Australia has its own AI model, built and run in Melbourne, and almost nobody is talking about it. The company behind it is Maincode.
The build
Maincode is spending about A$30M on what it calls an AI factory. It runs on AMD hardware rather than Nvidia, sitting in a Telstra data centre in Melbourne. Data engineering, training and inference all happen on Australian soil. SmartCompany reports the team even wrote its own inference engine in Rust for AMD’s chips.
The product
The model is called Matilda. In July 2026 Maincode opened its coding agent, Matilda Code, for public beta. It reads your codebase, writes features and fixes bugs. The company says it is still in beta and parts still need work.
The people
CEO Dave Lemphers was chief technology officer at EasyGo, the parent of Stake and Kick, before leaving in November 2024 to start Maincode. Stake co-founder Ed Craven is the majority investor.
The moment it mattered
In June a US export order forced Anthropic to pull its top models for users outside the US. The controls were lifted less than three weeks later. Lemphers told SmartCompany it did not materially affect Maincode, because it does not rely on US hosted frontier models. “We use our own models and consume our own tokens,” he said.
The word they dropped
In 2025 Maincode stopped calling itself sovereign AI. Lemphers called the label too loaded and too defensive, and later told SmartCompany the term “doesn’t mean anything”. It now says Australian made AI.
My read
Everyone else is selling the word. These blokes shipped the thing. Whether Matilda can keep up with the global labs is a fair question, but they have the hardware, the model and a product people can actually use.