13 weeks ago, one of these startups did not even have a name. 3-November-2026, their founders took the stage at the Founder Institute Australia New Zealand (ANZ) Demo Day and presented to investors, mentors, and the broader startup community, each making a public commitment for the year ahead.
This cohort represented the second Founder Institute ANZ cohort of the year, and the online showcase served as the final milestone of the program. The evening included Ash a returning portfolio founder with impressive momentum agentive.au + two mentor keynotes filled with actionable guidance, and presentations from a new group of portfolio startups addressing everything from cyber security to modern dating.
Here is what took place, and which founders deserve your attention.
Benjamin emphasised what he calls the startup rule of one: solve one problem, for one customer, with one product that has a killer feature, ideally backed by one revenue stream. Founders tested this rule every week, receiving feedback from mentors, office hours, and their peers. Paul and Benjamin also created customised sprints for founders who needed them, such as gathering honest feedback from customers who were not just friends and family.
The founders benefited from a strong local community. The Founder Institute network across Australia and New Zealand includes over 440 mentors, and founders accessed more than USD $2 million in perks from partner organisations, including cloud credits from providers like AWS and Google Cloud. Rebecca Dooley, a corporate lawyer and partner at Australian law firm Addisons, and her team provided office hours and legal guidance as founders navigated the legal aspects of their startups.
The concept is straightforward. Many small finance practices still manually check records, often across two spreadsheets side by side, and hiring is expensive. Agentive connects to tools like Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Microsoft, and Google, stores data in Australia on a single-tenant setup, and keeps a person in charge of approving the work. Ash shared customer examples of bringing 333 invoices into Xero in 13 minutes, cutting a bank reconciliation from four hours to 20 minutes, and running a pay run in 20 minutes instead of six hours.
The growth since his own Demo Day is remarkable. Ash reported that Agentive has grown from seven customers to 48, from around $3K to roughly $30K in monthly recurring revenue, and from a team of two to six, all while still bootstrapping. He is now working toward his pledge of 100 customers.
He also offered a reminder for every engineer in the room. Mentors kept telling him to talk to customers and focus on one problem and one solution. In his words, he wanted to boil the ocean, and they told him to start by boiling the kettle.
Anne McGuire, who runs Atamai Advisory and has spent much of her career helping technology businesses scale their services operations, offered three key pieces of advice. First, stay close to the problem, especially as you fall in love with your solution, and watch what customers do as closely as what they say. Second, treat execution as part of the product, because what happens after someone says yes shapes whether they trust you and recommend you. Third, give yourself permission to change course. Updating your approach because the evidence tells you to is progress, not failure.
Graham Christie reminded founders that Demo Day is the starting line, not the finish line, and shared six ideas for moving from the structure of an accelerator into the uncertainty of the market. He urged founders not to confuse motion with progress, and to put most of their time into customer conversations and selling. He asked them to make selling repeatable with a weekly rhythm of conversations and follow-ups, to treat every "no" or "not now" as useful information, and to be passionate about the problem while holding their assumptions lightly. He also encouraged founders to give their supporters regular, candid updates, and to manage their energy for the long haul. His test for any task was a good one: will this make the boat go faster? Find Graham at thegoldenacre.com
Jess Miller and co-founder Kylie Hong are building HaiGui.co a dating and compatibility platform designed for people whose culture and values sit outside the Western mainstream. It matches people using their classical birth chart, combined with their own ratings of core values like family, career, education, money, and lifestyle. HaiGui offers paid birth chart and compatibility reports globally, and plans to launch its dating engine in Sydney in February 2027 before expanding to Melbourne, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond. Three months ago, the company did not have a name. It now has a co-founder, a working website, two revenue-ready products, and a waitlist that has gone well beyond expectations.
ShengMing Wu founded Omny ID, a wedding planning platform that helps couples manage workflows, compare supplier quotes, and handle follow-ups, so they always know their next decision instead of juggling spreadsheets. He is also working with vendors on one of their biggest pain points: preparing quotes, which can take a wedding venue up to an hour. His pledge is 100 users within two months and three vendor partners to prove the workflow from both sides of the marketplace.
