After six years spent rethinking how construction and infrastructure projects monitor their environmental impact, SiteHive has taken out one of the top honours at the 2026 Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards.
The Sydney-based company was named Startup of the Year at the annual gala event in Sydney on September 10, standing out in a stacked category that included sustainable textile manufacturer Xefco, quantum sensing startup Nomad Atomics and telehealth platform Doccy.
Sponsored by AWS Startups, the Startup of the Year category recognises an outstanding early-stage startup with fewer than 100 employees that has demonstrated strong growth, commercial traction and innovation within its market.
For SiteHive and its team of 35, the award comes off the back of a significant period of growth and product development.
“We’re revolutionising environmental monitoring,” head of product Laurene Michon told Startup Daily.
“We now have 1200+ devices around Australia and New Zealand, and 35 people working really hard to produce this piece of hardware and those new features.”
Rethinking environmental monitoring
SiteHive combines internet-connected monitoring devices with software to help construction and infrastructure projects track environmental impacts including noise, dust, vibration and weather in real time.
Over the past 18 months, the IoT sensing startup has strengthened its position with the rollout of its next-generation monitoring devices, while expanding the capabilities of the software sitting behind them.
For head of engineering Robert Weiss, the pace at which SiteHive can now develop and deploy those tools is just as significant as the technology itself.
“AI has shown that we can expedite the release of new features, but also expedite the ability to release things that actually make a difference to end users,” he says.
“Something we’re excited to do is not just release new products, but to be able to make that cadence faster, to be able to make things in the hands of customers a faster process, but also higher quality as well.
“So that’s something we’re looking to do as we scale up, as we expand and as we build things out.”
The IoT sensing tech, together with AI-powered analytics and cloud software, solves the problem of traditionally manual, expensive and hard-to-scale environmental monitoring. It acts as “the eyes and ears” on site so teams can respond to issues immediately.
For communities and natural ecosystems, this means less noise, fewer dust events, faster complaints resolutions and clearer accountability.
SiteHive is currently used in major projects such as Sydney Metro, Victoria’s Big Build, and Western Sydney Airport, recently expanding to its first overseas customers in New Zealand.
Heidi, from Melbourne to 190 countries
Melbourne-founded healthtech Heidi was named Scaleup of the Year, also sponsored by AWS Startups.
The award recognises an outstanding unlisted scaleup that has reached Series B or beyond and demonstrated exceptional growth across metrics including customers, revenue, team size and market traction.
Since launching its AI medical transcription product in 2024, Heidi has expanded rapidly beyond its original role as a clinical scribe, becoming one of Australia’s fastest-growing AI companies on the global stage.
Heidi hit $50 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) in the past year alone and quadrupled its team to 500 people.
The platform is increasingly moving from simply documenting medical consultations towards supporting what happens next, with the ambition that a single patient interaction could trigger consequent actions such as referrals and follow-ups.
That evolution has accompanied rapid international growth. Heidi now completes around 2.8 million clinical notes each week across 190 countries in 110 languages, making it the most widely used AI scribe in the world.
“We moved out of primary care and into the enterprise. Then we went from single product to multi-product,” explained Dr Simon Kos, Heidi’s chief medical officer.
“We’re looking to go beyond just capturing and guiding care into the whole acting of care.”
Heidi also took home the AI Gamechanger award on the night, recognising its use of artificial intelligence to deliver real-world impact.
The Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards celebrate standout founders, startups, scaleups, investors and industry leaders across 15 categories.
See the full winners list here.
Thank you to our Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards 2026 partners:
