ABOUT
Who is building this
My fascination with one particular piece of silicon began in 1991.
That year, my father travelled to South Korea on a work trip. As part of the trip, he visited Samsung Electronics Corporation (SEC), as it was known then, where he was presented with a VIP gold plated tie pin. Set into it, where you might expect a stone, was a real piece of silicon.
It lived among my mum’s jewellery. Whenever it came out, I would turn it over and study the tiny patterns on the chip. Dad remembers being told that something so small could hold the equivalent of many newspapers. I didn’t understand how. I just couldn’t stop looking at it.
I went on to spend more than twenty years in technology across New Zealand and Australia. At Optimal Workshop I ran the security, governance and GDPR compliance programme through a period of fast growth. At Silverstripe I was Platform Operations Director, responsible for the New Zealand Census digital platform and the platform behind the All of Government digital marketplace. At Slalom I founded the Modern Operations capability. Most recently I delivered a working AI agent for packaging and channel activation for global beauty and consumer health brands.
The part that stayed with me was running platforms people depend on. That work happens at one boundary: the place where software failure becomes real-world consequence. Incident by incident, the same lesson repeated. The controls that matter most cannot live inside the thing they control.
AI is now crossing into the physical world, and that lesson is about to matter more than it ever has. So I'm building Astraea around another small piece of silicon. PEC-1 is a small chip that holds the line between what software wants and what a machine is permitted to do.
Astraea is Australian by design. Sovereign trust hardware, designed in Australia for Australian and allied programs.
Janaki SabaFounder and CEO, Astraea