Meet a few extraordinary women who have the impressive task of driving SaaS in Australia and New Zealand.

These 9 women are powerful, relentless and are all making SaaS and tech in general a better place. They have impressive professional achievements, all the way from founding companies through to running international operations across continents. They are the stars in tech in Australasia.

Anastasia Volkova

Co-Founder & CEO | FluroSat

Anastasia’s passion is Earth observation, automation, and efficiency. To her nothing is more frustrating than inefficiency, especially on a global scale. She has a fascination for remote sensing which she believes will revolutionise the way we will manage our economies. Along with 3 degrees and a doctoral thesis on autonomous navigation systems she led a 370 people team for UEFA, workshopped with Airbus, managed software development teams for American/European companies, started her own web-development company and a successful event management start-up. 

FluroSat offers scientifically-proven solutions to compelling agricultural problems using state-of-the-art remote sensing technologies and data collected from airborne (drones) and satellite platforms. 

Annie Slattery

Co-Founder & CEO | ConX

Annie, who hails from Ireland, has been the driving force behind ConX right from the beginning. She wears many hats on a daily basis, from product to partnerships. Together with her co-founder Keith she was able to identify a huge problem in Australia in the construction sector and founded ConX. When asked about what she wished someone would have told her about starting a company, she said: “That it takes 10 years to become an overnight success and that it takes a lot of hard work and persistence to keep going. Nothing happens overnight.”

ConX is a platform built for construction contractors to simplify how they find and win work with a suite of tools to do takeoffs, manage tenders and hire a team. 

Fiona Boyd

Co-Founder & CEO | EdSmart

Fiona is passionate about using technology to empower relationships and a greater good. For the last decade she specialised in creating and leading successful businesses online that serve communities by solving big problems. As founder and CEO of EdSmart she’s dedicated to helping educators, parents and students worldwide by reducing costs, reducing risk and getting old fashioned paperwork out of the way to save huge amounts of time that can be reinvested into human connections.

EdSmart provides a School Organisation System (SOS) that helps educational institutions not only go paperless, but also handle their internal processes better. 

Georgie Drury

Founder & CEO | Springday

Georgie Drury is a self-confessed tech geek in trainers. Her two great passions are technology and holistic health. She combined them to create Springday, a company at the cutting edge of technology and wellbeing with an holistic approach on the five pillars of wellbeing: physical, emotional, social, financial and career.

Springday offers an easily accessible, cloud-based platform filled with sourced or in-house wellbeing programs, activities, tests and advice.

Kate Darby

Co-Founder | Dovetail X

An award-winning designer, Kate has worked across the industry from international agencies, freelancing and running her own successful design studio. Recently Kate was named in the “50 under 30 Oustanding Creative Women” globally by The Drum Magazine and “one of eight creative New Zealanders you need to know about” by Idealog Magazine. Kate can also be found hosting Design Work, a podcast about trailblazing creatives who are designing their work, lives and everything in-between. 

When she’s not fizzing over design-related stuff, she can be found making legendary cheese scones, exploring her beautiful backyard in New Zealand or front-left at a gig. 

Dovetail X is a talent workflow platform for creative agencies and brands that are powered by a marketplace. They are building the operating system for the project workforce so companies can assemble their own perfect-fit teams.

Lucy Yueting Liu

Co-Founder & President | Airwallex

Named one of Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30, Lucy oversees the ongoing business operations at Airwallex. Prior to founding Airwallex, she was an investment consultant a CICC and director of Hong Stone Investments Development. She is a recognised leader in the AU fintech community. 

Airwallex helps businesses make better international payments at scale. Lucy, along with co-founders Jacob and Jack, wanted to develop a technology that uses machine learning to determine the most cost-effective way of settling every payment that comes through the platform. 

Melanie Perkins

Co-Founder & CEO | Canva

Melanie Perkins likes to set “crazy huge goals and make them happen”. No kidding! Melanie raised one of Australia’s largest early stage investment rounds as CEO of Canva, a disruptive online design and publishing tool and she turned her ‘Future of Publishing’ idea into a SaaS unicorn.

Canva is an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone. Canva has been growing rapidly since its launch in August 2013 and is now empowering millions of people across from every corner of the globe to create great designs.

Natalie Nguyen

Co-Founder & CEO | Hyper Anna

Natalie Nguyen cofounded Sydney-based Hyper Anna, a data analysing software that taps into business intelligence and delivers real-time insights from natural language requests. As CEO she has built a viable beta product within 6 months and has raised over $12.5 million in funding. 

Hyper Anna is an Artificial Intelligence powered data analyst and companies can unleash data from a range of sources, such as customer interactions, finance, supplier activities and even, HR, to power changes that make an impact, such as upselling, revenue forecasting, and supply chain management. 

Tessa Court

Co-Founder & CEO | IntelligenceBank

Since the age of 16, Tessa knew she wanted to get into marketing – specifically, global advertising. After working in global advertising for several years she was one of those people that took the first leap to martech. If Tessa has one word to describe her work style it’s FAST – she says she takes multi-tasking to a new height. Her company IntelligenceBank has been growing between 50-70% per year and the company has the rare position of being cashflow positive nearly every year since launch.

IntelligenceBank is the leading marketing operations platform, helping content marketers seamlessly manage digital assets, creative approvals and compliance, marketing project management and creative distribution.