Oversubscribed with Brendan Hill Inside the Minds Behind Australia’s Robotics Revolution
With Charlie Gearside, Joe Harris
About Michael Irwin
Michael Irwin is co-founder and co-CEO of Breaker, an autonomous defence company founded in 2023 with Matthew Buffa and Vanja Videnovic. It operates from Sydney and Austin, Texas. Irwin is a machine learning engineer by background. Breaker builds software that lets one operator direct teams of robots by voice, with AI agents running on each machine instead of relying on cloud connections. In February 2026 Breaker raised a $9 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Main Sequence, after a $2 million pre-seed. It has been granted AUKUS Authorised User status for licence-free exports to the US and UK.
In conversation.
1 episode
Oversubscribed with Brendan Hill Go straight to the good bits.
Key moments from Inside the Minds Behind Australia’s Robotics Revolution.
- 2:00Breaker’s origin story: building robots that act on human intent
- 5:00From drones to defense: autonomy, privacy, and life on the edge
- 8:20The hardest problems left to solve (and why easy ones are gone)
- 12:00Alloy’s story: from Eucalyptus to building the data brain for robots
- 16:00Why Joe left a rocket ship to start from zero
- 19:30Building for the age of robotics: data, telemetry, and the next frontier
- 23:00Finding A-players: how ambitious missions attract ambitious people
- 25:00Culture, conviction, and what passion really looks like inside startups
- 27:00The defense dilemma: ethics, values, and the post-Ukraine mindset
- 30:00Going global: why Australia’s best founders build beyond its borders
The path so far.
- Now
Co-founder & Co-CEO · Breaker Industries
- Earlier · Scale-up
Prior role (ASX:DRO) · DroneShield
- Earlier · Startup
Software Engineer · Reach Robotics
Sources: startupdaily.net, zoominfo.com
Breaker Industries on Day One
Breaker Industries builds AVALON, an AI agent platform that lets operators command teams of air, land and sea robots by voice, without screens or continuous data links.
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Spot something wrong? Suggest a correctionUpdated 25 September 2026
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