Aussie startups in the media

29 May 2013 - Alexie Sellar has worked as a mechanical engineer in project management and was recently the acting energy hub coordinator for Engineers Without Borders NSW. Now she's helping people living in India's slums by giving them access to affordable solar lighting.

The 15-hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney is a rough one for humans, but it's even more difficult for money. When it comes to fundraising, Australian startups really feel the pain of geography. Not that many American investors make the long schlep across the Pacific.

There's a gap in Australia's venture capital sector as big as the Outback. While the country has enough serial entrepreneurs and angel investors to be able to support young companies at the seed stage and enough interest from large national institutions and American VCs to flesh out the big growth rounds, anything in between falls into a void.

Zimmi has bulging, expressive eyes, a cutesy little giggle, and he farts in nine different ways. If you tickle Zimmi's nose, he'll sneeze; if you feed him a chili pepper, he'll turn red in the face; and if you flip him up and down a few times, he'll throw up all over the screen.

For Australian textbooks startup Zookal, the journey to a $1.2 million seed round started with a question on Quora. The young company's founders had exhausted their fundraising options in Australia, and they were preparing for a trip to Silicon Valley.

A few years ago, Mike Cannon-Brookes was invited to speak to a student entrepreneurial society at a Sydney university. The co-founder of Atlassian, one of Australia's most successful software companies, showed up to the venue in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt. One of the workers who was setting up the venue mistook him for IT support.

Last week, I wrote about an Australian entrepreneur who sold an ad-serving company to 25/7 Media for $75 million only to see its value evaporate in the dotcom crash. He then built up a search engine marketing company that he eventually also sold to 24/7, this time for $30 million when the Internet industry was in recovery.

You might have heard of Ninja Blocks. The Sydney-based startup first came to the world's attention last year with one of the most successful pre- Pebble hardware campaigns on Kickstarter.

As the native frameworks for trying apps before you buy them remain wedded to screenshots and written descriptions in the App Store or Google Play, independent developers are pushing ahead with a better model.

THEY'RE young, they're rich, and they're taking the technology world by storm. Over the next two weeks, news.com.au will be introducing you to some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and offering you the chance to win $1000 and a BlackBerry 10 phone when you vote.

Start with a problem and find the solution, that's where success lies. That's the advice of 27-year-old tech entrepreneur David Truong, and he can teach you a thing or two.

This is the advice of Greg Taylor, the owner and co-founder of apps such as eCoffeeCard which lets you store and redeem all of your coffee loyalty cards in the one place, and Clipp, which enable users to pay for their bar tab or restaurant bill directly from their phone.

THEY'RE young, they're rich, and they're taking the technology world by storm. Over the next two weeks, news.com.au will be introducing you to some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and offering you the chance to win $1000 and a BlackBerry 10 phone when you vote.

MELBOURNE game developers Matthew Clark, 27, and Simon Joslin, 28, had $200 in the bank when they launched their first smash hit Train Conductor, which was one of six prototypes they developed in 2009 alone.

Searching for a different life, they put their creative heads together and since 2009 have created dozens of apps in their spare time - without writing a single line of code - and make about $500 a day in revenue before they've even gone for a surf.

Tech entrepreneur says people shouldn't develop ideas for money Believes work needs to be fun He runs a company of more than 750 employees worldwide "IF you're in this business to make money, I'm absolutely not interested." This is the stern advice of Mike Cannon-Brooks, the CEO of Australian multi-million dollar software company, Atlassian.