Melbourne-based engineering outfit Sypaq Systems became the overnight innovation success story of 2023 with the launch of its flat-pack, cardboard drone to the frontlines in Ukraine. But like many overnight success stories, Sypaq’s was 30 years in the making.
The company had been working on hard engineering problems since its founding in 1992 – but it was the launch of the Corvo precision payload delivery system (PPDS) and its delivery to the war in Europe that captured the imagination of Australians everywhere.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco, Sypaq Systems chief executive Amanda Holt discusses what it takes to become an “overnight success” in Australia and talks about the organisational culture that enables consistent high quality work.
Sypaq Systems is a family-owned business founded in 1992 by former Former Australian Air Force engineer George Vicino, who left the service to join the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar project before setting up the company.
Sypaq is now an engineering heavyweight, employing more than 200 staff. Its focus is on hard engineering problems. The history of Sypaq’s growth has often been associated with what is politely called “troubled project remediation” – where the company gets the call when a project goes off the rails.
The way Ms Holt describes it, when a technology project gets itself on the front pages, Sypaq has built a reputation for providing the fix that will get it off the front pages. And that reputation is a decades-long, ongoing work in progress, she says.
She says the company’s primary aim in any project it is engaged in is to bring maximum impact and benefit.
And being able to bring its flat-pack Corvu PPDS drone to market, and to capture the imagination of Australians with super-exciting, because it was a demonstration of the disproportionately large impact that a smart, high-quality SME can make.
The cardboard drone, which the company still manufactures at its facility in Melbourne and still supplies to Ukraine through an Australian Defence Force contract, is an outlier project for the company, which is better known for its software and software integration programs.
The genesis of the Corvu drone prototype and then production system is a story worth listening to, and Ms Holt provides a decent guide for people stepping through the processes at the Defence department.
Sypaq had always been involved in mission-critical, software-intensive projects, and she says Australia has always leaned heavily into “C4ISREW programs”, to use the acronym for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Electronic Warfare systems.
The company was deployed sometimes within Primes and sometimes at the direction of the Defence, and often in relation to the kind of “troubled project remediation” on which Sypaq had built its name.
But around 2015 there was mindset shift within the Defence establishment toward autonomous systems and Sypaq was fortunate to have some depth of expertise within its engineering teams.
Through the Rapid Prototyping Development and Evaluation program within Defence, and then its Defence Innovation Hub and finally the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator, the department was increasingly willing to bring experts from the industry in to try and solve problems through disruptive technologies.
“That gave us a bit of confidence to say, ‘hmm, we’ve got a pretty unique workforce here [at Sypaq]. We’ve got some good resident intellectual property based on the work we’ve done doing integration [at Defence],” Ms Holt said.
“Is this our opportunity to actually pivot towards providing products and technologies directing to the department?”
And the rest is history. Sypaq has been providing the flatpack cardboard drones – with many iterations of software and applications the ride with it – since 2023, all through the Australia military support packages to Ukraine.
But it has also expanded its range and sophistication of drone systems, manufacturing in Australia and building a role as a defence Prime contractor.
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