Main Sequence backs husband-wife team

This Canberra-based start-up has landed $3 million in funding, and has quickly grown to more than 20 staff.

Main Sequence partner Mike Zimmerman. Source: Supplied.

CSIRO’s deep tech investment fund Main Sequence has led a $3 million Series A funding round for Canberra-based AI compliance software specialist Castlepoint Systems, which has quickly grown from its husband and wife team of two to more than 20.

CEO and co-founder Rachael Greaves, who started Castlepoint with husband Gavin McKay, said they originally built the software for their own consulting projects to address the limitations of traditional software and its inability to meet regulatory and statutory obligations in government.

She said her platform automatically discovers, classifies, and controls every document, email, chat message, database, or web page in an organisation’s network, regardless of its location or format, identifying rogue data and potential compliance risks based on regulatory rules and reporting.

The technology worked so well that they pulled back on consulting and focused on commercialising the product and created Castlepoint, which now has global ambitions.

“It’s not well understood that information management can be a matter of literally life or death,” she said.

“Failure to manage information properly has led to completely preventable catastrophes; not just breaches of information security like Office of Personal Management in the US, which has undermined national security for two generations, but also lapses in information retention, quality, and access.

Castlepoint Systems co-founders Rachael Greaves and Gavin McKay. Source: Supplied.

“Vivian Solon, an extremely vulnerable Australian citizen, was deported because her records couldn’t be found. Paul Maguire was killed in the Grasstree mine because records weren’t maintained.

“Lack of accountability for records has left generations of Indigenous Australians unable to claim for $1bn in stolen wages and has affected outcomes and justice for victims of institutional sexual abuse.

“The simple ability to know exactly what information we have in a network, where it is, and who is doing what to it, is a fundamental necessity that nobody has been able to achieve throughout the entire digital era, in government or enterprise.”

The executive said that with AI, we can finally know what we hold, and we can then go further, to understand what information has risk and value, and what rules apply to it, and whether they are being met.

“We are finally able to catch up with the exponential growth in data and get ahead of it again and doing that can save lives and livelihoods,” she said.

“The traditional models for managing information do not work well anymore. And Australia is an excellent proving ground for RegTech and deep tech more broadly, as our government has a strong appetite for innovation and regulatory disruption.”