The idea for Tanda did not come from a boardroom. It came from a student guild office, and from the slow misery of working out what people should be paid.
Three of the four founders, Jake Phillpot, Josh Cameron and Alex Ghiculescu, were executive officers of the QUT Student Guild in Brisbane. Running a guild means employing staff, and employing staff means timesheets. According to early coverage, the founders complained constantly about how long it took to process them by hand. Complaining is cheap. They decided to build the fix.
Tanda added rostering, payroll and HR products, hired compliance experts to track Fair Work rules, and grew on its own earnings.
Tasmin Trezise completed the founding four, all of them recent QUT alumni. Tanda dates itself to 2012. The first thing they built was not a grand platform. It was software that calculated Modern Award conditions, the thicket of Australian pay rules that decides what a casual worker earns on a Sunday or after a late shift. It is the sort of problem that looks boring until you get it wrong and underpay someone.
Outside validation came early. In 2014 the team won the qutbluebox Innovation Challenge and its A$60,000 first prize, money they said they planned to use to take the product global.
Then the company did something unfashionable. It did not chase venture capital. Tanda added rostering, payroll and HR products, hired compliance experts to track Fair Work rules, and grew on its own earnings. It picked up large customers along the way; Domino's chose the Brisbane start-up to overhaul its workforce management. The company describes itself as founder-led and independent.
For fourteen years that stayed true. In September 2026 it was reported that Thoma Bravo, the US software investor, had led a growth equity round, Tanda's first outside money, with Phillpot still CEO. About 8,000 businesses in hospitality, retail, healthcare and quick-service restaurants now use the product.
What lingers is how ordinary the origin is. Nobody in that guild office was looking for a billion-dollar market. They were irritated by a spreadsheet. The lesson for a first-time founder is to treat your own recurring annoyance as a product spec, and to be patient enough to let the compliance detail that frustrates everyone else become your moat.