A 75-year-old Melbourne filmmaker just shipped a global funding map for founders

There is a particular kind of wealth in Oceania that never makes the rich lists: the capital of stubbornness. It shows up in founders who refuse to let a good idea die, who treat rejection as a line item in the cost of building. David Raynor, a 75-year-old Melbourne entrepreneur and filmmaker, has just added a fresh exhibit to that tradition. His new app, Funding Atlas, is a no-frills database of accelerators, incubators, grants and funding programs from around the world, built because he could not find the thing himself.

Raynor was hunting for opportunities to grow Morphosys, his AI filmmaking platform, when he kept hitting the same wall. Search after search returned the same handful of local Australian programs, as if the rest of the planet's capital did not exist. So he did what any sensible founder in his position would do: he started vibe coding. With help from Newly AI and freelance developers, he shipped native iOS and Android versions of Funding Atlas, a utilitarian app that scrapes the web every couple of hours to keep its database current. It is not beautiful. The interface is dense, the design is functional, and the brand identity is best described as earnest. But it exists, which is more than can be said for most ideas that die in a notebook.

The app costs $39.99 on the Apple App Store and $34.99 on Google Play, and Raynor is candid that it may never recoup the token cost of the large language models crawling the web on its behalf. That is not really the point. The point, he says, is that he identified a problem and saw the solution through to the end, through the frustrating back-and-forth with app store reviewers and the long hours of development. His advice to other founders is the kind you only hear from someone who has lived several careers: if you are moving two steps forward and one step back, you are still moving forward. Treat mistakes as lessons, not failures.

The backstory matters here, because Raynor is not a typical tech founder. He started as a hairdresser, working shoots for Vogue, Cosmo and Marie Claire, then became a fashion photographer, then a writer-director-producer of short films that reached the Cannes film festival. Filmmaking led to Morphosys, and Morphosys led to Funding Atlas. It is a career arc that would be implausible in Silicon Valley, where youth and pedigree are often treated as prerequisites. In Australia, the path is messier and more forgiving, and that is precisely why the country keeps producing founders who build things out of sheer persistence rather than institutional backing.

For anyone watching capital move through Oceania, Funding Atlas is a small but telling signal. Australia and New Zealand have a vibrant startup ecosystem, but the geography has always been the problem. A founder in Perth or Auckland is a long way from the venture dollars of Sand Hill Road or the angel networks of London. The default has been to look inward, to the local accelerators and government grants, simply because they are visible. Raynor's app is an attempt to dissolve that distance, to put the whole world's funding landscape on a phone screen. It is not a venture fund or a matchmaking service; it is a map. But for a founder who has never left their hometown, a map can be the first step toward capital.

There is also something quietly defiant about a 75-year-old building a tech product in an industry that worships youth. Raynor is still learning, still shipping, still treating every mistake as a lesson. In a region where wealth is often measured in mining stakes and property portfolios, his version of capital is different: it is the willingness to keep going when the sensible thing would be to stop. Funding Atlas may never make him rich in the conventional sense. But it has already done something more valuable. It has proven that the entrepreneurial instinct does not retire, and that the next great idea in Oceania might come from the most unexpected place. For the international reader watching this part of the world, that is the story worth following.