When Sangeeta Mulchandani learned she had won the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards Innovation & Entrepreneurship Award, she described the moment as “surreal.”
Seventeen years ago, she arrived in Melbourne as an international student with a single suitcase, $2000 in her bank account, and only one friend in the city. Winning a national award celebrating innovation across the Asia–Pacific was nowhere on her radar.
“If you told me I was going to win this award, I would’ve just laughed,” Mulchandani says. “Reflecting on that journey and on so many people I’ve worked with, makes me realise how much growth is possible. Australia truly is the land of opportunities.”
Today, Mulchandani stands as a prominent advocate for entrepreneurship, diversity, and Australia–Asia collaboration. She is the founder of Jumpstart Studio, a consultancy designing innovation programs for governments, corporates, and universities, and Press Play, a venture supporting women entering the startup ecosystem. Her work has already supported more than 600 early-stage founders, including over 250 women, across Australia and Asia.
Sangeeta Mulchandani’s pathway to entrepreneurship was both inherited and intentional. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs – her parents and grandparents founded their own ventures and she always felt she would eventually follow the same path.
But first, she built a high-achieving corporate career in banking and consulting in Australia.
“I climbed the corporate ladder really quickly,” Mulchandani reflects. “But I reached a point where I felt unchallenged. I knew I had more potential, but I didn’t know how to build a business in Australia.”
She took a year-long career break to study entrepreneurship – “the safe way,” she laughs. If it didn’t work out, she reasoned, she could return to corporate life with an additional degree. Instead, that year became the catalyst for launching multiple ventures and becoming a key voice in the national innovation community.
Mulchandani is a vocal believer in the transformative potential of the Australia–Asia relationship, particularly when it comes to innovation and startup growth. She sees Australia as uniquely positioned, both geographically and demographically, to deepen ties with Asia’s rapidly expanding markets.
“Australia has a massive opportunity,” she explains. “The many migrants who bring knowledge, entrepreneurial spirit, and the inherent risk-taking mindset are exactly what innovation demands.”
“Asia, India, the UAE, Africa are the next 20 years’ growth markets. The projected growth rates will outpace anything we see in the West [and] Australian founders need to shift their gaze. Instead of always looking to the US or UK for scaling, they need to start looking at this side of the world.”
Her new initiative, the Australia Innovation Corridor, aims to embed that shift. The project focuses on connecting early-stage startup ecosystems in Australia and India, groups often left out of traditional bilateral trade initiatives.
“These young founders are the future of innovation,” she says. “If we connect them early, in ten years India becomes a natural partner, not an afterthought.”
For Mulchandani, innovation is a mindset that has to “start internally.” It involves “thinking about better ways of doing things, moving from where you are today to a better future. It’s a mindset before it’s ever a product.”
This philosophy also underpins her teaching at the University of Melbourne, where she lectures on “intrapreneurship” which refers to entrepreneurial thinking within organisations.
Through Press Play, Mulchandani has worked with almost 150 women founders in just two years and she clearly understands the barriers they face. Some are ecosystem-wide challenges: limited technical infrastructure, a small domestic market, and funding difficulties. But for women, the hurdles often begin far earlier.
“The startup system we have today is built on a Silicon Valley model, designed largely by men, for men,” she explains. “We can’t expect women to simply enter and thrive without redesigning the system.”
“Women don’t play one role at a time,” Sangeeta Mulchandani says. “They’re mothers, daughters, sisters, career women, entrepreneurs often all at once. And they want to keep those roles. The ecosystem needs to create pathways that allow women to be their whole selves, rather than forcing them into a narrow mould of what a ‘high-growth entrepreneur’ looks like.”
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