There are plenty of show ponies in the Australian start-up scene. Sydney-based Liesl Yearsley is not one of them. More of a doer than a talker, the rarely interviewed tech entrepreneur has a track record of building valuable businesses in the hotter-than-hot realm of artificial intelligence. She is now deeply embedded in NASA’s plans to enable humans to live in space, and she is already putting helpful robots into Australian homes.

Yearsley, who has been running her AI company Akin for six years, is speaking to The Australian Financial Review Magazine at the tail end of a whirlwind trip to meet potential new investors in California.
“It’s been wild,” she says of the appetite for AI. “The valuations are staggering and everyone’s head is spinning, mine included.”