Edward Frame founded Mind Match to help people find a partner and then keep the relationship strong. The app uses puzzles and challenges grounded in neuroscience to understand traits like communication style and how someone handles stress. Once matched, couples move to a relationship hub with a shared calendar, budgeting tools, conflict resolution exercises, and personalised puzzles. The iPhone app is live, with Android in development. Edward's pledge is at least 100 couples using the hub every month by 30-June-2027, along with an advisory board of relationship psychologists and counsellors. He is also looking for co-founders with app development, marketing, or senior executive experience.
Long Do, founder of Auschain and BlockID au, is building a trust layer for investors. With AI making polished pitches easy to produce, his platform scores startups on evidence rather than presentation, using an index of eight dimensions and 53 evidence checks powered by an agentic AI framework. Startups keep reporting results week by week, so the score stays tied to real progress. Long, a CTO of more than two decades, is raising $500K to go to market through angel networks first and is looking for a business co-founder to grow in Australia.
The next Founder Institute Australia New Zealand (ANZ) program runs from February to April 2027, and applications are open now. Ahead of it, the team is hosting a series of public events, a great way to meet the community and see how the program works before you apply.
If this Demo Day got you thinking about your own idea, apply to Founder Institute and you could be the one pitching at the next one.
Congratulations to every founder who made it to the finish line, and thank you to the mentors, partners, and community members who showed up for them.
This cohort represented the second Founder Institute ANZ cohort of the year, and the online showcase served as the final milestone of the program. The evening included Ash a returning portfolio founder with impressive momentum agentive.au + two mentor keynotes filled with actionable guidance, and presentations from a new group of portfolio startups addressing everything from cyber security to modern dating.
Here is what took place, and which founders deserve your attention.
The Path to Demo Day: How This Cohort Progressed
Co-Directors Benjamin Chong and Paul Krajewski opened the evening by sharing what the founders had accomplished. Over 13 weeks, the cohort moved through weekly company building sprints, progressing from vision and validation in the early weeks to traction and fundraising toward the end. A central theme was understanding what traction actually means for an AI-era business, and how that conversation shifts when talking with investors.Benjamin emphasised what he calls the startup rule of one: solve one problem, for one customer, with one product that has a killer feature, ideally backed by one revenue stream. Founders tested this rule every week, receiving feedback from mentors, office hours, and their peers. Paul and Benjamin also created customised sprints for founders who needed them, such as gathering honest feedback from customers who were not just friends and family.
The founders benefited from a strong local community. The Founder Institute network across Australia and New Zealand includes over 440 mentors, and founders accessed more than USD $2 million in perks from partner organisations, including cloud credits from providers like AWS and Google Cloud. Rebecca Dooley, a corporate lawyer and partner at Australian law firm Addisons, and her team provided office hours and legal guidance as founders navigated the legal aspects of their startups.
From Graduation to Growth: The Agentive Success Story
Before the new cohort presented, Ash Khalilian returned to demonstrate what happens after graduation. Ash completed FI Core 6 months ago and founded Agentive, which provides bookkeepers and accountants with an AI employee that learns their specific processes.The concept is straightforward. Many small finance practices still manually check records, often across two spreadsheets side by side, and hiring is expensive. Agentive connects to tools like Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Microsoft, and Google, stores data in Australia on a single-tenant setup, and keeps a person in charge of approving the work. Ash shared customer examples of bringing 333 invoices into Xero in 13 minutes, cutting a bank reconciliation from four hours to 20 minutes, and running a pay run in 20 minutes instead of six hours.
The growth since his own Demo Day is remarkable. Ash reported that Agentive has grown from seven customers to 48, from around $3K to roughly $30K in monthly recurring revenue, and from a team of two to six, all while still bootstrapping. He is now working toward his pledge of 100 customers.
He also offered a reminder for every engineer in the room. Mentors kept telling him to talk to customers and focus on one problem and one solution. In his words, he wanted to boil the ocean, and they told him to start by boiling the kettle.
Mentor Guidance for the Graduating Cohort
Two mentors shared reflections for the founders completing the program.Anne McGuire, who runs Atamai Advisory and has spent much of her career helping technology businesses scale their services operations, offered three key pieces of advice. First, stay close to the problem, especially as you fall in love with your solution, and watch what customers do as closely as what they say. Second, treat execution as part of the product, because what happens after someone says yes shapes whether they trust you and recommend you. Third, give yourself permission to change course. Updating your approach because the evidence tells you to is progress, not failure.
