Syncrowin raises A$3m led by Collide Capital for industrial AI

Syncrowin raises A$3m led by Collide Capital for industrial AI

19 October 2026: Syncrowin, a Melbourne company building what it calls an AI operating system for critical infrastructure, says it has closed an oversubscribed A$3 million round led by the New York firm Collide Capital. The money is for deploying the system across energy and manufacturing sites and for hiring AI and engineering staff in Australia and San Francisco.

Not yet independently verified. Syncrowin's own announcement does not name the stage; SmartCompany calls it pre-seed. The claims that the round is three times the Australian median and the largest by a female chief executive at this stage this year are the company's own, with no source given. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Who put money in

Collide Capital led, with San Francisco's Hustle Fund, POV Ventures, and the Australian investors Co-Ventures and Ventari, plus angels the company describes as exited founders. Syncrowin says its US backers count limited partners from Amazon, Google, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

"What drew us to Syncrowin first was the team," said Aaron Samuels, managing partner of Collide Capital. "Ash and Jai have spent their careers inside the industrial sites and plants they're now trying to transform."

The company also says the round is three times the median for its stage in Australia and the largest raised at this stage by a female founder and chief executive in the country this year. It gives no source for either figure.

An operating layer over plants that already exist

Syncrowin's argument is that much of the industrial capacity the world needs is already built and simply badly run. Its software sits across a site's systems ("connecting every system on site", as its home page puts it) and applies AI to improve efficiency, reliability and output for operators in energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing.

"The world is spending trillions planning new industrial capacity, but a significant portion of what we need already exists, it's just not running intelligently," said Aisshwarya (Ash) Kansakaar, co-founder and chief executive. Her co-founder Jaideep Upadhyay, the chief technology officer, is a named inventor on several patents, and the pair's background spans mechatronics, mechanical and industrial systems and AI.

Early recognition from the energy sector

Before the round the company won the Initiate start-up pitch competition at DTECH, the large North American transmission and distribution conference held in San Diego this year, against 36 US start-ups. It was picked for the Energy Labs Scale Up programme from more than 600 applicants across Europe and Australia and New Zealand, says it is backed by CSIRO, and went through the University of Melbourne's MAP accelerator. Kansakaar was named 2025 Young Australian of the Year for Victoria.

The round sits in a quiet part of our catalogue: our energy management software category lists 10 products and our manufacturing execution software category 4, which says more about how rarely plant-level software vendors describe themselves to buyers than about the size of the market.

Company profile on TrustList: Syncrowin

Sources

• Syncrowin: Syncrowin raises oversubscribed A$3 million round as US investors back industrial AI for critical infrastructure, 19 October 2026
• SmartCompany: Three ANZ startups that raised $25.1 million this week, 23 October 2026