Mark Whittaker
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Articles by Mark Whittaker
From Synchron to Australian Ultra Bionics
Published on October 20, 2026 Co-founder, CTO and board member of Synchron, Nick Opie. When Nick Opie was helping lead the world in developing a brain-computer interface that could remain in humans for years, he was already thinking about the next frontier. As co-founder of Synchron, Opie had helped design and build technology that allowed people with severe paralysis to control a digital device using just signals from their brains.
How a Sydney professor built an AI army to scam the scammers
Published on October 19, 2026 This story features in Issue 25 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Dali Kaafar centre with Brad Joffe (left) and Peter Eckermann. The day that Dali Kaafar decided to start a company that unleashes an autonomous army of AI bots to take on the trillion-dollar global scam industry began like any other. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in spring.
A word from our Editor-in-Chief: Why luxury is digging into its past
Published on October 12, 2026 This editor’s note features in Issue 25 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Issue 25 is out now. His answer was simple: horsepower is easy; brand is difficult. That is why the brand is so important, along with the heritage behind it. He said, “Simply building a better car is no longer enough. We will not be successful simply by building better cars. We must build a better brand.” It’s something I hear more and more when talking to people running luxury houses.
How Arkeus crossed defence tech’s ‘valley of death’
Published on October 6, 2026 An Arkeus system at work For all the money Australia pours into defence innovation, there is a stubborn gap between building a piece of military technology and getting the Australian Defence Force to use it.
Alex Fevola on slow-scaling Runway Room and why AI won’t replace the beauty counter
Published on October 2, 2026 Alex Fevola founded Runway Room in 2012 and has built the business into a 150-SKU product line and a special event make-up service. Image: Alex Fevola The heavy grey storm clouds mute the shopfront windows on Armadale’s upscale High Street, but inside Runway Room the mood is bright and polished. Alex Fevola, wearing white, moves with practiced ease around the director’s chair, applying her signature base to my face under lighting calibrated for makeup precision.
The $200 million CBD gamble: inside the Australian biotech betting on a cannabis pill
Published on September 25, 2026 The Promethean production line. Australia legalised medicinal cannabis almost a decade ago, but the country has yet to approve a single CBD medicine for ordinary pain. Peter Comerford thinks he has found a way to change that. His Sydney-based Promethean BioPharma has developed a THC-free CBD tablet that it says delivers far more of the cannabis compound into the bloodstream than conventional CBD oils.
Welcome to the mammosphere
Published on September 19, 2026 PremieHealth founders Kevin Nicholas and Julie Sharp. | Image: Supplied For millions of years, marsupials have been solving a problem that human medicine is only now beginning to understand: how to tell a premature baby when to grow. Now two Melbourne scientists think they can use what they’ve learned about that to dominate a $2 billion a year market. Marsupial babies are born extraordinarily underdeveloped.
Drugging the undruggable. The Melbourne biotech taking on the world
Published on September 12, 2026 Ternarx’s executive team and scientific advisory board, from left: John Silke, Dianna McKiernan, Dr Lee Booty, Dr Bekky Feltham, Dr Bernhard Lechtenberg and Dr Joanne Boag. | Image: WEHI For most of modern medicine, the basic job of a drug has been simple: find the protein causing the problem and block it. But New Scientist declared in May that we’ll look back on 2026 as the year that all changed. A new class of drugs, PROTACs, have come on the scene.
A $1.3 billion event is coming to Australia. And ‘nobody is ready’
Published on September 5, 2026 Men’s Rugby World Cup Australia 2027 coming to Australia. When Australia Rugby last hosted the Rugby World Cup in 2003 it attracted 1.84 million spectators. This included 60,000 international supporters, 2,500 foreign media personnel and 2,500 corporate visitors and business executives. The FIFA Women’s Football World Cup in 2023 attracted 87,000 international visitors to Australia.
Lürssen launched unprecedented 6 new superyachts in 2026
Published on September 3, 2026 O3 is one of six new superyachts that Lürssen has delivered in 2006 (Tom van Oosanen) That’s simply because Lürssen has delivered six, that’s right, six full-custom, one-of-a-kind, impossibly complex, staggeringly large and expensive superyachts—ODISEA, DEEP BLUE, BOARDWALK, O3, NAUSICAÄ, and NIXIE this year. Together, they represent one of the most diverse collections of yachts ever delivered by a single shipyard in a single year.
