Gold Coast Founder Builds $2.4M AI Verification Business Amid Tech Giant Wars

Sharyn Calloway launched Veridact from a co-working desk on James Street, Burleigh Heads, in February 2024 with $80,000 in personal savings and a hunch that the authenticity problem eating through social media would eventually become every brand manager's headache. Eighteen months later, the company has signed 34 corporate clients, employs 11 full-time staff, and closed a $2.4 million seed round last month from Brisbane-based venture fund Rampersand and two Gold Coast angel investors.

The timing could not be sharper. Platforms globally are now purging millions of accounts after AI-generated profiles impersonated real creators at industrial scale, leaving advertisers exposed and ordinary users rattled. Calloway saw that coming. Veridact's software cross-checks creator identity signals — posting patterns, voice cadence metadata, device fingerprints — against a proprietary database to flag synthetic accounts before a brand cuts a cheque for a sponsored post.

From Burleigh to Brisbane boardrooms

The Gold Coast's tech sector is small but growing faster than most people in Sydney bother to notice. According to the 2025 Digital Economy report published by City of Gold Coast, the local digital and creative industries employed roughly 14,400 people and contributed $3.1 billion to the regional economy — up 18 percent from three years earlier. Calloway is part of a cohort of founders who deliberately chose the Gold Coast over inner-Brisbane, citing lower commercial rents and proximity to a lifestyle that helps recruit interstate talent without paying Sydney salaries.

Veridact's office moved in April to a 320-square-metre tenancy on the fourth floor of the Brickworks Centre on Christine Avenue, Varsity Lakes, paying around $420 per square metre annually — roughly half the going rate for equivalent space in Fortitude Valley. The company runs its computational workloads on a contracted arrangement with a rack provider in Southport rather than absorbing the capital cost of its own hardware, a decision that looks increasingly savvy given national warnings that AI data centre demand is already pushing up industrial land prices and threatening to crowd out freight and logistics operators.

Three of Veridact's largest clients are tourism and retail brands headquartered or operating heavily on the Gold Coast, including one retail group with multiple stores along Cavill Avenue and Pacific Fair. Those brands collectively spent more than $190,000 on influencer partnerships in the first quarter of 2026, according to figures Calloway's team shared with The Daily Gold Coast. The companies say Veridact's verification layer has reduced their disputed influencer invoices — cases where audience engagement turned out to be bot-inflated — by 67 percent since January.

What the next six months look like

Calloway plans to use the seed funding to hire five additional engineers by October, with recruitment concentrated in the Gold Coast to avoid competing directly with the large Brisbane employers already circling the same graduate pool. She is in conversation with TAFE Queensland Gold Coast's digital skills division about a structured work-integrated learning placement for students in the network's new AI systems certificate, which enrolled its first cohort in March 2026.

The broader environment is not frictionless. Melbourne's property investor exodus and the national cooling in first-home buyer activity are dampening confidence in some discretionary retail categories — the exact sector that leans hardest on influencer marketing. If brand budgets tighten heading into the 2026 Christmas trading period, demand for premium verification tools could soften alongside spending on the campaigns those tools are meant to protect.

For now, though, the pipeline looks solid. Veridact has a letter of intent from a national supermarket chain and is in late-stage talks with a Sydney-based media buying agency that places around $40 million in influencer spend annually. Calloway expects to reach break-even by the end of the March 2027 quarter. The company that started on a hot-desk in Burleigh Heads may soon find it needs considerably more than 320 square metres in Varsity Lakes.