EW&L Insights
4 February 2026
For decades, the global tech narrative has been shaped by spectacles like the charismatic founder, the futuristic pitch, the consumer app that “reinvents” daily life.
Meanwhile, Australia has quietly built something different and arguably more durable. This new generation of founders is creating deeply resilient, globally scalable businesses by focusing on something Silicon Valley often ignores: The operator-turned-founder who targets the dull, regulated, operationally messy problems that keep industries running.
Across early-stage venture, the highest-performing companies are veering away from building entertainment apps or trend-chasing consumer products and instead are focussing on the software that holds industries together. Industries like:
- Compliance tools.
- Cyber and privacy systems.
- Procurement platforms.
- Operational infrastructure.
- Specialist workflow automation.
It’s unglamorous. It’s essential. And increasingly, it’s where some of the best risk-adjusted outcomes are coming from.
The Global Rotation: From “Nice-to-Have” to “Must-Have”
A useful leading indicator is where early-stage capital goes when markets tighten. In 2023, Carta’s data showed consumer’s share of seed funding fell to 7%, the lowest share on record in their dataset and the first time it dropped below 10%. That is the market, in aggregate, voting for durability over novelty.
The underlying logic is simple:
- Consumer products often rely on discretionary spend and attention economics.
- “Boring” enterprise software earns revenue by embedding itself into operations.
- Embedded workflows are hard to unwind and create high switching costs and low churn.
This is why the “boring-but-essential” thesis is proving to be pro-cashflow, pro-retention, pro-mission-critical.
Australia is Producing an Unusual Number of High-Quality Founders
The Australian venture ecosystem used to be small, fragmented, and undercapitalised. But something changed. Founders today are entering the ecosystem with stronger technical backgrounds and deeper domain experience.
The result? A landscape where founders solve real problems because they’ve lived them.
This is why Australia punches above its weight: we produce operators who choose to take their expertise to become entrepreneurs.
Startup Muster reporting (as covered in Australian innovation media) found the average age of an Australian startup founder is 47, almost half have prior founding experience, and three quarters of startups primarily sell to business customers (B2B).
A separate Startup Muster 2025 summary reinforces the same underlying profile: founders are generally well educated, disproportionately B2B, and increasingly building with AI while still oriented toward solving practical problems rather than chasing consumer virality.
This matters because founder-market fit is often mistaken for “domain knowledge.” In practise, it’s closer to domain scars (lived exposure to inefficiency, regulation, and operational risk).
Those founders don’t romanticise entrepreneurship. Instead, they opt to treat it as applied problem-solving.
That’s exactly what we heard in recent interviews on The Exchange.
In a recent discussion between Charles Troian, EW&L Private Wealth Adviser, and Matthew Browne, Managing Partner of Black Nova, described their strategy plainly: backing “mission-critical enterprise” businesses that don’t grab headlines but do become infrastructure.
In a separate conversation between Nathan Denchman, CTO and Co-Founder of ProcurePro, and EW&L Private Wealth Adviser Mitch Finnen, story is the on-the-ground version of the same thesis: a pivot away from what sounded interesting, toward what customers couldn’t function without.
The “Workflow Wedge”: Why Boring Businesses Build Real Moats
There’s a repeatable pattern in these durable companies:
- Start with a painful workflow no one wants to touch.
- Replace spreadsheets, email chains, and manual approvals.
- Become the system of record for a core operational process.
- Earn renewal economics that behave more like infrastructure than software.
The strongest proof of this model is retention.
Morningstar’s analysis of WiseTech’s CargoWise highlights gross retention over 99% per year since 2013 — extraordinarily rare in software — and explicitly ties that performance to switching costs and entrenchment.
That is what “boring” looks like when it wins: a product so embedded that leaving is operationally irrational.
This is precisely the type of business Browne described from his own experience building enterprise software: churn is minimal because the change-management cost is often higher than the subscription line item.
“In my first enterprise software business, we churned one or two customers over an entire decade. When companies buy infrastructure software, they keep it because the cost of change is often worse than the cost of staying,” shares Browne.
