Launching ANZ's First AI Builder Coworking Residency

Introducing Builder Club: the best builders of ANZ in one place. The best founders not only dream, but also make them come true... by building.

We are launching Builder Club to bring this spirit to Australia.

And season 0 kicked off 2 weeks ago! Since then, we've had 86 build updates, 2 sessions and over 400 hours of build time across our cohort of 40.

Want to join? Say hi to our WhatsApp community here.

And if you are serious about building, come build with us on Sunday here and apply to our Slack here.

[#1: 5 min read]

What's happened so far?

We welcomed our oversubscribed cohort of 40 fellows

Our fellows are top tier AI Engineers and Founders, coming from both industry and startup backgrounds e.g., Atlassian, Tesla, Canva, and Palantir. All fellows have the ambition to accelerate time to launch and build an AI Startup in 6 weeks. With ~100 applications for the program, the Season 0 cohort was highly competitive.

During the course of the program, fellows co-work in real life and participate in weekly internal "build" demos to gather feedback on startup progress. We also have a full stack panel of expert mentors we will be announcing in our next update.

Our induction event held at the Aura Ventures offices was sponsored by Databricks and also had a special guest appearance from Alex Brogan. We also had a fireside chat on AI Agents and adoption in the enterprise setting with Jacky Koh (founder of Relevance AI) and Dr. Michael G. Kollo as part of the program kick off. You can read Michael's write up about the discussion topics here.

Kicked off "build" coworking hacker sessions in Sydney

The program differs from other accelerators, with the emphasis placed on curating the environment for "building" and 🤝 peer : peer support.

"The environment that's been created is so special, it's literally the top 1% of the Sydney AI talent coming together, it reminds me the time I spent in SF. You won't be able to have this level of discussion in any other curated community". - Fellow

We are seeing synergies already, with new founding teams being formed, tech stacks being debated and knowledge share across peers.

Here's a few highlights from the builder session:

And we ran a surprisingly high number of workshops in two weeks

A few highlights including:

• Partnering with GitHub 🤖 and SydWeb3 (NextGenius) to hold a workshop on Github Copilot and Codespaces at Haymarket HQ. You can view the full recording of the workshop here

• We ran a RAG, LLM infra and fine-tuning round table discussion with 10 fellows before our build session. This was spearheaded by our fellows Joe Anthony and Nissan Dookeran. You can read and contribute to our collaborative Google document here. We will continue to open-source resources like this as the program progresses🚀!

• 400+ hours of building and coding... and many more to come

What's ahead?

Over the coming weeks, we will give an inside peak into ongoing workshops, launch our investment memo series to spotlight the 40 AI startups in the program 🚀 and showcase some serious Slack Banter.

Stay tuned!

To finish off this update, here's a nice snippet of us "building" while watching the Matildas kicking .

Want to get involved?

You can get involved with our WhatsApp community here to stay up to date and join any of our open upcoming events here (including Demo day). If you are a startup founder or AI enthusiast, apply to be a part of our Builder Slack community here ♥.

A huge thank you 💌 to our program sponsors and partners: Fishburners, GitHub, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Startups, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft for Startups, Databricks, Stripe, SydWeb3, Marqo, Relevance AI, Aura Ventures, Mutinex, Sahha, Heaps Normal