By 2026, the Australian tech ecosystem has firmly pivoted from “fast follower” to global leader in specialized Artificial Intelligence. While Silicon Valley continues the arms race for general-purpose models, our team has identified a distinct trend of Australian founders building “Vertical AI”—deep, purpose-built solutions that solve high-stakes problems in healthcare, law, and defence.
We curated this list to highlight the innovators who have moved beyond simple “wrappers” to deploy autonomous agents and sovereign infrastructure, proving that the next generation of category-defining tech giants is being built Down Under.
Read also: 34 US startups to watch in 2026
Eyeonic
Eyeonic is an Australian health-tech innovator that effectively turns any standard computer or tablet into a medical-grade diagnostic device. With glaucoma standing as the leading cause of irreversible blindness globally, traditional testing has long been bottlenecked by the need for expensive, bulky perimetry machines found only in specialist clinics. Eyeonic breaks these physical barriers by utilizing a device’s webcam and advanced AI to track the patient’s head position in real-time, allowing for precise visual field testing from the comfort of home.
Unlike many “wellness” applications that lack clinical validity, Eyeonic distinguishes itself with rigorous regulatory backing, holding TGA approval and CE marking as a Class IIb medical device. Its software has been validated in peer-reviewed studies to rival the accuracy of industry-standard hospital equipment. By enabling high-frequency monitoring between clinic visits, the platform empowers ophthalmologists to detect rapid vision loss months earlier than standard protocols allow, potentially saving sight through timely intervention.
More about Eyeonic.
Haast
Haast is an Australian reg-tech startup acting as an “always-on” legal review team for digital marketing. In highly regulated industries like finance, insurance, and telecommunications, marketing agility is often stifled by the need for manual legal sign-off, creating a massive bottleneck. Haast eliminates this friction by using AI to instantly audit marketing assets—spanning text, images, and video—against complex regulatory frameworks (such as ASIC or ACCC rules) and internal brand guidelines.
What makes Haast unique is its “Compliance Firewall” capability, which protects brands across the entire content lifecycle. It integrates directly into creative workflow tools like Figma to flag risks before publication, while simultaneously crawling live websites to detect “compliance drift” in legacy offers. Backed by top-tier investors like AirTree and trusted by enterprise giants such as Telstra and Zurich, the platform reduces legal review time by up to 80%, allowing companies to market at the speed of e-commerce without risking costly regulatory fines.
More about Haast.
Harrison.ai
Harrison.ai is a Sydney-based health-tech powerhouse building “clinician-led” AI to solve the global shortage of medical professionals. With healthcare systems facing a massive “capacity crunch”—where patient demand outstrips the number of available doctors—Harrison.ai scales diagnostic capacity by acting as a high-precision “second pair of eyes.” Its flagship radiology platform (formerly Annalise.ai) automatically detects over 120 clinical findings on chest X-rays and brain CT scans, triaging urgent cases like strokes or bleeds so doctors can treat the most critical patients first.
The company’s “unfair advantage” lies in its unique Joint Venture model; rather than scraping public data, it partners with major medical networks (like I-MED and Sonic Healthcare) to train its AI on massive, proprietary clinical datasets. This rigorous approach has secured over 12 FDA clearances and adoption by over 3,500 clinicians globally—including 50% of all Australian radiologists. By automating the search for “normals” and highlighting complex pathologies, Harrison.ai doesn’t replace doctors; it gives them the superpowers to diagnose faster and more accurately.
More about Harrison.ai.
Heidi Health
Heidi Health is a physician-led AI company on a mission to eliminate “pajama time”—the exhausting hours doctors spend writing clinical notes after the clinic closes. With administrative burnout driving a global workforce crisis in healthcare, Heidi acts as an intelligent, ambient scribe. By listening to patient consultations in the background (with consent), it automatically transforms the dialogue into structured clinical notes, referral letters, and billing codes in real-time, effectively automating the “boring” part of medicine.
Unlike rigid transcription tools, Heidi’s “secret sauce” is its extreme customizability through “My Heidis,” which allows clinicians to teach the AI their specific writing style, templates, and preferred phrasing. This ensures the output requires almost no editing. Backed by top-tier investors like Blackbird and Ribbit Capital and adopted by thousands of practitioners globally, Heidi Health ultimately restores the doctor-patient connection, allowing physicians to maintain eye contact with their patients rather than staring at a computer screen.
