Co-founded a funded InsurTech startup (Tonghui Technology, Shanghai — raised external funding, still operating) and a profitable product business (Safemore, AU/UK) — then brought that founder judgment back into hands-on engineering.
generating a tailored summary…Co-founded a funded InsurTech startup in Shanghai with a team of 6, building a crowd-share motor insurance platform in collaboration with some of China's largest insurance underwriters. Exited in early 2024 after the COVID-19 pandemic made sustained Sydney–Shanghai travel impossible for three years, ultimately preventing the hands-on co-founder involvement the business needed.
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Co-founded Safemore, a consumer electronics company that designed, manufactured, and marketed an innovative vertical power outlet with integrated USB charging ports — built real revenue across Australian and UK retail markets, with genuine P&L ownership and a full supply chain from factory to shelf.
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A crowd-share motor insurance platform — community risk pooling backed by major Chinese underwriters — built by a 6-person founding team, funded after launch, and still operating.
Built Tonghui from a 6-person startup to a funded InsurTech company that continued operating after co-founder exit.
Co-founded Tonghui Technology from scratch with a startup team of 6. Owned technical strategy, product decisions, hiring, investor relationships, and regulatory compliance across eight years. Established collaborations with some of China's largest insurance underwriters to back the crowd-share motor insurance product — partnerships that validated the model and were central to securing external funding. Exited in early 2024: the COVID-19 pandemic made Sydney–Shanghai travel impossible for three years, gradually making sustained co-founder involvement untenable. The company secured external funding and continues to operate independently.
6-person founding team · Raised external funding · Partnerships with major Chinese insurance underwriters · Company continues to operate post-exit
Designed and built a crowd-share motor insurance platform — a community pooling model backed by major Chinese underwriters.
Built a crowd-share motor insurance platform where groups of drivers collectively pool premiums and share claim costs, with the risk ultimately underwritten by some of China's largest insurance companies. The business model sat between a traditional insurer and a mutual fund: members benefited from shared risk and lower premiums when the group drove safely, while the underwriter partnerships provided regulatory compliance and claims capacity. Designed the entire technical architecture and led a team of 6 to deliver it.
Conceptualised and built LBIC — a location-based on-demand travel insurance system.
Designed and implemented LBIC (Location Based Instance Cover), delivering on-demand insurance coverage to travellers based on their geographical location and current activity. The system integrated with GPS data to trigger and terminate micro-policies in real time — a genuinely novel product for the Chinese tourism insurance market. Identified the market gap, designed the product, and built it.
Grew the team and led business development alongside full technical and product ownership.
Wore every hat a co-founder wears: engineering manager, architect, product owner, and business development lead simultaneously. Cultivated partnerships with insurance providers, technology firms, and industry stakeholders. Built and managed the engineering team, implemented risk management protocols, and ensured regulatory compliance across the insurance domain — the kind of breadth that only comes from building something you personally own.
Designed, manufactured, and sold an innovative vertical power outlet with integrated USB charging ports into AU and UK retail.
Co-founded Safemore from zero with no external funding. The product was a vertical power outlet combining mains power sockets with integrated USB charging ports — a consumer electronics hardware product designed for home and office use. Handled product design, manufacturing relationships in China, branding, and retail distribution across Australia and the UK. Reached meaningful revenue with a small team, establishing the brand in both markets. Owned full P&L throughout: pricing decisions, supplier negotiations, and the financial consequences of every call made.
Profitable without external funding · Two-country retail distribution (AU + UK)
Built and ran the full supply chain from Chinese manufacturer to retail shelf across two countries.
Established a logistics and distribution operation serving retailers and distributors across Australia and the UK — supplier contracts in China, inventory management, inbound freight, and last-mile distribution all managed with a lean team. This operational experience (what breaks in a physical supply chain, how retailer relationships actually work, what real margin pressure feels like) directly shapes how Brian evaluates build-vs-buy tradeoffs in software: he's been on the other side of them.
At Tonghui we built a crowd-share motor insurance platform — groups of drivers pooling premiums, sharing claim costs, backed by some of China's largest insurance underwriters. Six people, no external capital at the start, a heavily regulated industry that had every incentive to ignore a startup. The underwriter partnerships were the hardest part: every architecture decision that made the platform more auditable and more obviously compliant was also a business development argument. We used blockchain for the group pooling agreements not because it was fashionable but because it made the arrangement verifiable independent of us — and that's what convinced the first underwriter to engage. The company raised external funding and continues to operate. I exited in early 2024 — COVID-19 made Sydney–Shanghai travel impossible for three years, and you can't be a hands-on co-founder of a Shanghai company from Sydney indefinitely. The exit was forced by geography, not by the business. The lesson that stuck: if you can't articulate the business case for an architectural choice, you probably shouldn't make it.
Between 2010 and 2015 I co-founded Safemore, a consumer electronics company that designed and manufactured vertical power outlets with integrated USB charging ports — sold into retail across Australia and the UK. No external funding, small team, real P&L. The product itself was genuinely novel for the time: a single unit that replaced your power board and USB charger, with a vertical form factor that minimised desk clutter. What the business taught me that software never had: in a hardware business, a bad product decision ships physically and sits on a shelf. You can't push a patch. The cost of getting it wrong is inventory, not a rollback — and you find out at the rate of the next sales cycle, not the next deploy. That experience gave me a very different intuition about the cost of mistakes — one I now bring to software decisions that are harder to reverse than they look: data model choices, API contracts, infrastructure commitments. The discipline of physical product forces a clarity that software can obscure.
Outside of work I've coached a high school FIRST FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team — and the team won the Australian championship two years in a row. FRC is intense: six weeks to design, build, and program a robot from scratch, then compete. The coaching challenge isn't just technical — it's helping teenagers under pressure make fast decisions with incomplete information, divide work across mechanical, electrical, and software sub-teams, and iterate on a physical system when there are no rollbacks. What I brought from professional engineering: systems thinking, the discipline of breaking a hard problem into testable pieces, and the habit of asking 'what's the most important thing to prove first?' What coaching gave back: a renewed appreciation for how much you can teach by asking the right question instead of giving the answer, and the patience that comes from watching someone figure something out for themselves. Two back-to-back championships suggests the approach worked.