Last night, over 900 founders, investors and industry figures filled CENTREPIECE at Melbourne Park for the Victorian Startup Gala, LaunchVic's annual celebration of the state's startup ecosystem. Our co-founder Sara was one of the founders invited to speak on the night, sharing the Flowing Bee story alongside fellow Victorian founders Paloma Newton (Elita), Sam Kothari (Everlab) and Eldin Rostom (Diag-Nose.io).
The gala capped a decade in which Victoria's startup ecosystem has grown twentyfold to $139 billion, now home to over 4,400 startups and scaleups. It also marked a new chapter for how that ecosystem is supported, with LaunchVic and Breakthrough Victoria coming together as a single entity, Innovation Victoria, and a fresh $3.5 million committed across nine pre-accelerator programs to help the next generation of AI and deeptech founders get investment-ready.
Why Flowing Bee was in the room
Being asked to speak at an event built around that scale of investment is not a small thing, and Sara used the platform to tell Flowing Bee's own founding story.
It starts in 2020, with two housemates stuck at home during Melbourne's lockdowns. One was an F1 engineer who had built driving simulators for Formula 1 teams and was midway through a PhD on how humans learn in virtual worlds. The other, Mike, was a behavioural scientist fielding calls from some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, Fortune 500s, top ASX 20 companies and government departments in the country, all of them paying for help changing human behaviour.
The brief was rarely small. Quarter-of-a-million-dollar projects to work out why people won't return a shopping trolley, how to get more Australians to take a free at-home bowel cancer test, or how to encourage people to save more for retirement. Each project took months and needed a full team of behavioural scientists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists working together.
Watching those projects unfold gave Sara a simpler question: she had spent her career simulating physical systems, so why not simulate this? Why not model the human decision-making process itself, end-to-end, and automate it?
That question became Flowing Bee. What used to be a manual, expensive, months-long process is now run through thousands of AI models and agents. Customers describe the behaviour they are trying to shift and with whom, the platform runs research with real people to build a decision-making model of that audience, then identifies the psychological barriers in the way and designs the interventions to overcome them.
Since launching in January 2024, Flowing Bee has raised $1.6 million, working with enterprise clients across Australia, the US, UK and Europe.
The thesis behind the pitch
Sara closed her talk with the line that has become the company's operating thesis: every growth challenge is a behavioural challenge. For investors, that means getting the right founders to choose your fund. For startups, it means getting customers to choose your business. For government, it means getting founders to choose Victoria.
It is a fitting note for a night built around exactly that last point, a state betting, year on year, that backing the right founders compounds into an ecosystem worth $139 billion and counting.
Thank you to the LaunchVic team for the invitation, and to the Alice Anderson Fund for their continued support of Flowing Bee.
