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5 days ago | 
forbes.com.au | Josh Lai |Mark Whittaker |Shivaune Field
As loyalty programs surge in popularity across Australia, one fintech start-up is helping businesses tap into the benefits. Pay.com.au is turning everyday expenses into airline points and premium perks - and has just banked $18 million to prepare for its expansion into the US. Few countries embrace loyalty programs quite like Australia.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Mark Whittaker |Suzanne Rowan Kelleher |Shivaune Field |Anastasia Santoreneos
Scenic World and the Hammon family took on some of Australia's wealthiest and won. Here's how they grabbed the keys to BridgeClimb - and what they did next. When Anthea Hammon declared she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, her older brother David felt an enormous weight lift. He was off the hook.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Grace Chung |Anastasia Santoreneos |Shivaune Field |Mark Whittaker
Women everywhere from China and the U.S. to Indonesia and Russia have broken many glass ceilings, thanks to everything from coal and collagen to software and soy sauce. It's never been a better time for women entrepreneurs - at least by the numbers. There are now an estimated 658 million female founders and company owners worldwide, compared to 772 million men, per the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Shivaune Field |Mark Whittaker |Josh Lai |Chloe Sorvino
With CEO Silvija Martincevic and CFO Emma Seymour at the helm, Deputy became one of Australia's newest tech unicorns in 2024. Now, the female-led company's shift work platform powers 1.5 million workers across 375,000 workplaces worldwide - redefining the future of frontline work. CEO Silvija Martincevic is decked out in designer duds and sits high up in a corner office with views over the financial district of San Francisco. She is a long way from where she started inlife.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Shivaune Field |Rebecca Thurlow |Mark Whittaker |Hank Tucker
The Harbour City's startup scene is valued at $55 billion in Startup Genome's 2025 Global Startup Ecosystem Rankings. Melbourne's ecosystem value is a third of that at $18 billion, but has risen seven spots in the rankings in the last three years. Sydney has Canva, Employment Hero, and Immutable. Melbourne has CultureAmp, Airwallex, and Stake. The longstanding rivalry between Australia's two most populous cities is well-known.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Mark Whittaker |Mike Ozanian
Best known for his beard and ubiquitous vans, Jim Penman has quietly built a franchising giant, while funnelling profits into a scientific mission. When Jim Penman's PhD thesis was rejected in 1982, his thoughts of a career as an academic historian were dashed. Instead, his mind went to the long game. He just needed to get rich to fund the research to prove the naysayers wrong. He'd already spent 12 years at university, mowing lawns furiously at weekends to support himself at $5 a lawn.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Josh Lai |Mark Whittaker
Forbes Australia picks out three Aussie entrepreneurs who are making waves in the startup space right now. Liveheats When former Queensland junior champion and World Surf League surfer Chris Friend (pictured) met software engineer Fernando Freire in the Bondi surf, they bonded over a shared love of sport and a mutual frustration with how disorganised competitions were. Over a post-surf beer, they landed on a simple solution - to build an app that would streamline the experience.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Ian Sayson |Stewart Hawkins |Mark Whittaker
Amazon will invest A$20 billion ($13 billion) in the five years through 2029 to build data centres in Australia amid growing demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications. The spending-the biggest investment from a global technology provider in Australia-will hasten AI adoption across the country, boost productivity and modernise the IT infrastructure for Australian entities, Amazon said in a statement over the weekend.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Shivaune Field |Mark Whittaker |Richard Nieva |Stewart Hawkins
The fastest-growing unicorn to emerge from Australia, Airwallex, has raised over $1 billion and serves 150,000 customers worldwide. Lucy Liu - the co-founder and investor - wrote a $1 million cheque, giving rise to a company now valued almost 10,000 times that. Ten years ago, Lucy Liu sat down at a Collins St, Melbourne restaurant, and promised Max Li and Jack Zhang a $1 million cheque.
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1 week ago | 
forbes.com.au | Sarah O'Carroll |Phoebe Liu |Shivaune Field |Mark Whittaker
Jony Ive and Steve Jobs. Perhaps the greatest product design duo of our time. Together, they gave us era-defining products that changed how we live and work. Jobs, however, often credited Ive with much of Apple's success because he believed tech could be functional and beautiful. His eye for design was why users fell in love with the sleek curves, elegance and simplicity of the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. After nearly 30 years as Apple's design guru, Ive stepped away in 2019.
