Cibby Pulikkaseril
Founder at Zabidou
Cibby Pulikkaseril is founder of Zabidou, a startup founded in July 2025 that builds automated quality-assurance systems for factories. Its systems use lasers, cameras and edge AI to inspect outputs such as steel and concrete at the end of the production line. He was previously founder and Chief Technology Officer of Baraja, the Sydney LiDAR company for autonomous vehicles, where he helped invent its Spectrum-Scan technology. Baraja later collapsed, and Pulikkaseril says it taught him not to look impractically far into the future. Zabidou focuses on customers ready to pay now. It raised a $3.5 million seed round in 2026 led by Black Nova, Main Sequence and Antler.
Career
- Now Founder · Zabidou
- Until 2023 · Startup Co-founder · Baraja
Sources: forbes.com.au
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of Building with Atoms and Bits: 5 Founders Making Hard Tech in Australia | HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou, Antares you want.
- 2:21 Founder intros: HEO, Alloy, Vexev, Zabidou Antares
- 5:53 Why humanoid robots are still 5+ years away
- 7:50 HEO's natural language satellite tasking "vibe tasking" robots
- 12:35 Hiring in deep tech: why PhDs aren't a requirement anymore
- 14:27 Finding training young talent in robotics
- 20:52 US vs Australia: aerospace talent, poaching the Golden Dome effect
- 27:50 Why US investors now believe in Australian hard tech
- 30:54 "Competition is for losers": building what no one else has
- 32:43 How fundraising for hard tech has changed in 5 years
- 41:05 Zabidou's brutal pre-seed deadline capital efficiency
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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