The UK investor advice that convinced me to build a unicorn in Australia

Back in the depths of raising funds during Australia’s funding winter, I was given some unexpected but prescient advice by an overseas investor: “Don’t come here.”

My co-founder Skye and I were on the outskirts of London and meeting with the General Partner at one of UK’s largest fintech funds, canvassing the idea of expanding into their market. A couple of chats into our fundraising process with them, he asked us to seriously reconsider our international expansion strategy.

Indirectly, he was suggesting we didn’t need overseas geographic validation to prove our business was viable and venture scale. At least not this early on.

Building a homegrown unicorn

“Why squint at something when you can stare at it,” I remember him saying.

His logic was clear: the Australian commercial insurance market was large, complex and under-digitised – and ripe with opportunity. It’s a space where a company like ours could reach unicorn status without ever opening a foreign office. And a few weeks ago, Australian company Zeller drilled home that exact point, albeit in the payments space.

Zeller’s recent success story has become a powerful counterpoint to the long-standing startup dogma that you need to go global to grow, simply because Australia is too small a market.

Rather than chasing international expansion, Zeller focussed on local merchants, building products tailored to Australian regulatory and business environments. That strategy helped them become one of the fastest homegrown startups to reach a $1 billion valuation – and they did it without overextending into foreign markets too early.

Rethinking scale

It’s a reminder that in some cases, depth beats breadth.

The sectors best suited to this local-first approach—insurance, health, and payments—share a common set of traits. Each is highly regulated, deeply integrated into Australian systems, and underpinned by trust. They are also complex, shaped by local compliance frameworks, professional networks, and consumer expectations that don’t translate easily across borders.

These industries resist one-size-fits-all global strategies. In each of these sectors, foreign companies typically need to establish a local presence to gain traction – there’s no shortcut around local knowledge, licensing, or trust. Success requires nuance, relationships, and the ability to navigate dense regulatory terrain. That’s why Australian companies in these spaces often have an edge: they grow by embedding themselves into local systems and solving pain points that global players can’t reach or don’t fully understand.

And because these markets are large and underserved, there’s meaningful room to scale without ever needing to leave home.

Australia’s ‘small’ market is bigger than you think

We’ve seen it time and again: a big launch into the UK or US, followed by a very quiet retreat months later. Too many startups burn capital trying to replicate success in unfamiliar markets before fully capturing the one they know best.

Finding leadership for overseas teams is expensive, and it takes time to build momentum. Worse, it risks distracting core teams, splintering product focus, forcing founders across multiple time zones, and ultimately diluting investor confidence.

For us, the lesson was clear. Before we expand globally, we want to own our market at home. That means going deep into customer needs, product fit, and distribution strategy in Australia.

Australia may be a small country by population, but in insurance, health, and payments, it’s a big, complicated, high-trust market. The companies that win here are often better equipped to scale globally – not because they went global early, but because they stared at the opportunity in front of them and built deep, not wide.

• Anish Sinha is the cofounder and COO of insurtech Upcover.