More about Heidi Health.
Relevance AI
Relevance AI is driving the enterprise shift from “copilots” that assist humans to “autonomous agents” that act as digital employees. While standard generative AI tools simply wait for a user’s prompt, Relevance AI enables businesses to build a true “AI Workforce”—autonomous systems that proactively execute complex, multi-step workflows like outbound sales, deep market research, and customer support triage. Their low-code platform empowers non-technical domain experts to design these agents, effectively allowing a manager to “hire” infinite AI capacity for repetitive cognitive labor.
The platform’s core differentiator is its sophisticated orchestration capability, allowing users to build “teams” of agents that delegate tasks to one another—much like a human org chart. For instance, a “Manager Agent” can assign leads to a “Researcher Agent” before handing off the findings to an “Outreach Agent” for execution. Backed by King River Capital and Insight Partners, the Sydney-based startup has become a critical infrastructure layer for companies looking to move beyond simple chatbots. By equipping agents with functional tools—such as access to LinkedIn, CRMs, and web browsers—Relevance AI ensures that businesses can scale their operations 24/7 without linearly increasing headcount.
More about Relevance AI.
Rich Data Co (RDC)
Rich Data Co (RDC) is transforming the opaque world of credit risk with its “Explainable AI” platform, specifically designed to help banks lend to the notoriously complex Small-to-Medium Enterprise (SME) sector. While traditional credit models often act as “black boxes”—rejecting borrowers without clear reasons—RDC utilizes alternative data streams (such as real-time cash flow and accounting feeds) to build a holistic, accurate picture of a borrower’s health. This allows financial institutions to say “yes” to viable businesses that legacy scoring methods would otherwise exclude, effectively bridging the credit gap for growing companies.
The company’s defining edge is its “Glass Box” philosophy, which ensures every AI decision is fully auditable and compliant with strict fair lending regulations. By providing transparent “reason codes” for every approval or denial, RDC solves the regulatory “trust gap” that often stalls AI adoption in banking. With a deep strategic integration with banking giant nCino and backing from major players like Westpac, RDC is not just automating risk assessment but actively expanding financial inclusion by making credit decisions fairer and more transparent.
More about Rich Data Co.
Sapia.ai
Sapia.ai (formerly PredictiveHire) is an Australian HR-tech company that replaces the bias-prone resume screen with a “blind” chat-based interview. In high-volume industries like retail and customer service, recruiters are often overwhelmed by thousands of applications, leading to arbitrary filtering based on names or schools. Sapia.ai solves this by interviewing every applicant via an automated text chat. Its “Smart Interviewer” asks behavioral questions and uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to evaluate soft skills and personality traits without ever seeing the candidate’s face or name, ensuring that hiring is based on potential rather than pedigree.
The platform’s standout feature is its ability to turn the “black hole” of recruitment into a positive feedback loop. Unlike traditional processes where rejected candidates are “ghosted,” Sapia provides every applicant with a personalized “My Insights” profile—a coaching report on their strengths—regardless of the outcome. Trusted by major brands like Woolworths, Qantas, and Starbucks, Sapia has been shown to reduce time-to-hire from weeks to hours while significantly boosting diversity; one study found it increased the shortlisting of female candidates in male-dominated roles by 30%.
More about Sapia.ai.
SourseAI
SourseAI is an Australian decision intelligence company that helps telecommunications providers (Telcos) stop guessing and start predicting. In the hyper-competitive telecom market, operators often rely on backward-looking dashboards that show what happened—like a spike in churn—without explaining why. SourseAI’s platform, Atlas, plugs into an operator’s data to create a predictive model of customer behavior. It acts as a strategic “wargaming” engine, allowing executives to simulate the outcome of business decisions—such as a price hike or a new data plan—before they are launched, ensuring that every move maximizes profit and retention.
