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Tom Schalch, Co-founder & CEO
Tom is the one building it. He started in tech and software at 16 and has spent the 16 years since launching companies: e-commerce brands, stock trading software, and Whiskr, a pet-tech startup that placed joint third out of more than 2,000 applicants in the 2023 Uber x Rare Birds Business Booster.
Nights, weekends, whatever it takes, Tom is still hands-on in every build: Spark, AI Legal Toolbox and the custom systems we make for clients. He makes sure each one does exactly what it says it does and nothing it doesn't. If you ever wonder why our AI would rather say "I don't know" than bluff, that's Tom's fingerprints on it.
Tom on LinkedIn
Sarah Burke and Anthony Bartlett, Co-founders
Sarah and Anthony are the operators. They've each spent years running real businesses, the kind where a missed follow up is a lost job and admin eats the afternoon. They backed Tom early as partners, not passive investors, and they're the reason every Elysia product gets judged on one question: does it earn its place in a real workday, or does it just look clever in a demo? That's the bar they hold every product to.
Sarah on LinkedIn
What we build
The three of us are equal partners in Elysia Partners, and we build a small family of AI tools the same way:
- Spark: the AI employee that runs a small business's whole front office, from follow-up and bookings to campaigns, invoices and the phone.
- AI Legal Toolbox: the AI paralegal built into Outlook for Australian law firms.
- Custom AI: systems built for problems off-the-shelf software can't solve.
Different industries, same rules: do the unglamorous work properly, tell people the truth about what it can and can't do, and the human always decides how much the AI does on its own.
We didn't start Elysia because AI is exciting. We started it because we kept meeting business owners, tradies and lawyers buried in work a machine should be doing for them, and we knew we could fix that properly, not just impressively.
