Australia Proptech Is Down Under the Radar

Proptech startups in Australia may not yet be a blooming onion locally or globally, but they are gaining traction while awaiting a kangaroo-level leap in financing.

Australia boasts a growing number of proptech startups, most of them focused on residential property, according to entrepreneurs and investors there. However, Australia’s proptech investment system falls short of the expectations of company founders when compared to that of the U.S. or Europe.

“Australia is a much smaller market than the U.S. in terms of population, as well as the availability of capital and the number of startups,” said Carolyn Trickett, who is a Sydney-based growth principal at JLL Spark Global Ventures, the venture capital arm of JLL. “It’s not the same hotbed of innovation as Silicon Valley and the U.S. market. There is a lot of activity here, though. I do some work with Proptech Australia. It’s a membership association that was launched in 2020 specifically to represent the proptech startup companies and help them find their way in the industry and support them in any way possible.”

In 2023, Proptech Australia mapped about 470 Australia-based proptech companies, said Trickett. That number has now grown to more than 500, the majority of which are focused on the residential market.

“I think that’s probably the same in any region,” Trickett said. “It’s easier to build a tech company that’s focused on residential than it is to build one that’s working with the commercial industry. It’s just such a higher bar and a bigger market. Your product needs to be much more mature before a commercial real estate company will consider using it. So it’s hard work.”

Most of Australia’s proptech efforts are internally focused, with construction the fastest-growing vertical, she said. However, breaking beyond the country’s borders is a difficult barrier to clear.

“The time difference alone makes it difficult for companies from here to work in other regions,” said Trickett. “I think it’s especially difficult for an Australian company to break into the U.S. market. You need a lot of capital and a lot of staff to support a move into another region, and that’s not just the U.S. — it’s in Asia Pacific. It’s hard to work across different countries. They’re all very localized.”

Most business by necessity comes from within Australia itself or from New Zealand, which itself can be a three-hour flight.   

“It’s easier to cross the Tasman Sea than it is to break into an Asian market or the U.S. market,” said Trickett. “And, even all the Asia Pacific countries have a very localized market with local customs, language, and generally just a different way of doing business in each country. So it’s much more common for a startup company here to be focused on their local region and have more difficulty moving beyond that.”

Whether onshore in Australia or off, venture capital and other types of investments are an issue for proptech firms too, said Trickett.

“For a startup company here in Australia, the idea that if you can attract U.S. capital, that’s a major gold star,” she said. “If you can get capital from one of the big U.S. venture firms, then you’re really starting to make it.”

Investors from outside Australia have put “a toe in the water” there, she added, noting that JLL Spark has not yet made an investment in the Land Down Under. “One of our investments, [London, U.K.-founded] Re-Leased, is probably the closest, and that’s based in New Zealand. They’re a good example of a very small company that started out and has broken into other markets. Their biggest market still is in the U.K., and since Spark invested in them, they’ve now broken into the U.S. market as well.”

Australia-based proptech firms that can get U.S. capital have a much better launching pad to operating in the States. “I think that is seen as the holy grail for many of the startups here — to jump across the Pacific,” said Trickett.

One prominent Australian venture capital firm is the Sydney-based Taronga Group, which bills itself a global investor in technologies that impact the built environment.

Jonathan Hannam, co-founder and managing partner at the Taronga Group, sees a more dynamic proptech startup scene emerging in the country. The investment firm’s portfolio is 25 percent Australia-based, with another 25 percent invested in Asia, 39 percent in North America, and 11 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“In the past, many Australian technology companies looked to the U.S. for expansion,” Hannam said in an email. Among such firms are the Melbourne-based companies REA Group, a global company that supports residential acquisition and construction efficiency; Pexa, a digital property exchange platform; and the Tarongo-backed Activepipe, an email marketing company acquired by MoxiWorks in 2022.

Other Taronga-backed proptech startups that have entered the U.S. market are Allume, an energy distribution hardware that enables multiple apartment or commercial tenants to share a single rooftop solar system; Presien, with which John Deere partnered to deliver AI-powered safety and productivity technology for its 2025 Collaborator Program; Spacecube, a Taronga portfolio company and a modular building system; and Taronga-invested PowerStack, a modular solar pole system for residential and commercial real estate.