The platform’s key advantage is its specialized focus; unlike generic analytics tools, SourseAI comes pre-trained with industry-specific telecom models. This solves the “cold start” problem for challenger brands (MVNOs) like Boost Mobile and Lebara, allowing them to deploy sophisticated churn prediction and marketing mix modeling (MMM) in weeks rather than years. By identifying the precise “Next Best Action” for every subscriber—whether it’s a specific discount or a data bonus—SourseAI democratizes “Tier 1” data science capabilities, giving smaller players the predictive power to compete with industry giants.
More about SourseAI.
Trellis Data
Trellis Data is an Australian deep-tech specialist bringing “Sovereign AI” to the most sensitive sectors: defence, intelligence, and law enforcement. While the world rushes to adopt public cloud AI, national security agencies face a critical dilemma: they need advanced intelligence, but they cannot risk sending classified data to foreign servers or relying on internet connectivity in combat zones. Trellis solves this by building robust AI systems designed to operate in “disconnected” environments—running complex transcription, translation, and computer vision tasks entirely offline, from a secure server in a bunker to a ruggedized laptop in a field tent.
Their competitive edge lies in bridging the gap between cutting-edge generative AI and legacy tactical hardware. Their platform can integrate directly with military radios to provide real-time translation and transcription of voice communications, or search through terabytes of seized digital evidence without the data ever leaving the facility. By ensuring true data sovereignty and “Intelligence at the Edge,” Trellis Data provides a critical capability for nations to maintain technological superiority without compromising security.
More about Trellis Data.
Traffyk.ai
Traffyk.ai is an Australian “communications performance” platform that treats employee attention as a finite financial resource. In the age of hybrid work, the “productivity tax” of digital noise is massive; employees spend hours triaging notifications rather than doing deep work, and leaders often have no idea if their strategy updates are actually being read. Traffyk solves this by acting as a “Guardian” for the inbox. It integrates with tools like Microsoft 365 and Slack to analyze the cost of every message sent, calculating metrics like “Time to Read” and “Financial Impact” to show leaders exactly how much money is being wasted on ineffective internal spam.
Unlike standard analytics tools that just count open rates, Traffyk uses predictive AI to optimize the timing and format of communication. It can advise a CEO to delay an announcement until Tuesday morning for maximum cut-through, or flag that a specific team is showing signs of “digital burnout” due to excessive after-hours messaging. Founded by former Commonwealth Bank executives and backed by $1.8M in seed funding, Traffyk helps organizations move from “spray and pray” communication to a precision approach that protects employee focus and recovers millions in lost productivity.
More about Traffyk.ai.
Tactiq
Tactiq is an Australian productivity startup tackling the “meeting tax” that drains corporate efficiency. Professionals spend countless hours manually taking notes or trying to recall agreed-upon actions, often at the expense of participating in the actual conversation. Tactiq solves this by acting as an unobtrusive “AI Scribe” for Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams, capturing real-time transcriptions and instantly generating summaries, decision logs, and Jira tickets so users can focus on the discussion, not the documentation.
The platform distinguishes itself with a “bot-less” architecture; unlike competitors that require an awkward third-party bot to join the call as a participant, Tactiq operates discreetly as a browser extension that captures the native caption stream. This privacy-first, low-friction approach has driven viral adoption, with over 1 million users and backing from top-tier investors like General Catalyst. By automating the “memory” of an organization, Tactiq ensures that no critical insight or action item ever slips through the cracks.
More about Tactiq.
eesel
eesel is an AI-powered knowledge assistant that turns a company’s scattered documentation into a single, accessible “Oracle.” As organizations adopt more SaaS tools—from Notion and Confluence to Slack and Google Drive—employees waste hours simply trying to find where a policy or answer is buried. eesel solves this “information silo” crisis by indexing these fragmented sources and allowing users to ask questions in plain English (e.g., “What is our travel expense limit?”), instantly retrieving the correct answer with citations without requiring any data migration.
The platform distinguishes itself with a strict “privacy-first” architecture, addressing the primary enterprise concern regarding AI; it explicitly acts as a processing layer that does not use customer data to train public models. Originally starting as a popular browser extension with over 100,000 users, eesel meets employees where they already work—integrating directly into Slack, Microsoft Teams, and the browser—making it one of the most frictionless ways for teams to move from “searching” for documents to simply “knowing” the answer.
