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Michael Irwin

Michael Irwin

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Breaker at Breaker Industries

Founder

Michael Irwin is co-founder and co-CEO of Breaker, an autonomous defence company founded in 2023 with Matthew Buffa and Vanja Videnovic. It operates from Sydney and Austin, Texas. Irwin is a machine learning engineer by background. Breaker builds software that lets one operator direct teams of robots by voice, with AI agents running on each machine instead of relying on cloud connections. In February 2026 Breaker raised a $9 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Main Sequence, after a $2 million pre-seed. It has been granted AUKUS Authorised User status for licence-free exports to the US and UK.

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Career

  1. Now Co-founder & Co-CEO, Breaker · Breaker Industries
  2. Earlier · Scale-up Prior role (ASX:DRO) · DroneShield
  3. Earlier · Startup Software Engineer · Reach Robotics

Sources: startupdaily.net, zoominfo.com

Key moments

Jump straight to the part of Inside the Minds Behind Australia’s Robotics Revolution you want.

  1. 2:00 Breaker’s origin story: building robots that act on human intent
  2. 5:00 From drones to defense: autonomy, privacy, and life on the edge
  3. 8:20 The hardest problems left to solve (and why easy ones are gone)
  4. 12:00 Alloy’s story: from Eucalyptus to building the data brain for robots
  5. 16:00 Why Joe left a rocket ship to start from zero
  6. 19:30 Building for the age of robotics: data, telemetry, and the next frontier
  7. 23:00 Finding A-players: how ambitious missions attract ambitious people
  8. 25:00 Culture, conviction, and what passion really looks like inside startups
  9. 27:00 The defense dilemma: ethics, values, and the post-Ukraine mindset
  10. 30:00 Going global: why Australia’s best founders build beyond its borders

Heard on

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Oversubscribed · 20 November 2025 Inside the Minds Behind Australia’s Robotics Revolution With Charlie Gearside, Joe Harris

Breaker Industries on Day One

Breaker Industries Breaker Industries builds AVALON, an AI agent platform that lets operators command teams of air, land and sea robots by voice, without screens or continuous data links. 1 person · 1 episode →

Connections

Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026

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