Here are the 12 finalists in this week’s Pitchapalooza’s AI pitch contest

A dozen emerging AI startups in NSW will take to the stage this Thursday at the sold out Pitchapalooza pitch competition.

Hundreds of applications were whittled down to an egg carton of AI startups, with Pitchapalooza supporter Simon McKendry, a partner at VC OnePitch, saying the event breaks the usual pitch mould.

“Instead of very early-stage founders asking for capital to fund a vision, our grand finalists are showcasing something far more tangible for the audience: how they’re already wielding AI to disrupt their market and themselves,” he said.

The judges for the final include Professor Gana Pogrebna, executive director of the AI and Cyber Futures Institute; Rob Sibo, head of AI/ML customer engineering at Google ANZ; and Sami Ede, cofounder of Leonardo.AI.

Smokeball CEO Hunter Steele

Among the finalists is the 12-year-old legal tech scaleup Smokeball, led by founder and CEO Hunter Steele.

“I believe AI will disrupt all professional services. But in our case, rather than supplanting the legal expertise solicitors have, AI can automate administrative tasks, simplify billing processes, and improve business insights,” he said.

“Our AI tools, such as Archie, have already saved legal professionals hundreds of hours, allowing them to focus on delivering exceptional counsel to their clients. AI is a trusted ally behind the scenes, not in the courtroom”.

Here are all 12 finalists:

Crafty

One-liner: AI-generated RFP responses that help enterprise sales teams win more, faster.

Enterprise sales teams waste up to 80 hours per RFP — chasing documents, wrangling input, and rushing to meet deadlines. Crafty streamlines the process with AI that pulls data, coordinates inputs, and generates tailored proposals in minutes.

Its Intelligent Content Library learns a company’s tone, structure and content, while AI-powered generation creates winning proposals at scale. With pilots underway and SharePoint integration next, Crafty’s goal is full automation: finding, interpreting and responding to RFPs — end to end.

Smokeball

One-liner: Smokeball is AI-powered legal practice management software helping law firms streamline operations and boost profitability.

Legal work is high-stakes and detail-heavy, but many small firms still rely on manual tools for time tracking, billing, and document creation.

Smokeball changes that with an AI-powered platform built to automate and simplify the day-to-day running of a law firm.

Smokeball tracks every billable moment automatically using its Activity Intelligence feature. It includes over 20,000 automated legal forms, built-in trust accounting, and seamless integrations with Outlook, Word, LawPay and QuickBooks. Its newest addition, Archie, is an AI matter assistant that summarises files, drafts correspondence, and accelerates research.

With 6,200 firms across Australia, the US and UK, Smokeball enables 26,000 legal professionals to spend less time on admin and more time on what matters: their clients.

GeoNadir

One-liner: GeoNadir makes Earth intelligence more accurate and accessible through AI-powered geospatial data engineering.

Only 1% of Earth observation data is analysed, leading to poor environmental decisions based on incomplete or misclassified satellite data. GeoNadir fixes this by automating the structuring, validation, and analysis of high-resolution drone and satellite imagery using advanced AI models.

Their platform includes a global, user-contributed drone dataset, automated data labelling across 50 classes, and collaborative tools for teams working on conservation and environmental planning. With workflows that bridge drone and satellite data, GeoNadir significantly boosts mapping accuracy while reducing manual processing time.

Already generating revenue, GeoNadir is helping environmental managers and scientists unlock critical insights from geospatial data that were previously out of reach.

Coassemble

One-liner: Coassemble uses AI to turn everyday knowledge into interactive online courses—no expertise required.

Creating online courses has long been limited to learning designers with time, budget and technical skills. Coassemble breaks down those barriers with AI that transforms documents into engaging, mobile-ready courses in minutes.

Users can upload PDFs or slides, generate quizzes, or simply input a prompt to create a complete course. The platform automates content structure, language suggestions, and assessments—while keeping full user control for personalisation.

With over $1M ARR and years of insight into what works in e-learning, Coassemble is now making course creation faster, easier and more accessible for everyone—from teachers to teams.

Gether

One-liner: Gether is an AI assistant easing the mental load of family life, because the home CEO deserves better tools.

