Ahead of the TechStars Sydney ‘Demo the Future’ evening on December 8, Startup Daily is profiling the 12 startups and their founders in the 2025 cohort.
Our next profile is Juxtabyte – a startup helping companies realise the value in their critical data and how to reuse this smartly.
Juxtabyte
Founder: Hugh Le
One-liner: Juxtabyte helps organisations unlock value by knowing their critical data, managing it compliantly, and making it reusable.
What’s the future of data?
Ninety per cent of the world’s data has been created in just the last two years.
And in the next three, that volume is set to grow another 2.6x.
How we manage, store, track, and use that data has quickly become critical – “and governments are finally waking up to it,” Juxtabyte founder Hugh Le said.
He points to the hefty fines dished out by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – Meta (€1.2bn), Amazon (€746m), TikTok (€345m), and LinkedIn (€310m).
He goes on to explain that today, 82% of the world’s population is covered by privacy legislation. Yet plenty of high-profile companies still break the rules (hopefully because they lack the capability to comply, not out of negligence or malice).
Here in Australia, our prudential supervisor, APRA has introduced a new suite of data standards in July 2025.
But guess how many Australian institutions consider their data management “leading”?
Zero.
It’s hardly reassuring for those of us trusting them with our data at home …
What’s the problem and why does it matter?
“Data is the foundation of all businesses,” Hugh said.
“Especially in the age of AI where data is used to train models, personalise experiences, and inform important decisions.”
Look under the hood of the Juxtabyte product and it does two things.
As Hugh explains: “First, we solve data governance. Every company is underprepared for the current regulations, let alone the ones that are coming.
“We track every piece of data, risk rate it based on privacy and security rules, make sure it is stored and used compliantly, and of course solve the reporting to regulators.”
That alone will be a $13.4 billion market by 2035.
“Second, and this is what almost everyone is missing, we unlock immense value from data,” he said.
Hugh points to Elon Musk’s recent comment: “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge … in AI training.”
“He’s wrong,” Hugh said, with a smile to let us in on the secret.
“Yes, we’ve used most of the data on the internet. But half of the world’s data is stored within private companies and personal devices.”
Juxtabyte, with a financial focus, enables this proprietary data to be compliantly managed and available for safe reuse.
“Both within companies and externally,” he said.
How does Juxtabyte work?
Anyone who has worked in a large company or the government knows exactly how they are run on the inside – excel spreadsheets are a plenty.
Which means the data governance teams of today have a particularly painful job. They must:
- Manage a list of all data sets within the company.
- Manually tag each data set with its criticality rating.
- Apply the right level of data governance and reporting based on the rating.
- If data sets change – due to how they are used, who they are used by, or alterations to the core data itself – then the whole process starts again.
“I lived that process every day at CBA where I led the data governance team,” Hugh said.
“I spent years improving a hugely manual process, and ultimately APRA rated our team as the best in the country.”
“I left to build Juxtabyte, where we take the entire process and do it with AI. We keep the human oversight, but what took weeks is done in just 15 minutes.”
Why did Techstars invest?
“Plenty of industries are disrupted by outsiders,” Techstars Managing Director Christie Jenkins said.
“But there are a huge proportion who are disrupted by insiders. People who have lived every intimate detail of a problem.”
“Hugh is this type of founder,” Jenkins enthuses.
“He led the team responsible for data at CBA. Made their processes so good they were recognised by APRA as the best. And ultimately decided he couldn’t solve the problem to the standard he wanted within the bank.”
“The other thing we love about Hugh is his obsession with feedback. More than anyone we’ve ever met his superpower is asking for feedback, reflecting, and accelerating his rate of learning,” she said.
What’s the long term ambition?
“First we solve compliant data management for financial services companies,” Hugh said.
“If you lead a data governance team reach out,” he adds.
“And our long term mission is to build the world’s data exchange for companies. Where businesses who own data can share it, trade it, and use it compliantly and safely.”
Given the amount of data in the world, that’s quite the mission.
- See Juxtabyte and the Techstars startups in action at Demo the Future, Monday December 8, 5-8pm. Details here.
- Read about the other Techstars Sydney startups here.
Daily startup news and insights, delivered to your inbox.