Jaeger-LeCoultre names actor Robert Pattinson global ambassador
Published on September 3, 2026 Robert Pattinson, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s New Global Ambassador (Jaeger-LeCoultre_ An advertising and marketing campaign featuring Pattinson is scheduled to debut in mid-September. Pattinson says he is a genuine admirer of fine watchmaking and the artistry behind mechanical timepieces. “For me, the most compelling objects are the ones that have real depth to them,” Pattinson said.
Casella’s whisky bet gets down to a single barrel
Published on September 2, 2026 Morris of Rutherglen head distiller, Darren Peck, owner John Casella, and chief winemaker, Madden Morris. Now that bet has produced its rarest bottle yet: a single-barrel whisky from which just 270 bottles will be released, at $298 each. The Morris Single Barrel Sherry Cask has spent six years maturing in a single ex-Sherry cask at Rutherglen in northern Victoria, and is being bottled at cask strength of 51.8% ABV.
‘You can’t eat pixels’: Why Duxton’s Ed Peter is betting on real things
Published on August 21, 2026 Ed Peter outside Duxton headquarters in Adelaide. Ed Peter was looking at a financial model of his company’s apple orchards when his eyes fell on “pollination costs”. Something was amiss. He went up to one of his young analysts and patted him on the shoulder. “You’ve got this wrong,” Peter recalls saying. “Your model’s fucked. Pollination costs can’t have tripled in three years.” The analyst stood his ground.
The two Aussies who helped secure the internet, and never made a cent from it.
Published on August 21, 2026 SSLeay founder Tim Hudson, now president of OpenSSL. The first sign Tim Hudson had that his cryptographic software had arrived was when he bought a new dishwasher in 1998. The code written by his friend Eric Young and him was embedded in the whitegood. “We wrote this stuff,” he remembers thinking. “Why is it in my dishwasher?” It is difficult to overstate the importance of what Young and Hudson had done. In Brisbane. in their spare time.
Fat Zebra, the fintech that refused to run with the unicorn herd
Published on August 18, 2026 This story features in Issue 24 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Fat Zebra founder Pred Dragila. | Image: Harry Hayes Pred Dragila was spinning discs at nightclubs. But the retrenched banker’s thoughts and conversation were consumed by electronic payments and by why merchants found it so darn hard to do them.
South is the new north as the bottom of the Goldie enjoys a moment
Published on August 17, 2026 The Humpback Highway. 250 whales are said to swim past the Gold Coast every day in season. | Image: Cooly Eco Adventures “Go! Go! Go! Go!” yells Haley the swim guide as she slips off the side of the rubber ducky. But there’s a moment of hesitation as my brain questions the logic of jumping into the Pacific Ocean 14 kilometres from land. But “go” I do – into an ocean that now looks a deeper, darker blue than I’ve ever seen before as we scan the depths for whales.
South is the new north as the bottom of the Goldie enjoys a moment
Published on August 17, 2026 The Humpback Highway. 250 whales are said to swim past the Gold Coast every day in season. | Image: Cooly Eco Adventures “Go! Go! Go! Go!” yells Haley the swim guide as she slips off the side of the rubber ducky. But there’s a moment of hesitation as my brain questions the logic of jumping into the Pacific Ocean 14 kilometres from land. But “go” I do – into an ocean that now looks a deeper, darker blue than I’ve ever seen before as we scan the depths for whales.
How a regional cookie start-up won over Qantas and a shot at $14 million
Published on August 16, 2026 This story features on the cover of Forbes Australia: Issue 24 . Tap here to secure your copy. Cooee Native Superfoods A million Qantas passengers will this year unwrap a biscuit designed to solve one of the food industry’s thorniest problems: catering to multiple dietary requirements – vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free etc.
The new rules of influence: How Australia’s top creators turn followers into fortunes
This story features in Issue 24 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Sweat founder Kayla Itsines. | Image: James Evans When Kylie Jones was retrenched in 2024, she was told she was too old to understand social media or artificial intelligence. Two years later, the 53-year-old single mother has built an audience of 1.1 million Instagram followers, embraced AI as a business tool and joined a generation of female Australian creators turning themselves into media companies.
How Sam Kennard built his family’s storage business into a $4.5 billion empire
After a staff revolt exposed deep cultural flaws, Sam Kennard transformed a modest family storage business into a $4.5 billion property powerhouse built on growth and reinvention. This story features in Issue 24 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Sam Kennard opens his emails one morning early in his life as a CEO to find an angry grenade of a message from a disgruntled employee pointing out all that is wrong with his company. She has sent it to the entire Kennards Self Storage organisation.
