Australia’s most internationally successful brain-computer interface company has a co-founder and CEO who has been publicly direct about why he had to leave Australia to build it. On 25 May 2026, Synchron CEO Tom Oxley joined a growing coalition of Australian founders pushing back against Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s proposed capital gains tax reforms, in comments published by The Australian under the headline “How BrainChip heavyweight Synchron beat Elon Musk after escaping Australia’s toxic startup ecosystem.” Oxley has previously stated publicly that he could not raise capital in Australia for Synchron’s early rounds and that the appetite for risk among Australian investors did not match what he eventually found in the United States. His pushback adds a marquee BCI voice to a founder coalition that has already escalated the issue to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese through an open letter campaign.

What Chalmers proposed

Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down the Australian 2026-27 federal budget on 12 May 2026, with a centrepiece reform that removes the long-standing 50% CGT discount for assets sold from 1 July 2027 onward. Under the proposed changes, the existing 50% discount would be replaced with a cost-based indexation model for assets held longer than 12 months, alongside a proposed 30% minimum tax on net capital gains.

For Australian startup founders, the proposed changes structurally rewrite the equity-compensation calculus. Founders typically hold their company shares for many years before any liquidity event, and the existing 50% CGT discount has historically been the primary tax incentive that compensates for the years of below-market salary and equity-as-deferred-compensation that early-stage company building requires. Removing the discount and adding the 30% minimum tax tightens the post-tax outcome on founder equity sales substantially.

The CGT changes are part of a broader package of budget measures that also include a 30% minimum tax on discretionary trusts (from 1 July 2028) and limits on negative gearing for properties acquired after 7:30pm on 12 May 2026. The combined package has been read by Australian founders as a coordinated shift away from the asset-class-favouring tax structure that has supported Australian entrepreneurship for two decades.

The founder pushback

Australian founders launched an open letter campaign urging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to reconsider the CGT changes, with the campaign specifically targeting founders under 40. The pushback frames Australia as becoming the worst country in the developed world for startup equity if the changes pass as proposed, with the prediction that tech talent and capital will move offshore to jurisdictions with more favourable founder-equity tax regimes (the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates).

The Tech Council of Australia and the Investment Council have entered formal consultation with the Treasurer’s office. Chalmers has indicated in subsequent public commentary that startups and venture capital may receive special consideration in the final legislation, recognising that the standard CGT framework may not fit the structural realities of long-hold founder equity. The shape of that special consideration has not been disclosed.

Why Oxley’s voice matters

Synchron is Australia’s most internationally successful brain-computer interface company. The company was founded in Melbourne in 2012 by Tom Oxley, Nicholas Opie, and colleagues from the University of Melbourne’s Vascular Bionics Laboratory. The flagship Stentrode device is an endovascular BCI designed to be delivered through the vascular system without open-skull surgery. Synchron has since relocated its commercial centre of gravity to New York while maintaining Australian clinical operations, and has raised more than $305 million in equity capital across multiple rounds, with the Series D closed in November 2025 including a $54 million investment from Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation (covered in Inside BCI’s 8 May sovereign capital piece).

Oxley’s public position on the Australian funding environment predates the CGT debate by years. He has stated publicly that he could not raise capital in Australia for Synchron’s early rounds, and that the investors who led the company’s Series A and Series B in the United States had a substantially higher appetite for risk than anyone he encountered in Australia. The 25 May Australian piece extends that established position into the specific CGT debate, with the framing that Chalmers’s proposed reforms will accelerate the same offshore drift Synchron itself executed.

How this lands inside the broader Australian BCI cohort

Synchron is not the only Australian-origin BCI story affected by the Australian tax debate. Nicholas Opie joined the Control Bionics board on 14 May 2026 as a Non-Executive Director, deepening the Australian neurotechnology ecosystem’s institutional coordination at exactly the moment the federal tax policy is moving in the opposite direction. Control Bionics is ASX-listed under the ticker CBL and headquartered in Cremorne. The University of Melbourne’s Vascular Bionics Laboratory remains the academic anchor for the cohort that produced Synchron, Ultra Bionics, and other Australian neurotechnology companies.

The CGT changes, if passed as proposed, would affect founder equity sales across this cohort and any future Australian BCI companies that emerge from the same academic infrastructure. The structural question is whether Australia’s BCI advantage (a serious academic base, strong sovereign capital posture via NRFC, recent commercial coordination via the Opie / Control Bionics move) can survive a tax regime that pushes founder equity sales toward offshore restructuring.

What to watch

The first signal is the shape of the special consideration the Chalmers office is reportedly developing for startups and venture capital. If the carve-out is meaningful (a separate CGT discount for founder equity above a defined holding-period threshold, or an indexation-only treatment for qualifying startup shares), the immediate offshore-drift concern softens. If the carve-out is narrow or absent, Oxley’s “couldn’t raise capital in Australia” framing becomes the template for the next decade of Australian startup commentary. The second signal is whether other apex Australian founders (Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, Canva’s Melanie Perkins, BrainChip’s Antonio Viana, and others) add their voices to the Oxley pushback. The third signal is the final legislative text when it lands in Parliament; the 1 July 2027 effective date gives the federal government roughly 13 months to consult and revise.

Sources

• How BrainChip heavyweight Synchron beat Elon Musk after escaping Australia’s toxic startup ecosystem (The Australian, 25 May 2026)
• Labor considers startup CGT changes after founder backlash (SmartCompany)
• Startup founders launch open letter to Albanese over CGT changes (Startup Daily)
• Jim Chalmers ‘recognises’ startups and VC need special consideration amid CGT change (Capital Brief)
• NRF slings $54 million at Synchron (Startup Daily)
• Perspiration and commercialisation with A/Prof Tom Oxley (Bionics Institute podcast — for prior Oxley quotes on Australian VC)