GenAI Community

🎉 Build Club Perth — May Recap featuring Samreid Manez.

Around 70 people packed into the Bloom Bentley basement last night — what an incredible turnout! Students, founders, senior developers, and investors came together for an inspiring night of AI product stories, pitch energy, and community support.

🎤 Prototype to Product

We were joined by Samreid Manez, Founder & CEO of Valearnis — an AI-powered education platform helping children develop critical thinking through Socratic tutoring and curriculum-aligned lessons.

Sam shared how Valearnis has grown into a truly global company, with students and customers across the world and a dev team spanning multiple timezones. 🌏

What Samreid Walked Us Through

✅ Getting the most out of AI tools in product development
✅ Hiring high-performing teams who care deeply about the mission
✅ His wild founder journey — from studying Geology, running a tutoring business, and living in Japan, to serving as a politician, before finding his true calling building something he genuinely believes in.

💡 Bonus Insight

Angel investor Nicholas Jerrat, fresh back from Sunrise in Sydney, reminded everyone building with AI that your AI software stack is not your moat. 👀

🚀 Pitch Night

Congrats to the five founders who took the mic:

Shopmate — Track grocery prices across stores. (Tommy L)
Nordycreats — Jonas Skoogh is newly arrived from Sweden, looking for collaborators and new opportunities.
BFF Health — Hayley Cullen-Xiang pitched personalised health for adults and Hungry Bubbasaur, personalised diet plans for kids.
Asset Tracker — Connor Rullo, a mechatronics student, building RFID tracking for company assets.
Agentic OS — Vladimir Vorotilov pitching a self-evaluating agent orchestration platform with a Star Wars theme.

🎂 Next up: our FIRST BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION! See you there — it’s going to be a big one.

🙏 Thank You

Thank you to our 15+ start-up founders, senior industry developers, and students from every discipline who showed up and brought the energy.

A very special thanks to Alex Jenkins for spending the whole evening with us and connecting with so many community members. 💙

And to our incredible supporters who make Build Club Perth possible: WA Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH) · Bloom · Curtin Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship · DDD Perth · AI.SEA.

Behind-the-scenes heroes: Kristina Gagalova, Ph.D., Nicholas Jerrat for keeping pitches running smoothly, and Matthew Yuan for photos.

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