Geospan, Superstat and eight other Australian AI startups join Airwallex’s inaugural Latitude 37 cohort, gaining funding, mentoring and global network access.
Airwallex has launched Latitude 37, a new program backing young Australian AI founders with equity-free capital, alongside global network access, mentoring and international immersion trips.
Each cohort of more than ten founders receives AUD $100,000 in non-dilutive funding, access to Airwallex’s global network across more than 100 countries, an immersion tour through Airwallex’s San Francisco and Singapore offices, and exposure to the company’s AI infrastructure. Named after Melbourne’s latitude, where Airwallex was founded in 2015, the program sits under Airwallex Impact, the company’s global Pledge 1% commitment.
Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang, writing on the company’s blog, said the funding was structured to protect founders’ ownership at the point in a company’s life when it’s most vulnerable.
“The capital is equity-free because the first year is when ownership gets given away cheapest and protected the least. I want these founders to keep theirs,” Zhang wrote.
Betting on young founders
Zhang framed the program as a response to a shift in who can realistically start a technology company, pointing to how quickly AI has lowered the cost of building software.
“AI is not a feature, a trend, or a marketing layer you bolt onto an existing product. It is a fundamental rewiring of how software is built, how businesses operate, and how value is created,” Zhang wrote.
He argued this shift extends beyond traditional tech founders to a much broader range of business owners.
“We are about to see an explosion of entrepreneurs of every kind, solo founders, two-person teams, restaurant owners who can now run their finance operations with one AI agent instead of one finance team, designers who become product companies overnight,” he wrote.
Equity-free, by design
Zhang also positioned the program within a broader argument about Australia’s position in global technology, describing the country’s small domestic market and geographic position as advantages rather than limitations.
“The domestic market is small enough that Australian founders are forced to think globally from day one. And our position at the crossroads of Asia and the West gives our companies a natural bridge to the fastest-growing economies on the planet,” Zhang wrote.
He said Airwallex’s own experience building from Melbourne, without early access to Silicon Valley networks or capital, shaped that view.
“We had no big home market. We had to acquire licenses across dozens of jurisdictions and go global from day one. We weren’t part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, so we had to do many things in hard mode including raising capital, finding product-market fit, and recruiting,” he wrote.
Ten companies, one cohort
The inaugural Latitude 37 cohort includes AXIOMS, founded by Manu Masson and Lochlan Hill, which builds networks of AI agents, and Blank Robotics, founded by Jed Hoo and Anirudhh Ramesh, which develops modular robots for grocery retail.
Also included is Dreamscale Labs, founded by Eric Ren, Chris Yoo, Antoine Nguyen and Kevin Lin, which builds cloud inference infrastructure for robotics, and Forward, founded by Daniel Yoon, Riley Janjis and Darryl Luo, which applies AI to structuring private credit deals.
Geospan, co-founded by Julia Tan and Beau Hobba, uses real-time road hazard detection aimed at improving safety for connected and autonomous vehicles. The remaining cohort spans Kronus, which builds safety-critical software for aerospace and industrial systems, Polarbear AI, an edtech startup, SeatFinder, which helps travellers navigate flight bookings and loyalty programs, Superstat, which turns sports game footage into performance analytics using computer vision, and SyncPay, which attaches transaction records to individual payments.
Zhang said the broader goal was to ensure a meaningful share of the next wave of AI-native founders build from Australia rather than relocating.
“I want a meaningful number of them to be Australian. I want them to know that someone believes in them before anyone else does,” he wrote.
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