OpenAI brings Startups Week workshops to Australia

OpenAI is bringing members of its global startups team to Australia for a week of workshops and technical sessions for local founders and developers, with events in Adelaide and Sydney.

The programme, branded OpenAI Startups Week, includes builder lounges, hands-on workshops, and meetings with investors and ecosystem partners. Organisers are positioning it as a practical forum for building and scaling AI-native products using OpenAI's tools.

The five-day schedule starts at Adelaide's Southstart Festival, then moves to Sydney for builder sessions and workshops hosted with local partners. Events are planned with Square Peg, Side Stage Ventures, Relevance AI, and Stone & Chalk.

OpenAI has singled out Australia as an active market for developers building on its platform, describing the country as a top-10 global market by developer activity. It also reported a sharp lift in local usage of Codex, its agentic coding product, in the month after launch.

Developer focus

The agenda centres on product-building tasks rather than broad strategy. Topics include API implementation, multi-agent workflows, production deployment, reliability, and cost management. OpenAI has also flagged discussion of multimodal updates and what it calls frontier models.

Thomas Jeng, OpenAI's VC Partnerships Lead for APAC, is scheduled to run sessions in both cities alongside local ecosystem partners, including workshops targeted at startup builders.

OpenAI is using the week to highlight how AI tooling is changing early-stage software development. Coding agents can run tasks in parallel across projects, which OpenAI argues can increase the pace at which small teams ship product, particularly in a startup's earliest phases.

Jeng said the sessions would focus on practical engineering and operating questions rather than general introductions.

"OpenAI Startups Week is about getting builders hands-on with the technology," said Thomas Jeng, OpenAI's VC Partnerships Lead for APAC.

"We'll be running technical deep dives on everything from API implementation and scaling AI-native products to cost optimisation and building reliable AI workflows," he added.

OpenAI is also using the events to point to what it calls an "AI capability gap" in Australia. It says internal data shows the top 5 per cent of power users use around eight times more advanced reasoning and coding capability than the median user, which it presents as a sign of the potential productivity uplift as more developers build deeper skills with AI tools.

Partner sessions

Relevance AI, which is co-hosting a Sydney builder session, plans to use the week to showcase its own developer tooling. It will present Relevance AI's Programmatic GTM, described as tooling for GTM engineers working with teams of AI agents.

"As a startup that has grown by building on OpenAI's technology, we're thrilled to co-host a session with the OpenAI team to give builders hands-on access to new tools and live demos. We'll also be showcasing the launch of Relevance AI's Programmatic GTM, developer tooling for GTM engineers looking to build and deploy teams of AI agents. Founders can expect practical guidance, real examples, and a behind-the-scenes look at how startups are building AI-native products today," said Jacky Koh, Co-CEO and Founder of Relevance AI.

Stone & Chalk, which operates startup hubs and programmes, is set to host builder lounge events in both Adelaide and Sydney. Chris Kirk, CEO of Stone & Chalk, framed the sessions as skills-based workshops focused on what founders can build with current tooling.

"Stone & Chalk exists to help ambitious founders access the networks, tools and expertise they need to build globally competitive companies. By hosting OpenAI's Startups team in Adelaide and Sydney, we're giving founders direct, hands-on access to the people and tools behind the technology shaping the next generation of AI-native companies," Kirk said.

"These are not hype sessions - they're builder-focused workshops where founders can see what's possible today: solo founders shipping products at speeds that used to require ten-person teams, and startups creating solutions that corporates are still only piloting. It's a rare chance to witness the velocity and ingenuity of Australia's AI-native founders in action, and to help them build smarter, faster and globally," he added.

The Sydney schedule includes an AI builder session hosted with Relevance AI; a workshop co-hosted with Square Peg covering multi-agent workflows and updates to Codex; and a builder lounge at Stone & Chalk's Tech Central Innovation Hub featuring a technical deep dive and live Q&A.

In Adelaide, the programme is due to include a builder lounge aligned with Southstart Festival, hosted with Stone & Chalk, with Jeng listed as session lead.

OpenAI's focus on Australia comes amid broader competition among AI platform providers for developer mindshare and startup adoption. The visits also signal the importance of ecosystems that combine capital, technical support, and distribution partnerships, particularly as more startups build products with AI models at the core.

"Australia is already a top-10 market globally for developers building on OpenAI's platform. With the rise of agentic coding tools like Codex, we're seeing more local founders shipping products faster and creating entirely new categories of AI-native software," Jeng said.