TechTalk: Building AI to Forecast Supply Chains, Cities and Critical Systems w/ Flora Salim, CEO & Co‑founder @ DataCruiser

​About

​This is an invite‑only event for investors interested in frontier opportunities in DeepTech. Register your interest today. Approval Required.

​Co-hosts: UNSW Barker Street Ventures, The Pillars

​Event Details 

​Trillions of dollars in global GDP depend on accurately understanding and predicting how people, goods and infrastructure move through the world, yet most AI systems break down under real-world uncertainty and disruption. DataCruiser is building a new class of spatiotemporal world models that treat the physical world itself as something that can be learned, simulated and reasoned over, not just analysed in hindsight.

​In this TechTalk, Flora Salim, Co-Founder and CEO of DataCruiser, will unpack:

• ​Why traditional forecasting and optimisation tools fail in complex, disrupted environments such as logistics, mobility and infrastructure

• ​How spatiotemporal foundation models unify messy, sparse geospatial and time-series data into a single world representation

• ​Agentic what-if simulation and failure-aware reasoning for real-time decision making

• ​Enterprise use cases across logistics, supply chains, government and emergency services

• ​What it takes to commercialise frontier AI research into scalable business

​This conversation is designed for investors and operators seeking insight into the next generation of AI systems that move beyond prediction into simulation and autonomous decision support.

​Agenda:

​5:00PM Doors open 
5:20PM Fireside Chat with Flora Salim moderated by Mark Esterhuizen
Networking to follow

​About

​Flora Salim (LinkedIn)

​Flora Salim is Co-Founder and CEO of DataCruiser and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney. She is a world-leading expert in spatiotemporal and time-series machine learning, with over 300 publications and more than $20M in delivered industry and government contracts. Flora serves on national and international AI committees and editorial boards and is ranked in the top 2 percent of scientists globally.

​DataCruiser (Website)

​DataCruiser builds spatiotemporal world models that predict, analyse and simulate the moving world across logistics, mobility, infrastructure and government use cases. Its platform enables forecasting, imputation, causal analysis and agentic what-if simulation from complex real-world data.

Mark Esterhuizen (LinkedIn)

​Mark Esterhuizen is a Partner at Aura Ventures and a high-impact executive and entrepreneur specialising in scaling venture-backed businesses. As former CFO and COO of Peter Manettas Seafood Group, he drove 40x revenue growth, raised $30M+ in capital and scaled valuation from $5M to over $180M. Mark brings deep expertise across capital strategy, marketplaces and operational scale.

​Aura Ventures (Website)

​Aura Ventures is a venture capital firm partnering with ambitious founders to build and scale category-defining businesses. The firm focuses on capital strategy, growth execution and long-term value creation.

​Barker Street Ventures (Website)
Barker Street Ventures is an investment platform giving sophisticated investors access to DeepTech spinouts and UNSW research. Most people never get the chance to invest early in Australia’s best research. We’re here to change that.

​For questions: [email protected]