Pollinate founders Corey Berther (left) and Adeep Mitra (right) at ilab’s Pitch Night.
Pollinate, local Brisbane startup accepted into US startup accelerator Y Combinator
Pollinate, a Brisbane-based startup building AI agents for supply-chain and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) workflows, has been accepted into the latest cohort of Y Combinator (YC), one of the world’s leading startup accelerator born out of Silicon Valley.
Pollinate enables businesses that sell physical products such as food distributors, manufacturing firms and hardware companies to build personalised apps and AI agents that work with their existing ERP system in days not months. This replaces months-long, consultant-led implementations with deployments in days reducing admin burden and supply chain friction.
Adeep Mitra and Corey Berther, best friends since high school the entrepreneurial founders have been building digital solutions to solve problems together since their first year at The University of Queensland (UQ). During their undergraduate degrees the team built an app to help their fellow students find parties in their local area. Later, Adeep and Corey worked together part time at a digital and marketing agency where they developed and shipped digital tools for small businesses, were they helped fruit markets track and manage their inventory. Through speaking to clients, they identified several significant problems with the existing systems used by suppliers and were inspired to solve them.
According to the Pollinate founders – ‘Modern supply chain companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to solve a burning problem just to get 6 month deploy times and failed implementations – these mistakes are costly and unfortunately are a disappointing reality within even the most critical food, medical and technology supply chains.’
Adeep and Corey entered the UQ Food Innovation challenge in August 2024, a program to empower student teams to design and validate their innovation projects towards the development of a viable food and beverage business. A program run by UQ Ventures and the Food and Beverage Accelerator (FaBa). The team were inspired to build innovative digital solutions to address high cost of living problems especially those experienced by small businesses.
‘We wanted to create impact through a software solution and solve a meaningful problem in the logistics space. We spoke to many stakeholders in the space and we found that owner operated restaurants have many problems with their suppliers which, coupled with rising costs, often causes them to go out of business.’
After completing the Food Innovation Challenge the founders of Pollinate completed UQ Venture’s startup accelerator program ilab (Summer 2025 cohort). The UEF invested AU$15,000 as part of their participation in the program. Speaking about their experience in the UQ program, the founders said – ‘ilab was an incredible experience and the mentors we worked with shaped the people we are today, Michael [Cotton – Optio Capital] and Abbey [Cameron – Nourish’d] were both people we looked up to and valued their feedback’.
Previous ilab Entrepreneur in Residence Michael Cotton, Chief Product Officer at Optio Capital said ‘Working with the Pollinate team has been an absolute pleasure — they’ve demonstrated real nimbleness in responding to customer needs and continuously iterating their solution. What stood out was their ability to stay grounded in solving real problems while building toward something genuinely innovative and scalable. They have clear vision and the discipline to adjust as they learn, which positions them well not just for YC but for long-term competitive success.’ Abbey Cameron, CEO of Nourish’d said ‘From the beginning we knew there was going to be something special about Adeep and Corey – they are innate hustlers, but were willing to set all ego aside to learn how to channel that in the most effective ways. They are successful because they have that perfect combination of belief in their ability to solve the problem they’ve identified, bravery to dive in the deep end and do the work, and humility to learn and iterate as they go. That they were accepted into Y Combinator is no surprise to me – they’re the one to watch.’
‘Challenges and problems really excite us.’
The two technical founders are a formidable duo: highly motivated, driven by impact and delivering solutions. Adeep has sales, advertising and business development experience through working for a marketing agency where he helped clients develop small scale software solutions and running advertising campaigns. Corey has been coding his whole life, learning Python at a very young age. Corey previously worked in a digital solutions agency and developed many digital tools and websites for businesses.
The founders’ experiences (including their self-described failures) developing projects have led them to highly value working hard and iterating fast. Pollinate’s core values are building something the customer actually wants and building it quickly.
In December 2025 Adeep and Corey were successful in being accepted into the YC Winter 26 cohort along with 38 other companies (announced to date). Founded in 2005 YC boasts impressive alumni of over 4,000 companies, including major successes such as Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch having been through the program. YC invests into its cohort companies and has made over 5,000 investments which according to YC have a combined valuation of over US$800B. Pollinate will also receive a US$500,000 investment as part of YC’s standard investment package for the cohort which is kicking off in January. Edexia, another startup out of Brisbane co-founded by Daniel Gibbons, a graduate of UQ, was accepted into the Winter 2025 cohort of YC.
On being accepted into YC, Corey said ‘We’re incredibly excited to get the call to go, but we know there’s still a long road ahead. Being here just means we’ll push even harder on our path to unicorn status.’ Adeep reflected ‘We’ve built software our whole lives and the food supply chain is archaic. [To date] we’ve deployed our software in Brisbane. Our AI agents save customers hundreds of hours.’
Their mission: compress supply chain costs and drive down retail prices.
If you’re a startup founder with a link to UQ and want to follow a similar pathway you can apply for the upcoming 2026 Summer ilab cohort here.
Applications close 12pm (AEST) 27 January 2026.