More about eesel.
Lumachain
Lumachain is an Australian computer vision company that brings digital transparency to the notoriously opaque and hazardous meat processing industry. While most supply chain tools track cardboard boxes on trucks, Lumachain installs AI-driven cameras directly inside abattoirs and processing plants to track the meat itself—cut by cut—in real-time. This solves the “broken link” in the food chain, allowing a steak on a restaurant plate to be digitally traced back to the specific animal and farm it came from, a level of granularity previously impossible in high-speed production lines.
Beyond traceability, Lumachain acts as an always-on “safety guardian” for factory workers. Its computer vision algorithms monitor the production floor 24/7 to detect safety breaches—such as a worker missing a protective glove or handling a knife incorrectly—and instantly alert management to prevent injuries. Founded by former Qantas CIO Jamila Gordon and backed by heavyweights like Bessemer Venture Partners and Chipotle (via its Cultivate Next fund), Lumachain is effectively digitizing the “paddock-to-plate” journey, ensuring that ethical sourcing and worker safety are verifiable facts rather than just marketing claims.
More about Lumachain.
Vervoe
Vervoe is an Australian skills assessment platform that flips the hiring script by prioritizing performance over pedigree. Traditional recruitment relies heavily on resumes, which are often poor predictors of actual job success and prone to unconscious bias. Vervoe solves this by allowing candidates to prove their ability through immersive “work simulations”—simulating real-world tasks like writing code, answering a customer support ticket, or drafting a sales email—before a human ever reviews their application.
The platform’s “secret sauce” is its proprietary AI grading engine, which evaluates thousands of open-ended responses instantly. Unlike standard multiple-choice quizzes, Vervoe’s AI can read text, analyze code, and even listen to video answers to rank candidates based on the quality of their output rather than keywords in their CV. Trusted by global enterprises like Walmart and Australia Post, Vervoe democratizes the hiring process, ensuring the best person gets the job regardless of their background while saving recruiters countless hours of manual screening.
More about Vervoe.
NexLaw AI
NexLaw AI is a legal technology startup designed to level the playing field for boutique law firms and solo litigators. Litigation inherently involves massive amounts of “grunt work”—analyzing discovery documents, building factual chronologies, and researching case law—which traditionally gives large firms with armies of junior associates a decisive advantage. NexLaw solves this inequality with a “Litigation-First” AI assistant that automates the heavy lifting of trial preparation. Its platform can digest thousands of pages of evidence to construct detailed timelines and draft complex motions, effectively compressing weeks of billable hours into minutes.
Unlike many legal AI tools that focus heavily on US law or transactional work (contracts), NexLaw distinguishes itself with a specialized multi-jurisdictional engine covering the Commonwealth (including Australia, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore). Its research core, NeXa, is engineered to eliminate “hallucinations” by providing answers strictly grounded in verified statutes and case law. Backed by the Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Global and the NVIDIA Inception program, NexLaw empowers smaller firms to punch above their weight, delivering “Big Law” quality outputs without the massive headcount.
More about NexLaw AI.
Lorikeet
Lorikeet is an Australian-American AI company building the next generation of “Agentic” customer support, moving far beyond the frustration of first-wave chatbots that simply recite FAQ articles. While traditional automation tools focus on “deflection”—keeping customers away from human agents—Lorikeet focuses on “resolution.” It acts as a fully autonomous concierge that can handle complex, multi-step tickets across chat, email, and even voice. By integrating deeply with backend systems like Stripe and Shopify, it doesn’t just tell a customer how to process a return; it authenticates them, checks the policy, and executes the refund itself.
The platform’s core differentiator is its strict adherence to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). In high-stakes industries like Fintech and Healthtech, hallucinating an answer is unacceptable. Lorikeet uses a specialized architecture that constrains the AI to follow approved workflows exactly as a human agent would, ensuring 100% compliance while still offering the fluidity of natural conversation. Recently backed by a $35M Series A led by QED Investors, Lorikeet is defining the new standard where AI is trusted to do the work, not just talk about it.
More about Lorikeet.
