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New Dialogue, an AI enterprise platform focused on regulated industries that was spun out of Software as a Service (SaaS) group CentricMinds, has appointed Birchal co-founder Matt Vitale as its executive director just over six months after he left the crowdfunding facilitator.
The new venture was launched today by Vitale and CentricMinds founder Tod Pedler to help address Australia's AI sovereignty challenging, enabling organisations to deploy open-source large language models (LLMs) in their own secure environments.
Vitale describes the company as positioning itself as a practical middle ground between public black-box AI services such as OpenAI and costly bespoke builds.
Put simply, New Dialogue creates a safe space, where organisations can give their teams permission to speak freely and use AI to work with sensitive data responsibly.
The platform is already live in pilots across professional services, healthcare and legal services - all sectors where data security, regulatory compliance and auditability are non-negotiable.
"Many of the most important institutions in the country can’t or shouldn't use public AI tools,” says Vitale.
“They need sovereign, explainable infrastructure they can actually control.”
Vitale, who helped shape Australia’s crowd-sourced funding (CSF) regime and enabled more than 30,000 retail investments into Australian early stage businesses during his time at Birchal, was drawn to the AI space by what he sees as a repeat of earlier digital infrastructure losses.
"We lost search to Google, and social to Meta. AI is different. Enterprise might be the last line of defence," he says.
The platform allows organisations to run models such as Meta’s Llama 2 or France’s Mistral within their own cloud environments, and includes governance features such as role-based access, observability tools, and integration with internal knowledge bases using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
"We’ve productised what compliance-conscious organisations will need. A private, policy-aligned AI assistant," says New Dialogue CEO Tod Pedler.
"The differentiator is speed. We can get an organisation live in days, not quarter."
New Dialogue’s implementation model typically begins with a 60-day pilot, where clients test AI against specific workflows and fine-tune the model using internal data.
“We’re seeing real productivity gains, not just efficiency around content creation,” says Vitale.
“We’re embedding AI into workflows to unlock speed, quality, and better decision-making, and we’re doing it in a way that aligns with an organisation’s internal governance.”
The launch coincides with heightened activity around AI regulation in Canberra. US-based OpenAI’s chief economist, Ronnie Chatterji, recently concluded a series of high-level government meetings, while Australia considers its approach to data sovereignty and safe AI deployment.
"There’s no shortage of enthusiasm for AI," says Vitale. "But most large organisations are constrained by legal, compliance, and ethical concerns, particularly with black-box systems. This is where everything is bottlenecking."
Vitale adds interest is also coming from markets such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada where policy settings align closely with Australia’s.
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