Managing family admin is a full-time job. One that 90% of women say they carry alone. From school notes to WhatsApp threads, the mental load is overwhelming and unpaid, impacting workforce participation and wellbeing.

Gether is a digital assistant built to change that. Parents can forward texts, emails, photos, or newsletters. Gether’s AI transforms them into calendar events, alerts and shared tasks. It integrates with existing tools, providing a central hub and proactive reminders that reduce stress and improve family coordination.

Thriday

One-liner: Thriday automates banking, accounting and tax for small businesses without the need for a bookkeeper.

Financial admin is one of the biggest time-wasters for small business owners. Thriday’s AI, Luca, handles it all by automatically categorising expenses, calculating tax, forecasting cash flow and even lodging BAS. By integrating banking with real-time accounting, Thriday removes the need for separate tools or costly accountants. 

Already generating over $1M in ARR, Thriday helps business owners cut admin time by up to 90%, so they can focus on growing their business instead of managing paperwork.

Eased UP

One-liner: Eased UP helps teachers plan lessons and create resources faster with AI that supports, not replaces, their professional judgement.

Teachers are time-poor and stretched across competing priorities. Many tools offer generic content that needs heavy editing, giving the illusion of saving time but reducing control and effectiveness.

Eased UP modular AI assistant guides curriculum planning with a contextual knowledge base, helping educators generate unit plans, lesson outlines, presentations and assessments that are relevant, differentiated and aligned to local curricula. It enhances teacher expertise and frees up time for what matters most: supporting students.

Gooday

One-liner: Gooday is an AI-powered booking platform that connects consumers and businesses through a smarter, fully integrated system.

Current booking tools are clunky, time-consuming and disconnected. Consumers spend hours coordinating plans, while SMEs lose up to 30% of revenue from no-shows and admin overhead.

Gooday solves this with AI agents that act like executive assistants. For businesses, it automates bookings, staff and customer management, marketing and referrals. For consumers, it syncs calendars, suggests mutual availability between friends, recommends services and even arranges transport.

 Toastie

One-liner: Toastie uses AI to help people with chronic illnesses track symptoms and spot health patterns in seconds, not hours.

Managing chronic illness is exhausting. Patients often spend hours each week logging meals, symptoms, and medications, only to overlook the patterns that matter. Toastie changes that with lightweight, AI-powered health tracking designed to detect early warning signs and personalise care.

Toastie allows users to log meals via photos, utilize plain language notes, and receive meaningful, predictive insights from their health data. Toastie aims to become the go-to platform for health tracking, records, and literacy, starting with women’s health and scaling to global chronic care.

GradSift

One-liner: GradSift is an AI-powered early careers platform that replaces job ads with instant, pre-assessed candidate matching.

There are no job ads, resume screening, or lengthy applications. Students register once and are instantly matched to roles based on strengths, not keywords.

For employers, GradSift’s proprietary AI assesses achievements, behavioural skills and job fit, offering a ranked shortlist within days. It’s already used by BCG and the Queensland Government, helping hundreds of hiring managers discover talent fast.

Workfx AI

One-liner: Workfx AI uses voice-based AI agents to automate customer support and bookings in hospitality and service businesses.

Small hospitality businesses are overwhelmed by booking requests and repetitive customer inquiries, often lacking the tools or staff to manage them efficiently. Workfx AI solves this with Axify, an agentic voice AI that handles 75% to 90% of enquiries autonomously.

Operating 24/7, Axify manages unlimited conversations at once, reducing operational load while improving response times and customer satisfaction. Businesses can focus on hospitality, while the AI ensures no opportunity is missed.

Tendl

One-liner: Tendl helps businesses win more tenders with AI-powered drafting and a full-suite tender management platform.

The tender process is slow, repetitive and highly competitive. Tendl gives businesses a private, AI-driven assistant that learns from past submissions to generate tailored, high-quality responses fast, without compromising confidentiality.

Tendl is a full tender management platform. From assessing opportunities and tracking responses to learning from past feedback, Tendl is becoming the “HubSpot for tenders.”

Pitchapalooza  is an initiative launched by the team behind Cut Through Venture and VC One Pitch.