SouthStart festival of innovation, impact and imagination attracts business starters across Australia to Adelaide
Attendees at the SouthStart festival of activities in Adelaide for business starters across Australia. Below: Some of the sessions featured at the 2024 festival in March.
Images courtesy SouthStart
SouthStart proved itself Australia’s festival of innovation, imagination and impact with 500+ speakers, 10,000+ attendees and a collective of $30 billion invested business capital descending on Adelaide since the annual South Australian business startup event began in 2013.
SouthStart, based at Adelaide University, in 2024 again offered a multi-day experience, supported by the South Australian government to “create paths to global connections through an immersive syllabus of in-person masterclasses, conversations, investment connections, activations, wellbeing activities and regional escapades”.
SouthStart was founded in 2013 by Chhai Thach and Steve Barrett who also opened the first privately-owned coworking space, Majoran Distillery (“Majoran”), that hit a peak of around 60 residents. The team hosted three more conferences, with the 2016 event attracting around 600 attendees. (The 2023 festival had 1,300 with more than 50% from interstate.)
The Adelaide ecosystem was blossoming with communities such as Techstars, Startup Adelaide and TEDxAdelaide but, in 2017, Barrett and Thach decided to wind down SouthStart’s operations. While they struggled to secure recurring government funding, they believed SouthStart still had a place in the business startup ecosystem. Barrett was quoted in SmartCompany that he believed Adelaide lacked a “lighthouse” – somewhere for the city’s innovative endeavours to centralise.
In 2018, directors Danielle Seymour, Craig Swann and Jason Neave reignited SouthStart with a grant from the state government's Tech In SA programme. With a mutual interest and involvement in South Australia's startup ecosystem, they saw the festival’s potential to thrive against the backdrop of significant investment in the broader innovation ecosystem from the South Australian government – most significantly the Lot Fourteen innovation district on North Terrace, Adelaide city.
South Australia also offered cutting-edge experiences in important future business areas. Notably:
Artificial intelligence, cyber security & data analytics: Some of the world’s largest technology and professional services companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Accenture, had set up offices in Adelaide, The Ten Gigabit Adelaide initiative in 2018 gavemore than 1,000 buildings in the Adelaide city centre access to 10Gbps fibre-optic high-speed internet access, enabling AI-focused businesses like Consilium a competitive advantage. Adelaide also was home to the Australian Institute of Machine Learning, Australia’s first dedicated to research that area; MIT bigdata Living Lab, combining public, private and research sectors to analyse big data to inform economic decisions; and Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre.
Space, satellites & defence: The Australian Space Agency was based in Lot Fourteen with the SmartSat cooperative research centre and the Australian Space Discovery Centre. With space technologies underpinning many daily conveniences such as GPS, internet access and weather forecasting, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also has a strong team in Adelaide. One of the most successful satellite companies, Fleet Space Technologies, was backed with federal government funding.
Climate & clean energy tech: After becoming home to the world’s first big battery and other clean energy projects, South Australia had a state government showing strong intent on becoming a green hydrogen powerhouse.