Around a decade ago, before AI could do any of this for you, I started mapping the Australian healthtech scene. No grand plan, I just wanted to know who was out there as I started to take a keen interest in it.
So I did it the slow way. I hunted down every list and article Google would give me and went through them one by one. Copy the name, find the website, find the LinkedIn, note the location, work out what they actually did. Each one by hand. Then I watched LinkedIn religiously, every day, for funding news, launches, and the odd gem nobody had written up yet.
The trick that helped most was also the most boring: job alerts. I set up Indeed, LinkedIn and Seek alerts for every keyword I could think of, "healthcare startup", "healthtech startup", "digital health startup". If a company was hiring, it existed, and half the time the job ad explained what they did better than their own website did. I hosted the lot on Wix, uploaded the CSV every so often, and wrote about the space as I went.
It got into the hundreds of companies. Then Covid hit and healthtech went off. I ramped everything up, taught myself Bubble, and moved the whole thing across to it. That was a royal pain and a genuine labour of love, in that order.
Somewhere along the way it stopped being just an Australian map. I started adding New Zealand companies too, so ANZ is the honest label these days, even if Australia is still the bulk of it.
Then AI showed up.
These days the directory lives on Squarespace, here on this site. I dumped the spreadsheet into Claude, we tinkered until it looked like something a human would actually want to use, and now it updates the code for me each week. I still sign up to every startup newsletter, VC update and industry email going, and I still scan them by hand. Now and then I'll ask a few different AI models to find the ones I've missed. Honestly, they're average at it. This is one of those jobs where you have to love the space to keep it current.
Here is the part the AI does not do: the final check. Every entry still gets read by a human who knows the sector, which is me. That is the quality bar and it has not moved.
The upside of all those years of manual graft is something I did not expect. I remember them. The names are burned into my brain because I read about each one properly, rather than letting a scraper swallow them whole. Ask me about a company on that list and I can usually tell you what they do, who is behind it, and whether they are still breathing. You do not get that from a bulk import.
Which brings me to the graveyard.
Last year I added a section for the ones that did not make it. The quiet shutdowns, the pivots, the ones that raised big and then went dark. It felt important. A directory of only the living tells a very flattering and very incomplete story. The companies that folded taught the sector just as much, sometimes more. So now they get a headstone too.
One thing has not changed in all these years, AI or no AI. Most companies still cannot tell you what they do in one line. Not on their website, not on their LinkedIn, nowhere. I will land on a homepage, read the hero, read the next bit, click "Platform", click "Solutions", and half an hour later I am still not certain what they sell. If I am doing that, so is every customer and investor you are trying to win.
The newer lot are better on one front. A lot of them build their sites with AI now, and the writing is genuinely cleaner and clearer than it used to be. The catch is they can start to look a bit templatey. Same layout, same stock vibe, same three feature boxes. Clear, but a little samey.
I will not go into the other half of this that never sees daylight. Behind a lot of the public entries, I have tracked down the founder, the owner, or the right senior person, and their actual email. That stays with me, not on the public directory. That is the bit that makes it more than a list.
Anyway. It is free, I run it for free, I have had the odd hiatus when life got loud, but the stubbornness usually drags me back. Frankly a government body should be doing this properly, but here we are, hey-ho.
Have a browse. And if your company is not on there, or worse, is on the wrong side of it, you know where to find me:
