Techboard’s Australian Startup + Tech Mapping Project

We are excited to release our first ever national startup and tech map. While we have previously published maps of the Western Australian landscape, this is our first national attempt. We believe it is one of the most ambitious visual mapping exercises conducted of the Australian startup space to date, and so we’re naturally excited about it. It is not perfect. There are noteworthy companies not included in the map, and (hopefully not too many) embarrassing omissions.

The map is not supposed to be exhaustive - try putting 2,000+ company logos on a map in any meaningful way! What it does show, is around 300 Australian companies, categorised along two axes. Even putting 300 companies on a map is a challenge – busy is an understatement. The map is designed to be zoomed in and out of, as you drill in to the different clusters.

Here is some context to help explain our approach. We started this a while ago when we had closer to 2000 companies in Techboard Directory (we now have over 2250 live profiles). All of the companies in the Techboard Directory are categorised by us into up to three out of forty three categories.   The categories selected for the two axes were to maximise the number of intersections while trying to keep the document more usable. We excluded any company which didn’t sit within at least one category on each axis. This is perhaps a little arbitrary however the purpose of the exercise though, is to highlight applications of specific technologies to specific sectors, and highlight clusters, or areas of concentration of Australian tech. And perhaps, in some cases, even areas of saturation.

The map highlights areas with little or no coverage. We believe there will be a startup out there who fits in each cross-section of this map – we just haven’t identified them yet. Who’s applying Location & mapping to defence? Who’s doing VR in the resources sector? Who is applying AI or data analytics in the Edtech space? We welcome any suggestions on any of these.

Some takeaways:

• There are over 400 marketplace startups on Techboard, of which we’ve include over 100 in this map, highlighting three main clusters: People Solutions (20!), Property (16) and Fintech (15).
• There are over 80 artificial intelligence startups, and we’ve captured about half of these on this map, covering  a broad range of applications, in particular health & biotech and adtech & martech.

We welcome the Techboard (and broader) community to get in touch with feedback on the map and any notable omissions. Your contributions are valuable - this map is made available for free to the community, and so let’s keep it as relevant as possible for everyone’s benefit.  We may be updating this map in the future or finding a better way to map Australia’s startups and young tech companies. We would love to hear suggestions on how improve the map or better software for creating such a map.

Rafael Kimberley-Bowen
Co-founder

Techboard is a data focused company.

Techboard has the best current data searchable data available on the Australian Ecosystem.  We have had a tendency to talk down what we have because it is not yet quite comprehensive... we may have less than 50% of overall startups on Techboard (we have over 2250 active profiles of an estimated 5,000 + startups in Australia) ... but realistically we probably have over 90% of higher profile companies, the ones raising capital and otherwise making headlines. In addition to the information visible in the company profiles on the Techboard Directory we collect traction and growth data on these companies.  We are very keen to explore collaborations with anyone who is interested in utilising our data to enrich any reports or studies they are undertaking, for opportunity identification, due diligence or for any other purpose.