Case Study: Construction Procurement Isn’t Sexy. But It Can Be a Goldmine.
If you want to understand the “boring is beautiful” thesis in one example, look at construction procurement. Founded by a team with deep technical capability, the group behind ProcurePro initially built a product in legal technology. When COVID disrupted that market, the founders didn’t cling to the original idea. Instead, they listened and made a strategic pivot.
By engaging with construction companies, they uncovered a stark reality: while construction had adopted technology in many areas, procurement remained largely manual — spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and high error rates.
Denchman explains:
“Construction companies don’t actually have a contract negotiation problem. They have a procurement problem. For a typical commercial project, there might be 50 to 70 trades, and procurement alone can take around 40 hours per trade. It’s a huge administrative burden and incredibly risky.”
This is a structural productivity leak in an industry that shapes the real economy.
And that’s the point: “boring” sectors often hide enormous addressable markets precisely because they are large, fragmented, compliance-heavy, and historically under-software’d.
The founders made a hard call: shut down the original product and start again. Three years of work was effectively written off. What mattered was solving the right problem.
Today, ProcurePro’s mission is to eliminate a billion hours of construction administration by embedding software directly into the procurement workflow. It is now backed by leading institutional investors, including the family office of an Aconex co-founder — a reminder that Australia’s prior enterprise successes are increasingly reinvesting into the next generation.
The Macro Tailwind: Cybersecurity and Compliance Are Now Non-Discretionary
If you want a second proof point that “must-have” enterprise spend is resilient, consider security.
Gartner projected worldwide end-user spending on information security would reach US$213B in 2025, up from US$193B in 2024, and continue growing into 2026.
And IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach reporting highlights how expensive failures have become, with 2024 reporting noting a major increase in global average breach costs (and related publications citing a global average in the high single-digit millions).
This is why categories like cybersecurity, governance, identity, compliance automation, and privacy tooling attract sophisticated capital.
Enterprise buyers don’t “pause” security forever. They may sequence projects, but the spend is structurally sticky, which is why these companies often behave differently in downturns than discretionary tech.
Australia’s Capital Reality: Scarcity Creates Better Businesses
Australia’s venture market is frequently mischaracterised as “behind.” A more accurate framing is "more disciplined."
Cut Through’s State of Australian Startup Funding (2024) reported $4.0B raised across 414 deals, up 11% year-on-year, with activity concentrated in fewer mega-rounds and a market that still rewards defensible fundamentals.
Their quarterly reporting also shows the character of the market: solid deal activity, fewer huge rounds, and rising early-stage valuations in specific pockets (notably AI and deep tech), while large late-stage cheques remain comparatively scarce.
In practise, this scarcity creates two effects that matter:
- Founders learn capital efficiency early (they have to).
- Businesses are often built to survive.
Browne made a similar point from an investor’s lens: the Australian ecosystem produces companies that prove themselves locally and move offshore early, but do so with a discipline shaped by tighter funding conditions.
This is one reason Australia repeatedly produces globally relevant enterprise winners despite having a smaller venture pool.
The National Context: Why “Boring” Tech Matters More Than It Seems
There’s also a bigger picture here. Australia’s economy has structural constraints:
Australia’s gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) in 2021–22 was estimated at $38.8B and 1.68% of GDP, below the OECD average of 2.7%.
You can interpret that as a weakness or as a prompt to focus on what Australia can do exceptionally well:
- identify operational pain in real industries,
- build software that commercialises practical innovation, and
- export it globally.
This is why enterprise founders building “unsexy” infrastructure aren’t just creating venture outcomes. They’re building exportable capability in a world where productivity and resilience are becoming strategic objectives.
The Durability Premium
Australia’s edge is increasingly clear:
- founders with deeper operational experience,
- capital discipline baked in early, and
- a pipeline of large, under-digitised industries where software can become embedded infrastructure.
The next decade’s standout companies won’t be defined by how loudly they announce themselves. They’ll be defined by how deeply they solve problems that still exist ten years from now.