Graham Christie reminded founders that Demo Day is the starting line, not the finish line, and shared six ideas for moving from the structure of an accelerator into the uncertainty of the market. He urged founders not to confuse motion with progress, and to put most of their time into customer conversations and selling. He asked them to make selling repeatable with a weekly rhythm of conversations and follow-ups, to treat every "no" or "not now" as useful information, and to be passionate about the problem while holding their assumptions lightly. He also encouraged founders to give their supporters regular, candid updates, and to manage their energy for the long haul. His test for any task was a good one: will this make the boat go faster? Find Graham at thegoldenacre.com
Meet the Spring 2026 Startup Founders and Their Pledges
Each founder closed their pitch with a public pledge, so the community can check in on their progress a year from now.Empathos
Mark Panayiotis Notaras is the founder and CEO of Empathos, a trust intelligence platform that measures and strengthens trust inside teams. Drawing on two decades of leading teams across countries and industries, Mark built a science-backed, AI-assisted model that reveals a team's trust gaps, tracks change over time, and guides leaders through priority trust-building actions. The platform is hosted on AWS. His pledge is 20 paying clients and up to AUD $200k in revenue by June 2027, with a licensing product for leadership coaches to follow. Mark shared that the program helped him move from outreach through his own networks to receiving inbound inquiries, and pushed him into customer validation he might otherwise have avoided.Vigilense AI
Baljeet Singh, co-founder and CTO of vigilense.ai is building an AI security operations team as a service for companies with 50 to 200 staff that run on Microsoft and have no dedicated security team. It monitors, investigates, and responds around the clock, priced at $10 per endpoint. The company already has three paying customers and three pilots running, and is raising a $400K pre-seed round. Baljeet's pledge is 20 paying customers and more than $200K in annual recurring revenue by 3-November-2027. Founder Institute helped him sharpen his focus, moving from selling a tool to security chiefs at mid-market firms to delivering a service for IT managers who need 24/7 protection without a big budget.
HaiGui
Jess Miller and co-founder Kylie Hong are building HaiGui.co a dating and compatibility platform designed for people whose culture and values sit outside the Western mainstream. It matches people using their classical birth chart, combined with their own ratings of core values like family, career, education, money, and lifestyle. HaiGui offers paid birth chart and compatibility reports globally, and plans to launch its dating engine in Sydney in February 2027 before expanding to Melbourne, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond. Three months ago, the company did not have a name. It now has a co-founder, a working website, two revenue-ready products, and a waitlist that has gone well beyond expectations.
Omny ID
ShengMing Wu founded Omny ID, a wedding planning platform that helps couples manage workflows, compare supplier quotes, and handle follow-ups, so they always know their next decision instead of juggling spreadsheets. He is also working with vendors on one of their biggest pain points: preparing quotes, which can take a wedding venue up to an hour. His pledge is 100 users within two months and three vendor partners to prove the workflow from both sides of the marketplace.
Mind Match
Edward Frame founded Mind Match to help people find a partner and then keep the relationship strong. The app uses puzzles and challenges grounded in neuroscience to understand traits like communication style and how someone handles stress. Once matched, couples move to a relationship hub with a shared calendar, budgeting tools, conflict resolution exercises, and personalised puzzles. The iPhone app is live, with Android in development. Edward's pledge is at least 100 couples using the hub every month by 30-June-2027, along with an advisory board of relationship psychologists and counsellors. He is also looking for co-founders with app development, marketing, or senior executive experience.
BlockID Au
Long Do, founder of Auschain and BlockID au, is building a trust layer for investors. With AI making polished pitches easy to produce, his platform scores startups on evidence rather than presentation, using an index of eight dimensions and 53 evidence checks powered by an agentic AI framework. Startups keep reporting results week by week, so the score stays tied to real progress. Long, a CTO of more than two decades, is raising $500K to go to market through angel networks first and is looking for a business co-founder to grow in Australia.What Comes Next for Founder Institute Australia
The support does not stop at Demo Day. As Benjamin explained, Founder Institute and Loyal.vc can provide capital to founders after FI Core, and the FI Venture Network helps founders as they work toward closing a Series A round.The next Founder Institute Australia New Zealand (ANZ) program runs from February to April 2027, and applications are open now. Ahead of it, the team is hosting a series of public events, a great way to meet the community and see how the program works before you apply.
If this Demo Day got you thinking about your own idea, apply to Founder Institute and you could be the one pitching at the next one.
Congratulations to every founder who made it to the finish line, and thank you to the mentors, partners, and community members who showed up for them.
