music, film, fashion, games, policy, design, education, and more—creates a unique density of possibilities in one place. It’s both a speaking and networking opportunity that serves as a concentrated business development platform.
As we look ahead to October in Sydney, the offering is clear. These calendar events are where serendipity meets structure. It’s a chance to build momentum and extend connection. Played right, it can be the launchpad for global ideas, talent, and industry-wide collaboration that can work alongside traditional export or trade strategies to create impact all year round.
Caroline Pegram is SXSW Sydney’s Head of Tech & Innovation. She has over two decades in media production and producing live events. Pegram believes that when art, science and technologies collide, we get a collective and rounded view of our world.
