Forbes Australia picks out three Australian entrepreneurs who are making waves in the startup space right now.
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Conry Tech
After six decades in the air-conditioning sector, Ron Conry found himself facing an industry that looked much the same as when he first began straight out of high school. Determined to address its energy inefficiency, the industry veteran partnered with his daughter Brenda and son-in-law Sam Ringwaldt to establish Conry Tech in 2019.
“We started Conry Tech asking, ‘What if we were to invent air-conditioning today?’” Conry recalls. “We set out to build a new air-conditioner from scratch, with no off-the-shelf components, to not only improve people’s comfort, but make it radically more energy efficient.”
The result is the BullAnt, an air-conditioning system that the founders claim can meet the cooling and heating needs of any commercial building up to five times more efficiently than conventional systems, at a fraction of the size.
The Melbourne-based start-up has secured more than $13 million in total funding, including a recent $3 million seed round led by Audacy to accelerate product development and its rollout to market.
“Conry Tech’s decentralised HVAC solution offers transformative potential, significantly reducing electricity consumption in commercial buildings and data centres,” says Audacy partner and co-founder Toby Chan. “We look forward to assisting the company in scaling its solution globally.”
GXE
Fresh off the sale of their start-up Omny Studio to Los Angeles-based audio firm Triton Digital, Ed Hooper and Andrew Armstrong co-founded GXE in 2020 to simplify the complex and fragmented world of private asset management.
“When I was an angel investor, I constantly ran into the same headaches,” Hooper recalls. “It became clear that modern fund managers didn’t have great tools to manage admin, reporting, tax and compliance.”
The pair has since developed an all-in-one platform to manage securities, tax, and regulatory workflows. “We built a way for investors to run their operations from a single source of truth that not only saves them time, but builds trust and unlocks scale for fund managers,” Hooper says.
GXE, now used by more than 300 funds and SPVs, has raised $5.3 million across three funding rounds and aims to become the default system for private asset management.
“We backed GXE because they’re building the kind of infrastructure firms need to manage a global portfolio,” says Second Century Ventures portfolio manager Tom Ellis. “Its fund-administration solution brings structure, transparency and speed to a space that’s long operated in silos.”
Skutopia
For years, Talea Bader and Emily Townsend watched e-commerce businesses thrive online but stumble when it came to fulfilment. “We realised the industry hadn’t evolved in decades,” Bader says. “It was still heavily manual and transactional, and it was clear that logistics needed to be rebuilt from the ground up through technology.”
In 2018, the pair invested around $1 million of their own savings and mortgaged their homes to co-found Skutopia, developing an AI-driven robotic fulfilment platform that automates everything from checkout to delivery.
“We bootstrapped every cent, reinvested everything, and spent countless nights erecting robots, coding orchestration layers, and testing every system until it finally worked,” Bader recalls. Seven years on, the company has concluded its largest funding round to date, a $38 million growth round led by Pemba Capital Partners, bringing its total funding to more than $50 million and valuing Skutopia at $100 million. The funding will be used to scale Skutopia’s fulfilment network across Australia and internationally, with launches planned in North America and the UK.
“We were drawn to Skutopia’s market-leading fulfilment technology, deep-tech innovation, and the strength of its impressive team,” says Pemba Capital Partners Associate Director Katrina Engelbert. Together, we’re excited to accelerate Skutopia’s growth and expanding its global presence.”
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