The West End Founder Turning Restaurant Waste Into a $2M Business

Loopable, a Brisbane startup that connects hospitality venues with urban farms through a digitally managed food-scrap collection network, closed a $2 million seed round on June 27 — its second raise in 18 months and the largest yet for a Queensland circular-economy company at this stage of growth. The funding came from Brisbane-based venture firm River City Labs Ventures and two Sydney-based impact funds, according to documents filed with ASIC.

The timing matters. Across Australia, the economics of organic waste diversion are shifting fast. Landfill levies in Queensland rose to $85 per tonne on 1 July, up from $75 the year before, making cheap disposal of food scraps genuinely painful for restaurant groups. At the same time, demand for finished compost and biochar from Southeast Queensland's expanding peri-urban farm belt — stretching from Redland City through to the Lockyer Valley — has pushed gate prices for premium compost above $180 per cubic metre, roughly double what the same product fetched in 2022.

Loopable's founder, a 34-year-old agronomist who spent three years working on soil-health programs in the Northern Territory before moving to Brisbane in 2021, runs the operation from a leased space in the Boundary Street industrial pocket of West End, about two kilometres from the CBD. The company uses a proprietary routing algorithm to schedule collections from roughly 140 hospitality clients — including venues along Fish Lane and several hotels in South Bank — and delivers the organic material to six partner farms, where it's processed into saleable compost and returned, in some cases, as fresh produce to the same kitchens that generated the scraps.

How Brisbane's Innovation Infrastructure Helped

The company's growth trajectory is inseparable from Brisbane's thickening startup support layer. Loopable ran through the River City Labs accelerator program in 2024, a 14-week cohort based at the Fortitude Valley tech precinct on McLachlan Street. It then took a desk at the Queensland University of Technology's The Precinct on Musk Avenue in Kelvin Grove, where it accessed the university's agri-food research network and connected with the Queensland Department of Agriculture's commercialisation team. QUT's commercialisation office confirmed it has assisted more than 60 startups through formal agreements since 2023.

Brisbane City Council's Smart City Office, which administers the $10 million Brisbane Innovation Fund, listed circular-economy ventures among its priority categories for the 2025-26 funding cycle. Loopable received a $120,000 feasibility grant from that fund in late 2024 to model a city-wide organic waste network — work that, the company says, directly underpinned the pitch that secured this month's seed round.

What the Money Buys — and What Comes Next

The $2 million raise is earmarked for three things: a second operations hub, likely in the Northgate industrial corridor near the future Breakfast Creek green bridge precinct; hiring six full-time collection drivers and two data analysts by September; and integrating the routing platform with the Queensland Government's food waste registry, which becomes mandatory for venues with more than 50 seats under state regulations taking effect in January 2027.

That regulatory deadline is the real accelerant here. Hundreds of Brisbane restaurants and catering businesses face compliance obligations in under six months, and most have no established diversion pathway. Loopable is already fielding inbound inquiries from venue groups it hasn't approached, according to a company spokesperson who confirmed the interest but declined to name clients ahead of signed agreements.

For other founders watching this space, the Loopable story carries a practical lesson: the combination of Brisbane's maturing VC ecosystem, accessible university partnerships and a council innovation fund willing to back unfashionable sectors — organics, not artificial intelligence — can get a capital-light business to seed stage without leaving Queensland. River City Labs Ventures is accepting expressions of interest from circular-economy startups for its next cohort, with applications closing on 31 August.