Forbes Australia picks out three Australian entrepreneurs who are making waves in the startup space right now.
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Marloo
After seven years building investing platforms, Hardy Michel and Shakeel Lala kept running into the same problem: customers wanted to know what to do with their money.
“In volatile markets, all we could send was an email saying do not panic, and then watch the data show people buying high and selling low,” says Michel. “The gap is not bad advice. It is a shortage of great advice, because the best advisers are already full.”
The pair, alongside Ben Robertson, set out to tackle that shortage with Marloo, an AI platform designed to help financial advisers serve more clients. The software builds a picture of each client from meetings, emails, documents, and files, then completes tasks ranging from research and modelling to compliance checks and producing advice documents.
Marloo says it now serves more than 1,000 paying advisory firms across eight countries and has averaged 37% monthly revenue growth since its inception.
The company has raised US$12.7 million in total funding, including a US$10 million seed round led by Blackbird Ventures.
“Hardy, Shak and Ben are building with the kind of clarity, velocity, and obsession that defines generational companies,” says Blackbird Ventures general partner Samantha Wong. “What they have built is elevating the entire profession and what every adviser is capable of. It reminds us of the early days of Canva.”
Orivium
After two decades working in the energy industry, Emma Clark became increasingly interested in the circular economy and the idea that waste did not necessarily have to remain waste.
“The world desperately needs more critical minerals. Rather than asking how we could mine more, we started asking how we could recover more from what we already have,” she says.
That idea led Clark to launch Orivium, a deep-tech company developing technology to recover metals from low-grade ores, mine waste and other resource streams.
“We use a mild electrical current to convert reagents used on mining sites and found within the ore itself to liberate metals at ambient temperature and pressure,” says the founder and executive chair.
The process can also remediate contaminants including cyanide and arsenic, while generating hydrogen as a by-product. Orivium has since moved from laboratory development towards commercial deployment. It has also partnered with ASX-listed Infinity Mining at its Cangai copper project in New South Wales, focusing on recovering metals from historical mining waste and developing a modular processing plant.
Orivium is now targeting a $30 million Series B raise to establish anchor plants in Australia and the US, with former Lenovo and Avnet chief executive Bill Amelio joining the company to lead its expansion into the Americas.
“We chose to support Orivium because it is tackling one of the mining industry’s biggest challenges with genuinely differentiated technology,” says Matt Wear, principal of Farmland Consultants LLC. “We’re excited by the progress the team has made and the potential for the technology to have a huge impact at scale.”
Sophiie AI
While running a marketplace for trade businesses, Jacob Banks kept seeing the same pattern among his customers.
“Tradies were great at their actual work, but because they were so busy, administrative tasks like answering the phone, following up leads, chasing missed calls, and sending or following up quotes would often get missed,” he says.
Banks saw an opportunity to automate that administrative burden and teamed up with Luke Kelleher and Juan Castro to launch Sophiie AI, an AI operating system and receptionist built for trades and other service businesses.
What began as a basic AI receptionist for answering calls has since expanded into a platform that can handle emails, quoting, scheduling, job management, invoicing, text messages, chat and web enquiries.
“For us, it felt like this technology could level the playing field for small businesses.”
Since its launch in 2024, the Gold Coast-based company says it has reached seven figures in annual recurring revenue, grown its team and raised $5 million from venture funds and angel investors including Archangel, Admiralty Capital, Antler and Gandel Invest.
“Trades and service businesses represent one of the largest productivity opportunities for AI globally,” says Admiralty Capital founding partner Stuart Haslam. “We believe the company is exceptionally well positioned to become a global leader in this category.”
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