How Australia can become a superpower of ‘disenshittification’
Published on July 30, 2026 Cory Doctorow says Australia could lead the charge against “enshittification”. Image: Jonathan Worth Cory Doctorow is sympathetic to the aims of the Australian government – and that of his native Canada – in attempting to take on social media giants by clawing back revenue for news publishers and in slapping age bans on social media. But, he argues, their solutions have been wildly problematic.
The Sydney startup hiding inside a magic speakeasy
Published on July 22, 2026 The current Black Ties line-up, clockwise from top left: Julian Yu, Aadi Mishra, Scott Zhou, Fung Ng, Clement Kwok and Peggy Liu. There are no signs outside. No neon lights. No promises of impossible illusions. Just an anonymous warehouse in Sydney’s inner south, where guests wait on the street until ushered into a dingy lobby and with close-up tricks – then told they’ve found one of the city’s best-kept secrets.
He sold software that didn’t exist. Now it’s a $6.5 million business
Published on July 17, 2026 Mybos founder and CEO Sam Khalef. Armed with only printed screenshots of what his dream would look like, Sam Khalef would use his spare time from being an apartment complex caretaker to nip out and try to sell his software dream to other building managers. “I printed it out on paper because it wasn’t live yet,” Khalef says of the software’s earliest incarnation. “I thought the only way I could market this product was to go out and door knock.
Revealed: The highest paid ASX-listed CEOs
Published on July 16, 2026 Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls. Image: Supplied There are some familiar company names in the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) 2026 ASX CEO Pay report. BHP makes an appearance, as you would expect, as does Wesfarmers, and CSL. For the first time, however, the Australian CEOs who earned first, second, and third place are running dual-listed US and ASX-traded companies.
This Brisbane biotech startup just raised a record $450 million
Published on July 16, 2026 AdvanCell CEO Philina Lee, left, at the company’s Brisbane facility. AdvanCell the US$315 million (about AUD$452 million) Series D round is believed to be the largest fundraise by a private Australian biotech. The money will fund Phase-3 development of its lead prostate cancer therapy, ADVC001, and expand manufacturing in the United States. The deal was led by Hong Kong and New York based Ally Bridge Group and New York-founded Alpha Wave.
How two cancer survivors turned a spice into a $10 million supplements business
Published on July 13, 2026 Kurk Founders Trent Scanlen and Harrison Weisinger. Trent Scanlen and Dr Harry Weisinger have vowed to party on Ibiza for Trent’s 100th birthday in October 2076. It’s what you’d expect the founders of a supplements company to say. But should they get there, it would be all the more remarkable for both having survived non-Hodgkin lymphoma in their 30s.
This former elite swimmer built a $300 million property empire in six years
Published on June 28, 2026 Glenn Piper, founder and CEO of Epochal, at the group’s Merewether Hotel, Newcastle. Glenn Piper’s first investment kitty came courtesy of Swimming Australia. The 17-year-old backstroker had broken national age-group records and the $10,000 was meant to support his training.
Carla, Allegra and me: Bianca Spender on fashion, family, and finding space
Published on June 24, 2026 This story features in Issue 23 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Bianca Spender When Allegra and Bianca Spender shared a bedroom growing up, the extrovert, perfectionist Bianca felt the need to put masking tape down the middle of the room to protect her side, and especially her clothes, from the chaos of her quieter, more contemplative little sister. “I was messy, and she was tidy, and it was exhausting,” recalls Allegra.
Meet the sisters reshaping one of Australia’s fastest rising wine brands
Published on June 22, 2026 This story features in Issue 23 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Patricia Brown had a little corporate culture hack. She’d heat the teacups in the oven so hot that the brew would be too scalding for her sons – the eponymous Brown Brothers – to gulp down in their daily meeting. Patricia might not have appeared in any corporate chart, but she was the cultural glue of the company for two generations, says Emma Brown, the daughter of one of those brothers.
Keep your colleagues close, and your babies closer
BubbaDesk founder Lauren Perrett. This story features in Issue 23 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Jessie Glew had barely settled in as a first-time CEO when she found herself facing a personal crunch. Her ASX-listed company, WOTSO, was set to double its co-working spaces in the next two years. And she was pregnant with her first. “I have never had a more existential crisis than that moment,” Glew recalls. “How the heck am I going to do this?” WOTSO CEO Jessie Glew.
