Sydney is rarely mentioned alongside San Francisco and Tel Aviv as a software hub. The combined market capitalisation of Australian-headquartered software companies — led by Atlassian, Canva, WiseTech and Xero — argues that the omission is well overdue for correction.
Atlassian, founded in a Bondi office in 2002 by two University of New South Wales graduates, is now one of the most widely used enterprise software companies in the world. Its products run inside, by company estimates, more than three-quarters of the Fortune 500.
A bench, not a single name
Below Atlassian sits Canva, the design platform whose user base — most of it global, much of it acquired in the last four years — has put it firmly into the ranks of the world's largest privately held technology companies.
Below Canva sit names that are, to the Australian general public, less familiar but to enterprise customers every bit as significant. WiseTech moves freight. Xero handles the accounts of small businesses across multiple continents. Together they make a portfolio whose breadth is unusual for a country of Australia's size.
Why this isn't widely understood
The reasons Australia's technology bench is poorly understood are partly geographic and partly cultural. The companies in question have, for the most part, deliberately built around an international customer base — meaning their growth has been, from the start, less visible to the Australian press than to the American.
"Australia's tech sector is large. It just isn't local."
The next ten years
The interesting question, looking forward, is whether the next layer of Australian software companies will follow the same outward orientation. Several recent series-B and series-C raises suggest they will. The talent pool, partly trained inside the existing giants, is now large enough to support founders who would once have moved to the Bay Area.
Whether that trajectory continues will depend, as much as anything, on whether the country's policy settings — research and development tax incentives, employee share schemes, immigration rules — keep pace with what is, by global standards, an unusually capital-efficient industry.