Affinda
Affinda is an Australian AI infrastructure company solving the “unstructured data” crisis that plagues enterprise software. It is estimated that 80% of global business data is locked inside human-readable documents—such as PDF contracts, invoices, and resumes—requiring armies of staff to manually key this information into databases. Affinda replaces this manual bottleneck with high-precision Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Using advanced deep learning rather than brittle templates, its API “reads” these messy documents to instantly convert them into structured, machine-actionable code, effectively giving business software the ability to read.
The company distinguished itself globally by building one of the world’s most accurate Resume Parsers, a notoriously difficult challenge due to the infinite variety of CV layouts. Unlike legacy OCR tools that struggle with columns and creative formatting, Affinda’s “Vesparum” engine uses Natural Language Processing to understand context, achieving near-human accuracy across 50+ languages. Trusted by major platforms like SEEK, Deloitte, and Wattpad, Affinda allows developers to embed this “reading comprehension” layer directly into their applications, automating data entry for everything from recruitment to accounts payable.
More about Affinda.
Isaacus
Isaacus is an Australian deep-tech company that positions itself as the “AWS for Legal AI.” While the market is currently flooded with “wrapper” applications that rely on generic models like GPT-4, Isaacus builds the underlying foundation models and infrastructure specifically trained for the legal domain. General-purpose AI often struggles with the strict nuances of legal retrieval—frequently missing critical precedents or hallucinating citations—but Isaacus solves this by providing the “picks and shovels” (specialized embeddings and classification APIs) that allow software vendors and law firms to build their own high-precision, reliable legal AI tools.
The company’s competitive edge lies in its “Kanon” model family, which reportedly outperforms industry giants like OpenAI on specific legal retrieval benchmarks (MLEB). By training on massive proprietary legal datasets (such as the Blackstone Corpus) rather than just generic web data, their models inherently understand the hierarchy of law. Crucially, Isaacus addresses the “sovereignty” barrier that stalls government and top-tier firm adoption by offering fully air-gapped deployments, ensuring that sensitive client data never leaves the user’s secure environment.
More about Isaacus.
Breaker
Breaker (Breaker Industries) is an Australian-American defence-tech startup building the “brain” for autonomous systems, effectively solving the “one pilot, one robot” bottleneck that currently limits military robotics. While most drones and unmanned vehicles still require a human operator to constantly manipulate a joystick and stare at a video feed, Breaker’s software enables a single person to command a mixed swarm of robots (air, land, or sea) using natural language voice commands over standard tactical radios. This allows a soldier to simply tell a drone to “scout that ridge,” and the AI interprets the intent and executes the mission autonomously.
The company’s critical differentiator is its “Physical AI” approach, where the intelligence runs entirely at the “edge” (on the robot itself) rather than in the cloud. This ensures that the system works in “disconnected” or jammed environments where internet connectivity is impossible—a non-negotiable requirement for modern combat and disaster response. Backed by Main Sequence Ventures and led by veterans from Anduril and DroneShield, Breaker is transforming robots from passive, high-maintenance tools into proactive teammates that can coordinate amongst themselves to achieve complex objectives.
More about Breaker.
Ninja AI
NinjaTech AI (Ninja AI) is a Silicon Valley innovator leading the shift from “Chatbots” that talk to “Agents” that work. While the first wave of Generative AI impressed the world with text generation, businesses have historically struggled to make these tools useful because they couldn’t securely interact with internal software or files. Ninja AI solves this interoperability crisis by championing the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a universal standard that acts like a “USB port for AI,” allowing their autonomous agents to instantly plug into and control enterprise applications like Salesforce, Jira, and Slack without requiring complex, custom integration code.
The platform’s “secret sauce” is its “Compound AI” architecture, which rejects the reliance on a single model. Instead, their agents intelligently route different parts of a task to the best available model—using Claude for coding, Gemini for massive context windows, or GPT-4 for reasoning—to achieve superior accuracy. Whether it is a “Deep Research” agent that autonomously browses hundreds of websites to compile a competitive landscape or a developer agent that refactors code in a secure, sandboxed virtual machine, Ninja AI provides the infrastructure for a true digital workforce. As a founding member of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), they are effectively building the operating system for autonomous work.
More about Ninja AI.
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