Why Tim Cahill is backing a startup that wants to reinvent sportswear
Published on June 19, 2026 Nardo founders with Tim Cahill in Doha. Tim Cahill has just become the first Australian to kick a goal at the football World when he gets a call from Giorgio Armani Armani’s people. They want to meet. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m heavily into fashion. It was one of my weakness during my career, along with cars,” the Socceroos great tells Forbes Australia.
Marc’s father died without warning. Now investors value his startup at almost $500 million
Published on June 17, 2026 Everlab co-founder and CEO Marc Hermann. Everlab has raised $65 million at a valuation approaching $500 million, marking what appears to be Australia’s largest medtech capital raise of the year, cementing the Melbourne-based preventive healthcare startup as one of the country’s fastest-growing tech companies. For co-founder and chief executive Marc Hermann, however, the company’s mission began long before investors were writing eight-figure cheques.
Swipe right: Meet the self-made billionaire trying to fix how the world gets hired
Published on June 15, 2026 This story features on the cover of Forbes Australia: Issue 23 . Tap here to secure your copy. Jane Hussey remembers meeting Katrina Leslie in 1994 – two women in their 20s, solid Aussie accents, on the way up. They just clicked, and at that very first meeting, Hussey asked Leslie, then Westpac’s 27-year-old head of human resources, what her big-picture goals were. “I’m going to have five children,” said Leslie.
First look inside Patty Cripps’ longevity bet
Published on June 14, 2026 Cameron Falloon, left, with Stille investor Patty Cripps. | Image: Supplied Patty Cripps spends plenty of time thinking about how to squeeze a few more years out of his AFL career. The 31-year-old Carlton captain has increasingly found himself using red-light therapy, hyperbaric chambers, saunas and ice baths in pursuit of better recovery, more energy and peak performance.
The Aussie biotech betting on life after Ozempic
Published on June 13, 2026 Myopharm CEO Karinza Phoenix Karinza Phoenix hasn’t found it hard raising the $6 million that’s got her biotech firm, Myopharm, onto the fast-track approval process for its Type 2 diabetes drug. “How many times do I present to these high-net-worth individuals and they say, ‘I’m a poorly controlled diabetic’,” Phoenix tells Forbes Australia. “They know what’s coming.
Why Phil Kearns quit the ASX for a country concrete startup
Published on June 11, 2026 Phil Kearns. Image: Getty Former Wallaby great Phil Kearns was no great fan of Scope 3 emissions requirements and all the other rigmarole he’d had to go through as CEO of listed building company AV Jennings. That’s why, when he learned on the golf course about a local company making emissions-free concrete, the idea was instantly appealing.
He watched drone operators drown in data. Now his start-up is worth $100 million
Published on May 15, 2026 Arkeus founders Simon Olssen, left, and Dr Jonathan Nebauer Arkeus has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by QIC to scale its AI-powered “eyes and brain” sensing systems. The Melbourne-founded deftech company says its “hyperspectral optical radar” can detect targets up to eight times further than existing military optical systems in degraded conditions. Arkeus plans to use the money to manufacture in Queensland and the US.
‘The status quo has a cost’: Why CBA and BHP leaders say doing nothing is your riskiest bet
Published on May 12, 2026 Geraldine Slattery, President Australia at BHP, and Susie Grehl, Executive General Manager, Wealth and Private at Commonwealth Bank. Image: Jay Patel for Forbes Australia When Geraldine Slattery was making her way up through the ranks at BHP, her mentors encouraged her to take an authoritative stance, display strength, “and for heaven’s sake, never admit you don’t know something”.
One injectable gel, five medical markets: inside Australia’s most versatile medtech
Published on May 10, 2026 Tetratherix co-founders Ali Fathi and Will Knox Tetratherix grabbed the market’s attention in March when it announced its patented polymer was going to be used for the slow release of GLP-1 inhibitors, peptides and hormones. Its share price surged on its linkage to these fashionable molecules, fell and is surging again after the $3 million-a-year deal with Superpower Health Inc was announced on March 16.
‘Extraordinary price to pay’: The personal toll of being Elon Musk’s ‘censorship commissar’
Published on May 6, 2026 Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. Image: Forbes Australia When eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was branded Australia’s “censorship commissar” by Elon Musk in 2024, the fallout came fast: 75,000 posts in 24 hours, 80% of them toxic, against her and her children.