Founded in 2015, Taronga has taken advantage of the nation’s growing construction sector to also invest in Australia-based startups like CarbonCure, a technology trying to permanently embed recycled CO2 into concrete; construction management Hubble; and Trendspek, which uses drones to capture 3D digital images of buildings’ exterior conditions for better asset management.

“From a corporate perspective we have seen quite a significant shift in many of our corporate partners,” he said of the Australia real estate market. “Over the past two years they have been very focused on climate technology and resilience. We are now seeing that many are focusing on driving asset level outcomes — how to create new revenue streams from existing assets and also manage assets more efficiently.”

Overall, Taronga has invested in about 35 companies, he said.

“Many wealthy individuals have made significant amounts of money from real estate and it is a major topic around the BBQ,” said Hannam. “This then extends into interest into property-related technology and thus there is quite a lot of angel- or seed-level capital that can support earlier-stage companies, either through high net worth or family offices, or from companies that make direct investments.”

Outside interest in the Australia real estate market from proptech entrepreneurs has built a foundation as well.

Companies like Agora, a Tel Aviv-based, digital real estate investment management platform, and Sydney-based PropHero, a generative AI real estate wealth management platform, have founders whose startups began elsewhere, but have expanded to Australia.

French-born Mickael Roger, co-founder and CEO of PropHero, fell in love with Australia when he visited years ago to surf. He ended up staying for eight years. With a background in AI, he realized there was a great opportunity for proptech in Australia, where PropHero made its home base.

“What surprised me about, and is very special about, Australia is that real estate is part of the local culture,” said Roger. “Everyone is into real estate. Twenty percent of Australians own several investment properties. It’s just insane — one of the biggest markets in the world for real estate investors. And what really struck me is that being very far from everything, there is limited competition in Australia, so margins are high, which allows most players to invest a lot in innovation. You’ve got quite a few big players in proptech, which are honestly best in class in terms of capabilities, in terms of AI, and in creating marketplaces. It’s really part of the culture.”

That culture has its advantages in terms of technology adoption.

“In Australia, you can get mortgage pre-approval in a few minutes,” said Roger. “In Europe, it can take several weeks to settle a property. In Australia, it can take just a few days, because everything is for DocuSign and through fully automated services. People are more used to using technology, and quite a few big players have changed the game to make it very digital and very data driven.”

Roger highlighted a number of Australia-based proptech companies that have done well, including Archistar, ActivePipe, OwnHome, RealEstate, Domain, RP Data (acquired by CoreLogic in 2011), and the EV charging-focused Ohmie Go.

“The proptech market in Australia is growing fast, however it has one major drawback, which is that startups typically plateau at the seed to Series A stage,” said Roger. “And because local VCs are relatively small, it means that if Australian startups want to grow beyond that, like to Series B and C, either they indeed go to the U.S., they stay at a small scale, or they get acquired by foreign players.” 

More recently, in February, Agora co-founder and CEO Bar Mor announced that his proptech firm was expanding its presence in the Australian market with teams in Sydney and Melbourne, a first step in a broader expansion after conducting a company roadshow in the country last year.

Among Agora’s clients in Australia are Go.Farm Australia, Arcana Capital, Harbour Credit Partners, and Stara.

Mor sees the dominance of the nonbank lender (NBL) market in Australian real estate, as compared to lending practices in countries such as the U.K. and the U.S., as a unique opportunity for what his firm does.

“A lot of these big loans are actually not provided by the banks, but are being provided by NBLs,” said Mor. “There is a very large industry of these NBLs. Some of them are smaller, some are larger. They raise capital from private equity firms, from investors, from institutional firms, and then they use this capital in order to provide debt for real estate projects as the first mortgage. Essentially they are providing an alternative to a bank. That’s something that is pretty unique to Australia. I haven’t seen it anywhere else in the world.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.