Roxane Bandini-Maeder
"We were surrounded by trees. It was very beautiful but we were very exposed to fire. We had absolutely no data to tell us about our level of exposure. This is something that changes all the time, evolves, but if you don’t know…"
"We realised we had missed mountains, that it would be a great place for the kids. We had two at the time and I was pregnant with the third one. It was just: let’s jump and see what happens."
Roxane Bandini-Maeder grew up in one of the most beautiful places on earth, near Lausanne, Switzerland.
She started rock climbing when she was six years-old, a sport for nature-lovers, a sport for risk-takers.
In university, she found a way to turn this love for the natural world into a career, with environmental studies and geography. The more she studied, the more she thought about risk, though not the exhilarating kind of her childhood.
Climate risk.
These twin passions, and a sense of adventure, led her to another one of the most beautiful places on earth: Tasmania.
“When we first arrived in Hobart, we were living in Mount Nelson,” she says, “and we were surrounded by trees. It was very beautiful but we were very exposed to fire. We had absolutely no data to tell us about our level of exposure. This is something that changes all the time, evolves, but if you don’t know…”
Better than most people, Roxane understands the potential consequences of not-knowing, the anxiety of climate risk. This is at the spiritual heart of Geoneon, a Hobart-based tech company that maps, evaluates, and reports on climate risks using geospatial data and AI.
Roxane, the CEO of Geoneon, reflects on the double-sided nature of risk in her life. She is in Australia because, growing up in a trilingual country, she understood at a young age the value of speaking multiple languages. As a university student in Lausanne, she reached out to another Swiss student who was studying in Perth. Was Australia a good place to learn English?
Rather than discuss it online, this young man, Alex, met her in person when he came home to Switzerland for Christmas. She found, in him, someone else who loved nature and risk. They decided to drive all night to talk and to have breakfast in Paris.
They started their careers in Perth together. Roxane worked in disaster risk and Alex did geohazard assessments for large infrastructure projects. Tasmania called to them both. So did the realisation that the problem in risk is not a lack of data. There is plenty of data. The problem is bringing that data together, quickly and meaningfully, to help governments and communities make decisions to avoid catastrophe.
It was scary to take that leap, of course. But a week after we started the company we had our first contract.
“We had come to Tasmania twice on holiday,” she says. “Visiting friends who had moved here from Perth. We realised we had missed mountains, that it would be a great place for the kids. We had two at the time and I was pregnant with the third one. It was just: let’s jump and see what happens. And at first I was not drawn to the idea of starting a business. It’s a lot of risk! So I applied for a couple of jobs here and we moved in 2018.”
Roxane and Alex loved to hike in a place where you did not need to carry ten litres of water in desperate heat. They immediately connected with the Tasmanian community. But something bothered both of them, as they prepared to resume their careers in risk assessment: all that data and no way to manage it strategically.
So this Swiss-Tasmanian couple, who deal in risk for a living, took another risk.
“It was scary to take that leap, of course,” says Roxane. “But a week after we started the company we had our first contract.”
They began consulting, and Roxane and Alex saw immediately they could make a great living this way – helping client after client. But instead of focusing on a great living, they chased a good living and invested as much as they could into research and development. It was obvious, even if the pathway looked as difficult as the last few holds of a climb. They began to build a scalable product that places around the world can use to mitigate climate risk with the most up-to-date information.
“The City of Hobart has been the best partner, so willing to work with us on the latest thinking, especially AI,” she says.
Today, from their office in Tasmania, Geoneon works with clients in Australia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe.
Roxane and Alex work hard. They are unusually inventive. They have sacrificed a lot of sleep, over the years, to make Geoneon successful. But as much as they want to build a brilliantly profitable company, their ultimate goal is to help leaders make the kinds of decisions that will prevent catastrophic impacts from bushfires and floods – and save both lives and ecosystems.
“It’s very Tasmanian,” she says.
We worked with Southern Tasmanian photographer Jess Oakenfull.
Read about more Tasmanians
Royce Smith
Anthony Broese van Groenou
