The Subiaco Startup Turning Pilbara Data Into Gold for Perth's Mining Economy

Iron ore is still the engine room of Western Australia's economy — and in 2026, it is running harder than most Australians realise. The state government's Mid-Year Financial Projections, released in February, forecast iron ore royalty revenue of $8.3 billion for the 2025-26 financial year, a figure that underwrites everything from Metronet extensions to hospital rebuilds in Perth's outer suburbs. The Pilbara's big three — BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue — dominate the headlines, but the less-told story is how that tonnage moving through Port Hedland is reshaping commercial life 1,600 kilometres south in the CBD and its fringes.

Nowhere is that reshaping more visible than in the cluster of mining-services and technology firms that have colonised the office towers along St Georges Terrace and spilled into cheaper digs in West Perth and Leederville. Commodity prices are volatile — iron ore touched a 21-month low of $89 a tonne in late May before recovering — so clients are pushing hard on efficiency rather than expansion. That pressure has created a very specific opening for operators who can help mining companies extract intelligence from the mountains of geological, logistical and environmental data the Pilbara generates every day.

Building a Business on the Back of Benchmark Rock

Orebody Analytics, a privately held software company headquartered in a refurbished warehouse on Oxford Street in Leederville, was founded in 2021 by geologist-turned-entrepreneur Priya Sandhu. The firm has spent five years building a platform that ingests drill-core imagery, grade-control data and haulage telemetry to give mine planners a tighter picture of ore variability before material reaches the crusher. The company declined to reveal revenue, but it confirmed in a statement to The Daily Perth this week that it signed its seventh Pilbara client in June and now supports operations at four separate iron ore projects between Newman and the Fortescue River region.

The commercial logic is straightforward. At $95 a tonne, a one-percent improvement in ore recovery across a mid-sized operation shipping 15 million tonnes annually is worth roughly $14 million in additional revenue. Software that costs a fraction of that to licence has an easy conversation with a chief financial officer. Sandhu, who previously worked at the Geological Survey of Western Australia's East Perth offices on Mason Street, has spoken publicly at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy's annual conference about the gap between the data mining companies collect and the data they actually use in real-time decisions.

Orebody Analytics is not alone in this space. Perenti, listed on the ASX and operating out of its global headquarters on Ord Street in West Perth, has been expanding its own digital services division. And the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia, based at the Harry Butler Institute in Murdoch, has been co-funding applied research projects since 2023 that feed directly into this kind of operational software development. The result is a loose but functional ecosystem — startups, mid-tier contractors and university researchers — that sits underneath the big miners and captures some of the economic surplus the Pilbara generates.

What the Numbers Mean for Perth Street-Level

The flow-on effects are tangible in specific postcodes. Commercial vacancy rates in West Perth fell to 11.2 percent in the March 2026 quarter, according to Property Council data, after sitting above 18 percent as recently as 2023. Hospitality operators on Hay Street and around the Leederville café strip on Oxford Street report that the lunchtime trade from mining-services offices now rivals the pre-2020 peak. A desk at a shared working space in the lately renovated Brookfield Place tower on St Georges Terrace runs at about $850 a month — up 12 percent year-on-year.

The near-term picture carries real risks. Iron ore's dependency on Chinese steel demand means any slowdown in Beijing's construction pipeline lands directly on Western Australia's budget bottom line. The state treasury's own modelling flags a price assumption of $85 a tonne for the outer years of the forward estimates — well below current spot. For companies like Orebody Analytics, a prolonged price slump would likely accelerate client demand for cost-reduction tools rather than kill it, but it would also compress the valuations that make raising growth capital straightforward. Sandhu's team is reportedly in conversations with two east-coast institutional investors about a Series A round before the end of calendar 2026. The Pilbara keeps driving. Perth keeps building businesses around the exhaust.