The top 10 CFOs in Australian deep tech in 2026

Runs one of the most complex finance briefs in the sector: the Adelaide satellite company's stack spans venture rounds, an Australian Space Agency grant and a Defence Space Command contract, and Tata Nardini sits on the boards of Fleet's subsidiaries in Canada, Chile, Luxembourg and the United States. Twenty years of CFO experience across Europe, India, the UAE and Australia, applied to mineral-exploration satellites since January 2022. Deep tech finance at its most international.

The CFO behind the first Australian-built orbital launch attempt. Gilmour's capital stack is the full deep tech spectrum: Blackbird and Main Sequence venture rounds, superannuation funds on the register, a A$52 million federal grant, all funding hardware that either flies or very publicly does not. Financing a rocket program through a failed first launch and into a second attempt is the strongest nerve test on this list.

The listed seat. Balanco joined the counter-drone company as financial controller in 2018 and rose to CFO, and now runs finance for one of the ASX's genuine defence-tech growth stories, including a roughly A$49.6 million European military contract announced in late 2025. Defence revenue is lumpy, sovereign and scrutinised; running it inside continuous disclosure obligations is a specialist craft.

Runs finance for Australia's navigation-technology flagship, whose inertial systems ship into land, sea, air and space programs and whose register includes KKR. Pereira's path is unusual for the sector, deputy CFO at Freelancer and CFO of MILKRUN before this seat, making Pereira one of the few deep tech CFOs here who learned the trade in high-velocity consumer businesses first. Sometimes the sector filter really is the wrong filter.

The exception that proves the sector's rule: while most Australian quantum companies run a Head of Finance, the UNSW spin-out building silicon spin-qubit machines runs a full CFO seat. Thennakoon brings twenty-five years of international finance leadership to a company whose funding mixes a $100M+ Series A and government quantum programs across four offices, 70-plus staff and one of the field's deepest patent moats.

Three and a half years running finance for the enzymatic recycling company partnered with lululemon, after a CFO seat at fintech SocietyOne and a deputy CFO role in Westpac's consumer bank. Climate-materials finance is grant-heavy, partner-heavy and capex-heavy all at once; Marshall's banking-grade background is exactly the profile this sector recruits when it gets serious.

Finance for AI that reads medical scans, backed by more than US$240 million and strategic investors including Sonic Healthcare. Clinical AI sits at the deep tech and healthcare intersection, where the CFO manages regulatory approval timelines, hospital procurement cycles and strategic investors on one balance sheet.

The regional outlier, and deliberately so: Loam runs microbial carbon sequestration from Orange in regional New South Wales, backed by A$150 million in total funding, including a US$73 million Series B co-led by Lowercarbon and Wollemi Capital that closed in February 2023. Cohen's brief joins two of the hardest finance domains, synthetic biology R&D and agricultural economics, in a company whose product is measured in soil carbon.

Runs finance for the CSIRO spin-out whose Hovermap drone-autonomy and lidar systems map mines and infrastructure worldwide. The classic Australian deep tech arc, public research commercialised into a global export business, with a finance function that has to serve mining-industry sales cycles and hardware margins simultaneously.