Making the invisible
visible.

I moved my family from Maroubra to the Snowy Mountains with an 18-month-old, a German Pinscher named Dash, and a hunch.

There's something about the Monaro that gets under your skin. The air is sharp and clean. The land feels ancient. For someone who grew up surfing and snowboarding, it made a strange kind of sense — the mountains, the open country, Snowy 2.0 tunnelling through the granite at my doorstep. Australia's largest infrastructure project, happening in my backyard. I wanted to be close to it.

I've spent my career in technology doing one thing at different scales: translating the complex into something anyone can understand. APIs. Credit reports. Insurance systems. The machinery that shapes people's lives, made legible. I've always believed that's where technology does its most important work — not in the complexity itself, but in the moment it stops being intimidating.

At Qantas, I found the hardest version of that problem yet.

Passengers genuinely wanted to fly more sustainably. The research was clear. What they didn't trust were the claims.

I watched well-intentioned sustainability commitments dissolve into fine print — and I watched customers notice.

That's the gap Zerra exists to close.

We have the data to prove the energy transition is real.

The Clean Energy Regulator publishes it. AEMO tracks it. The Bureau of Meteorology measures it. It exists — in CSVs, in industrial dashboards, in government registries that almost nobody outside the sector ever opens.

Zerra translates that data into something a person in Cooma — or Toowoomba, or Parramatta — can actually use. How many solar systems are on the rooftops in my postcode? How much carbon is my community avoiding? Is that rebate offer real, or is it a scam?

But solar was never the endpoint.

Aviation. Road freight. Marine shipping. The hard-to-abate sectors that can't simply electrify their way out. Low Carbon Liquid Fuels are how those sectors decarbonise — and right now, the claims being made about those fuels are nearly impossible for anyone outside the industry to verify.

This is what I pitched to EnergyLab's Charge program. They agreed it was worth building.

I'm a regional founder with a direct view of the Snowy Mountains and a dog who needs walking twice a day regardless of deployment schedules. I have access to the same government data everyone else does, and a conviction that the translation layer — the thing that connects industrial infrastructure to human understanding — is where the energy transition either succeeds or stalls.

That's what I've always done. Zerra is where it matters most.