Forbes Australia picks out three Australian entrepreneurs who are making waves in the startup space right now.
This story features in Issue 22 of Forbes Australia. Tap here to secure your copy.
estateXchange
When Sarah Poole, NAB’s former head of deceased estates, began administering her mother-in-law’s estate, she was struck by how fragmented and manual the system was.
“I knew the process inside and out, and yet it still took countless hours and multiple versions of the same documents to navigate,” she recalls. “The opportunity was to rethink how the whole ecosystem worked together.”
In 2023, Poole raised the idea with friend Marielle Yeoh, a former PEXA executive, and later that year, they launched estateXchange, a digital platform designed to bring together estate representatives, including lawyers, accountants and trustees, with banks, super funds and other institutions involved in administering a deceased estate.
“Our ambition is to see estateXchange become the trusted digital channel for deceased estates in Australia, supporting better outcomes for institutions, practitioners and, importantly, families navigating loss,” Yeoh says.
The company has since raised $12.5 million from investors including Macquarie Capital, Paul Little’s family office, Carol Schwartz AO, Christine Christian AO and OIF Ventures.
“estateXchange is bringing long-overdue modernisation to one of the most outdated parts of financial services,” says OIF Ventures investor Isabella Rich. “We’re excited to back estateXchange to modernise deceased estate administration at scale.”
Fluency
Finnlay Morcombe and Oliver Farnill grew up racing mountain bikes and building trails in regional Victoria, developing a habit of “making and fixing things”.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, that instinct turned to coding. It soon proved useful.
During an internship at a super fund, Morcombe encountered the problem that would eventually lead to Fluency. “Everything about how they understood work was broken,” he recalls. “Teams were documenting every process manually, while executives were making decisions based on surveys and guesswork.”
In 2023, the pair launched Fluency, a work intelligence platform that observes how tasks are performed across an organisation and converts that activity into documentation, workflow maps and automation insights.
“Fluency gives enterprise executives an unbiased, continuous view of how work actually happens,” Farnill says. “We show leaders where AI will have the biggest impact, measuring whether transformation is delivering ROI.”
The company recently raised $8.55 million in a seed round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Accel, valuing the company at more than $30 million.
“Fluency stood out to us because of its focus on operational fundamentals, not experimentation for its own sake,” says Accel partner Abhinav Chaturvedi.
IND Technology
When RMIT professor Alan Wong saw the aftermath of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, he recognised a problem in Australia’s power infrastructure.
“I realised how vulnerable power networks are when faults go undetected,” Wong says. “That pushed me to build technology that could detect those failures earlier.”
In 2013, he launched IND Technology to develop systems capable of identifying faults on power lines before they escalate into outages or fires.
The company’s flagship Early Fault Detection system gives grid operators real-time visibility into defects across power networks, allowing faults on power lines to be located to within around 10 metres, according to Wong. IND Technology now works with major utilities worldwide.
The company raised $50 million in its first institutional funding round last year, co-led by Angeleno Group and Energy Impact Partners, with participation from Virescent Ventures and Edison International.
“IND Technology has already secured global traction and deep adoption with their proven, homegrown solution preventing fires and improving reliability across major networks in Australia and North America.” says Virescent Ventures managing partner Kristin Vaughan.
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