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START-UP genius Bevan Slattery, who co-founded Pipe Networks with Steve Baxter in 2001 aiming to "make enough money to go fishing every Friday" and later sold it for $373 million to TPG Telecom, is back in front of telco investors with a brand new company.
In the coming weeks, Slattery says he will be lodging a prospectus for Superloop, a fibre-optic network owner servicing customers along Australia's east coast and Asia.
He tells Brisbane Business News that while it isn't completely finalised, he intends to raise between $15 million and $20 million for Superloop.
"We raised $10 million in pre-IPO this month but I have also invested a significant amount of money in the business myself," says Slattery.
Slattery launched his first venture, iSeek, in 1998 with minimal starting capital for it to then run him dry as he "lived between friends, jumped trains and ate two-minute noodles for about a year".
He has since come a long way.
He founded Pipe Networks with good friend Baxter, started listed-venture NEXTDC in 2010, created the spin-off Asia Pacific Data Centre Group in 2013 and has been working solidly on Megaport over the past couple of years.
Slattery says Megaport is essentially a customer of Superloop's. He describes Superloop as a "completely different business" but says "an internet fabric sits on top of the entire network".
The Australian reports that Superloop is a spin-off of Megaport, so Megaport can turn its focus to global expansion of its industry-leading interconnectivity services.
Slattery still calls Brisbane home, but has set his focus on Asia and particularly Singapore, as the place to be for telecommunications in this part of the world.
"We will be building a network across key metropolitan cities through Superloop, originating from Australia and Singapore," says Slattery.
"We acquired an underground duct network in Singapore and are rolling out fibre cables in the network as we speak now our level of investment in Singapore is already very high.
"We are focusing very much on rolling out these cables and integrating the major data centres in those markets, and probably in Singapore we are also looking at connecting some of the enterprise and high-end clients.
"Australia, particularly Melbourne and Sydney, is still strategic in terms of large enterprise and cloud providers but nowhere near the level of Asia."
Slattery doesn't give everything away, but if his past history is anything to go by, Superloop is tipped to be a big one.
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