Meet the inaugural Foundry Fellows

Today we’re introducing the first class of the Foundry Fellowship: 12 exceptional technical people exploring problems across AI, robotics, materials, health, quantum and space.

We built Foundry, and now the Fellowship, on a specific bet: the biggest barrier for the most technically brilliant people we meet has never really been money. It's belief, and knowing what your actual options are. Knowing what paths exist, who to talk to, and whether founding a company, joining one, or staying in research with a different lens is the right call for them right now.

The Fellowship gives engineers, mathematicians, researchers and builders direct access to the founders, operators and investors building frontier tech companies across Australia and New Zealand. They will spend time with Blackbird’s investors and work alongside a small group of equally ambitious technical people. The Fellows are people who run hard at difficult problems, care deeply about where their talent can be most useful, and feel the itch to build something that matters.

Meet the first twelve:

Alexander Frisina
Alexander is designing new catalysts and materials for a more sustainable industrial future.

Ali Ashrafy
Ali is building better robotic actuators so anyone can build capable robots without starting from zero.

Andy Yin
Andy is using deep mathematics, software and AI-assisted reasoning to open up new ways of seeing hard problems.

Annabel Sorby-Adams
Annabel is exploring what it would take to build a brain-healthy society, and the technologies, companies, and systems needed to get us there.

Bruce Changlong Xu
Bruce is researching ways AI can move from learning about the world to learning from it.

Kay Song
Kay is exploring ways of turning Australia’s raw materials and technical talent into a world-class materials innovation engine.

Nicole Wong
Nicole is pushing robots beyond rigid loops toward genuine spatial intuition in the physical world.

Nika Teran
Nika is working to bring photonic quantum devices out of the lab and into the real world.

Peter Shan
Peter is exploring new ways for AI to reason under uncertainty, from poker to more complex strategic systems.

Rohan Mirchandani
Rohan is rethinking how reinforcement learning can become easier to use and more useful in practice.

Rose Naji
Rose is working to expand access to space and exploring what humanity can build beyond Earth.

Seamus Thomson
Seamus is building the sensing and hardware needed to make predictive, AI-driven healthcare real.

The Foundry Fellows join a growing community of people who have taken the leap from technical depth into company-building - from Iceberg Quantum, Unsloth, Andromeda, On Zero, Cell Bauhaus and many more. 

When we started Foundry, we set out to prove that technical talent, backed early, can build category-defining companies and change the trajectory of an entire ecosystem. Across six cohorts, 56 teams have raised more than $73 million and generated over $397 million in enterprise value, showing just how fast that belief can compound into reality.

The future prosperity of Australia and New Zealand will not be built by people waiting for permission. It will be built by the engineers, researchers and technical obsessives who decide their work belongs not only in papers, patents or other people’s companies, but in companies of their own making.

That is the ambition behind the Foundry Fellowship.

Welcome to the first class. We cannot wait to see what you build.

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