‘No bigger story than this, mate’: The $5 billion man Australia forgot to notice
Published on April 28, 2026 Perdaman founder and chairman Vikas Rambal. Vikas Rambal can’t believe that nobody seems to have heard the stories about what he’s built. First, he was one of two twenty-somethings who came to Australia from India in 2000, raised US$320 million, and built Australia’s first ammonia plant, that was then the world’s largest. While that ended in tears, the now Perth-based engineer and entrepreneur is at it again.
This Tough Mudder liked Spartan Race so much he bought the company
Published on April 22, 2026 Realm Investment House co-founder Rob Camilleri who was ‘one Souvlaki away from a heart attack’. Rob Camilleri was “probably two souvlakis away from a heart attack”. He’d stacked on weight after giving up smoking, been diagnosed Type 2 diabetic four years later, and was close to 150kg by 2016. “You go to a doctor and they’re just always giving you another tablet, then pat you on the back, ‘Go do some exercise’,” Camilleri tells Forbes Australia.
Predictions of Crack Growth Rates, R-Ratio and Overload Effects Based on Smooth Specimen LCF Data and the Moving Plastic Stress Field Ahead of the Crack Tip
You are already at the latest version Previous work has attempted, often within the framework of strip yield-type models, to predict crack growth rates based on the accumulation of fatigue damage ahead of the crack tip as it moves through a structure. This study performs similar calculations using results from plastic 2D plane stress analyses run on a finite element (FE) model containing a sharp semi-circular notch representing an edge crack.
Ben Young felt like the ‘dumbest guy in the room’. Now he runs a $100 million bottle empire
Published on April 20, 2026 This story features in Issue 22 – out now. Tap here to secure your copy. Frank Green founder and head of the hare-brained scheme department, Ben Young. Frank Green founder Ben Young remembers his corporate baptism of fire – working mergers and acquisitions for the emerging energy giant Alinta back in the noughties. The company had an inspirational CEO, Peter McGarry, Young recalls. “They wanted to know that this business strategy team that I was in had the lights on.
Sydney startup raises $5m on the tech that found downed pilot
Published on April 13, 2026 Deteqt COO Rupal Ismin, left, CEO and co-founder Dr Jim Rabeau, and co-founder Professor Omid Kavehei Deep-tech start-up Deteqt has raised AU$5 million to develop its chip-scale “quantum magnetometer” [sensor] that is small enough to steer a drone. The seed round was led Main Sequence, with backing from ATP Fund, BOKA Capital, Beaten Zone Venture Partners, Uniseed, and the University of Sydney.
The billionaire who stayed in the background
The opportunity to roll out the Macquarie playbook in the US was vast - and largely untapped. Thanks to government tax exemptions, the US lagged well behind Australia in the privatisation of infrastructure such as roads and airports. For those who understood the model, it was open ground, and for Dorrell, it turned into a bonanza.
Australia's $12.5 billion man you've never heard of
From a 25-year-old Macquarie banker sent to crack America's infrastructure market to the founder of a US$72 billion powerhouse, Michael Dorrell has quietly built one of the world's most successful investment firms - and is now turning his sights back to Australia. Trent Vichie is on edge. No surprise there. But he is shocked to see his Stonepeak co-founder, Michael Dorrell, sweating bullets. "It's the only time I've ever seen Mike nervous," recalls Vichie.
This 23 year-old's new AI data company has already hit a $100 million run rate
When the Winter 2025 deadline for famed startup incubator Y Combinator approached, Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu, who were both still in college, pulled together an application in 48 hours. They didn't have a product. They had a destination: San Francisco. The plan was to ride the AI wave, in the most literal sense, and decide what to build once they arrived.
How to keep a business in the family for 177 years
From a bruising family buyout to a sustainability revolution, Yalumba's Hill-Smith family is playing the long game. Robert Hill Smith doesn't shy from the word "ambush" to describe what he did with his cousins - his friends - when he gathered them at a house in the Yalumba "Compound" to tell them he wanted to buy them out of the business.
Sydney uni dropout behind $432M startup teams up with Beckham to outsmart aging
Max Marchione is leveraging a $43 million Series A round and a $432 million valuation, alongside an alignment with David Beckham's supplement company, to scale preventative longevity. When Max Marchione was a Commerce/Law undergraduate student at the University of Sydney, he weighed up the pros and cons of making a life-and-career-changing decision.
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