Ten years after bootstrapping the precursor to a multimillion-dollar platform while studying at ANU, batchmates Ben Bromhead and Adam Zegelin have received the ACT Chief Minister’s Pearcey Entrepreneur Award.
Bromhead and Zegelin, the respective co-founder and technical inspiration behind Instaclustr, were named the 2022 recipients of the award earlier this week, Monday 17 October.
Instaclustr helps organisations deliver applications at scale, by operating their data infrastructure through its SaaS (Software as a service) platform for open-source technologies.
It was acquired in May of this year by US hybrid cloud data services and data management vendor, NetApp, in a deal estimated to be above $500 million.
Today, Instaclustr works with cloud providers including AWS, Heroku, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform.
Its customers include online streaming services, app stores, social media, and ride-sharing companies.
ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt said NetApp’s acquisition of Instaclustr “transforms a local company into a global giant”.
“[It] is massive for ANU, it’s massive for Canberra, it’s massive for Australia and it’s massive for every university across our nation.
“The company’s cloud-based, open-source offerings help power solutions millions of people use every single day and Instaclustr’s solutions are called upon the world over.
“It’s fantastic to see the company truly going global,” said Professor Schmidt.
Zegelin is the Technical Fellow and Systems Architect at Instaclustr, which he describes as “a natural progression of sorts”.
He was a casual PC game player from an early age but was always more interested in how video games worked, rather than playing them.
Bromhead, the Chief Technology Officer, was running a high-tech cryptographic and cybersecurity formal testing laboratory prior to Instaclustr.
The pair founded relational.io – the precursor to Instaclustr – while studying together at ANU.
In 2013, Instaclustr was incubated on campus by co-founders Peter Lilley and Doug Stuart.
Brand Hoff, ACT Chair of the Pearcey Foundation said, “The achievements of Ben and Adam and the success of Instaclustr is a perfect example of how technical innovation, academia and venture capital can come together to deliver more than the sum of its parts.”
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