About 40° South
We built this because Australian businesses deserve better than "probably compliant."
Every day, regulated Australian businesses send sensitive data to AI models hosted overseas, with no audit trail, no compliance checks, and no way to prove to their board or regulator that they're meeting their obligations.
Our story
40 South was founded in 2026 by Mike Jones, an AI innovation lead who spent years watching the same pattern play out across Australian enterprises: teams adopt AI to work faster, compliance raises concerns, and the whole thing stalls. Not because the AI wasn't useful, but because nobody could prove it was safe.
The problem wasn't the technology. It was the gap between what AI could do and what Australian regulations required. Every overseas AI tool came with the same limitation: no guaranteed data residency, no per-call compliance evidence, and no understanding of APRA, the Privacy Act, or the new ADM transparency laws.
So we built Guard. Compliance middleware that sits between your business and any AI model. Every input, every output, checked against your industry's obligations and logged to a tamper-evident audit trail. Your team doesn't change how they work. You get proof they're compliant.
Why "40 South"
The 40th parallel south runs through the Southern Ocean, below Australia. It's our line in the sand. Everything above it, every piece of data, every AI interaction, stays under Australian law.
The name is a commitment to sovereignty. Not as a marketing line, but as an architectural decision. Guard processes data in Australia, stores it in Australia, and governs it under Australian law. That's not a policy we chose. It's how the infrastructure is built.
What we believe
Our principles
Compliance should be automatic, not an afterthought.
If your team has to remember to be compliant, the system is broken. Guard makes compliance the default.
Your data is yours.
When we say data sovereignty, we mean it. Your data never crosses a border. We can prove it.
Simplicity is a feature.
Compliance is already complicated. Our job is to make the AI part simple. One API URL change. Live in a day.
Honesty builds trust.
We say exactly what Guard does and doesn't do. If we can't cover a regulation, we'll tell you before you sign. No vague promises.
The team
Mike Jones
Founder and CEO
Mike has spent over a decade working at the intersection of AI, digital innovation, and enterprise technology in Australia. Before founding 40 South, he led AI innovation at Capgemini Australia, where he saw firsthand how regulated businesses struggled to adopt AI without clear compliance guardrails. He's based in New South Wales.
We're building the team. If you're interested in joining a company that's solving a real problem for Australian businesses, get in touch at hello@40south.au.
Our infrastructure
Guard runs on Google Cloud Sydney (australia-southeast1). All data processing, storage, and inference happens within Australian borders.
Want to know more?
Have a question about Guard, our compliance coverage, or whether 40 South is right for your business?