Every year-end list of Australian AI companies features the same names. Canva. Atlassian. SafetyCulture. They’re great companies but you already know about them. Here are five you probably don’t that I think have genuine breakout potential in 2026.

1. Hivery (Sydney) — Retail AI That Actually Ships

Hivery has been quietly building AI for retail space optimisation since 2015. That’s a decade of domain expertise in a field where most competitors are less than three years old.

What they do: their AI platform helps retailers decide what products go where on shelves, optimising for sales, margin, and customer satisfaction simultaneously. It sounds simple. It’s computationally vicious. A typical store has thousands of products, hundreds of shelf positions, and constraints around supplier contracts, seasonal trends, and local demographics.

Why 2026 matters: they’ve secured partnerships with major Australian and US grocery chains. If those scale as planned, Hivery goes from a respected niche player to a significant retail technology company. Their recent funding round positions them for rapid international expansion.

2. Daitum (Melbourne) — Industrial AI for Resource Optimisation

Daitum builds AI that optimises resource allocation in complex industrial environments. Think mining, utilities, and large-scale infrastructure. Their platform takes operational data from multiple sources and finds efficiency improvements that humans miss because the interactions are too complex to model mentally.

What caught my attention: a case study showing 12% energy savings for a major Australian mining operation. In mining, where energy is one of the largest cost centres, a 12% reduction translates to millions in annual savings.

Why 2026 matters: the push for decarbonisation in Australian mining and heavy industry creates enormous demand for efficiency tools. Daitum is well-positioned to ride that wave, particularly if the government’s Safeguard Mechanism continues to tighten emissions baselines.

3. Morse Micro (Sydney) — AI at the Edge

Strictly speaking, Morse Micro is a semiconductor company, but their Wi-Fi HaLow chips are increasingly relevant to AI deployment. They build low-power, long-range connectivity chips that enable AI processing at the edge in environments where traditional Wi-Fi doesn’t reach.

Think agricultural sensors spread across a 10,000-hectare property. Or environmental monitoring devices in remote national parks. Or industrial IoT sensors in massive mining operations. These are settings where data needs to be processed locally because backhaul is expensive or unreliable.

Why 2026 matters: the global push toward edge AI creates demand for the connectivity infrastructure that Morse Micro provides. Their recent partnerships with major IoT platform vendors suggest 2026 could be their breakout year commercially.

4. Brainpool AI (Brisbane) — Federated Learning for Regulated Industries

Brainpool is tackling one of the hardest problems in enterprise AI: how to train models across multiple organisations without sharing raw data. Their federated learning platform lets companies in regulated industries (banking, healthcare, insurance) collaboratively build AI models while data stays within each organisation’s boundaries.

This matters in Australia because data sovereignty and privacy concerns are genuine barriers to AI adoption. If a consortium of banks could train fraud detection models collaboratively without sharing customer data, the resulting models would be significantly better than anything built on a single bank’s data.

Why 2026 matters: the Australian Privacy Act review is likely to impose stricter data sharing requirements. Federated learning goes from “interesting technology” to “regulatory necessity.” Brainpool has first-mover advantage in the Australian market.

5. Max Kelsen (Brisbane) — Applied AI Consulting Done Right

Max Kelsen is a professional services firm, not a product company, and I’m including them because they represent a model that I think will scale significantly in 2026.

They build custom AI solutions for Australian enterprises, with deep expertise in natural language processing, computer vision, and predictive analytics. Their clients include major Australian banks, government departments, and resource companies.

Why 2026 matters: as AI adoption accelerates, the bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s implementation expertise. Companies that understand both the technology and Australian business context are in short supply. Max Kelsen has built that rare combination and is scaling to meet growing demand.

The Common Thread

What these five companies share: deep domain expertise, Australian-specific knowledge, and solutions that address problems where local context matters. They’re not trying to out-scale Silicon Valley on general-purpose AI. They’re building for markets where understanding Australian conditions is a genuine competitive advantage.

That’s the playbook that works for Australian AI companies, and I expect we’ll see more of it in 2026.