Sebastien Eckersley Maslin

Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin began his career as a weapons and electronics engineer with the Royal Australian Navy, studying electronics engineering at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra under a University of New South Wales scholarship. He spent roughly a decade in the Navy, including an operational deployment to Iraq, and was awarded UNSW's top post-graduate researcher recognition for a patented technology that lands unmanned aircraft on warships. An entrepreneur from childhood — he ran "Sunscreen Squirts" at age eight and refurbished broken electronics for resale — he later launched and sold the SMS question-answering service 199QUERY while still serving, and founded the interactive digital signage company Crystal Display around 2009–2011.

In 2012 he founded BlueChilli, a Sydney-based venture technology firm and accelerator with the stated goal of launching 100 startups in five years. Under his leadership BlueChilli helped entrepreneurs launch over 150 ventures worldwide; by 2019 it had reviewed more than 12,000 pitches, supported ~125 entrepreneurs, grown to ~50 staff, and built a portfolio valued at around A$800 million that had collectively raised roughly A$160 million. BlueChilli's model gave founders a complete digital build team, incubator support across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the US, and a six-month accelerator program. It also ran standout initiatives including CityConnect (billed as Australia's first smart-city accelerator) and SheStarts, a venture-backed accelerator and documentary series dedicated to female-led startups.

Eckersley-Maslin has been named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist and is a three-time "30-under-30" winner. He is a frequent speaker on startups, innovation culture and celebrating failure.

He is now Founder and CEO of Phyllome, a company he started to build secure, predictable and sustainable food systems using robotics, genetics and AI. Phyllome operates automated "plant factories" (vertical/controlled-environment farms) with a disciplined focus on cost per square metre of construction and cost per kilogram of produce, using off-the-shelf parts and adding automation only where it accelerates the path to profitability. He has also held roles as CTO at StyleRocks and co-founded OnWriteTrack.

• Invests at the earliest (idea/pre-seed/seed) stage — a "first cheque" backer who pairs modest capital with hands-on product and engineering support rather than passive money.
• BlueChilli's classic terms: ~A$38,000 cash plus a full digital build team for ~15% equity, designed to take a founder from concept to a launched, testable product within months.
• Backs tech-enabled ventures across SaaS/digital, smart cities and — via SheStarts — deliberately supports female founders (SheStarts reached gender parity in its cohorts by 2018).
• Prizes founders over polish: emphasizes speed of execution, empowering people, and a culture that tolerates and even celebrates failure. In his words, "We celebrate failure … we even award a trophy," and "innovation is not an input but an output" of culture.
• Personally now oriented toward agtech and food security, favoring capital-efficient approaches that manage unit economics (cost/m², cost/kg) rather than technology for its own sake.