Australian Bureau of Statistics data has consistently shown that Australians born outside the country start businesses at higher rates than the Australian-born. The ABS Characteristics of Australian Business release for 2023-24 (published 2025) reaffirms the pattern. The Productivity Commission’s 2024-25 research on migrant labour market outcomes, including self-employment, confirms it at a more granular level.
The pattern has been stable for two decades. The more interesting 2026 story is not the pattern itself. It is what the second generation of migrant-Australian founders is doing with the result.
The generational shift
Through the 1990s and 2000s, first-generation migrant entrepreneurship in Australia clustered in specific sectors: suburban retail (Vietnamese-Australian, Chinese-Australian), hospitality (Greek-Australian, Italian-Australian, later Lebanese-Australian), small-scale import-export (across most communities), and professional services in smaller numbers.
The second generation, coming through in the 2010s and 2020s, has scaled those family operations in three distinctive directions.
Direction one: from retail to national e-commerce. Second-generation Vietnamese-Australian retail families, many of whom ran single-site suburban stores for two decades, have in the past five years scaled those businesses into national and international e-commerce operations. Jane Lu’s Showpo (Chinese-Australian) is the best-known case, but the pattern extends well below headline-scale operators.
Direction two: from professional services to SaaS. Indian-Australian professional services founders have increasingly pivoted into software productisation. The post-pandemic outsourcing boom accelerated this shift: a practice that had been billing clients for consulting services was more valuable as software that captured the same value at scale.
Direction three: from import retail to platform marketplaces. Chinese-Australian founders who ran import-retail operations in the 2000s have, in many cases, rotated the customer-relationship layer into their own marketplace platforms, keeping the supply-chain expertise but monetising differently.
A profile, in broad strokes
To avoid caricature, I am not going to name an individual founder in this piece. The representative profile is the interesting thing.
Second-generation migrant-Australian founder, 28 to 42. One or both parents migrated to Australia pre-1990 and ran a small business (retail, hospitality, professional services). Founder took over, scaled, or pivoted the family operation. The founder speaks the family’s first language at home, and English at work. The business is headquartered in a Sydney or Melbourne suburb, frequently the same suburb the parents’ business was in. The founder’s capital structure is more likely to include family equity and less likely to include VC than the Australian-born founder cohort. The founder is more likely to have built the business without formal mentorship than through the formal ecosystem.
That description is built from publicly available profiles of about thirty Australian founders across several cohorts. It matches enough of them to be worth recording.
My parents did not know the accelerator ecosystem existed. I did not go to it either. We learned from each other across the kitchen table. The capital was ours. The mistakes were ours.
What the data does not capture
The ABS numbers pick up self-employment and small-business ownership. They do not pick up informal family-business co-ownership, which is common in the relevant cohorts and which understates the real migrant-Australian contribution to the SMB sector. They do not pick up the cross-border activity (supply chains, customer bases) that many of these businesses run, which materially understates their economic footprint.
The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion 2025 research provides a richer qualitative picture of migrant community economic participation. The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals and CPA Australia’s Asia-Pacific Small Business Survey 2025 provide cross-country comparisons that show Australia in the middle of the migrant-entrepreneurship range for OECD countries, but with a higher second-generation scaling rate than most.
The ecosystem’s blind spot
The formal Australian startup and SMB ecosystem has been visibly bad at including second-generation migrant founders at scale. Accelerator cohorts, venture-capital portfolios and industry-body boards remain disproportionately drawn from a narrower cultural band than the underlying founder population.
That is not a policy problem. It is an ecosystem problem. The founders are there. The question is whether the ecosystem that claims to find and back the country’s best founders is looking in the right places.
On the evidence, in 2026, it is still mostly not.
The note
The first-generation migrant entrepreneur story is well-covered and, in its public-facing form, sometimes sentimental. The second-generation story is less well-covered and, on the data, more economically important. The businesses these founders are building now are operating at a scale that the first generation, bound by language, capital access, and the Australian business culture of their time, could not have reached.
The 2030s Australian SMB sector will be substantially shaped by what those founders do in the second half of this decade. It is worth the national business press paying more attention to it than it currently does.
The ecosystem, too, could start by looking where the businesses actually are. Most of them are not in the accelerators. They are in the suburbs. They have been there, in one form or another, for thirty years.