Brisbane export achiever, Intellection Pty Ltd, is one of Australia’s fastest-growing start-up companies with world-leading automated mineral analysis technology that is in big demand worldwide due to the minerals and energy boom.

Financial support from HSBC and Export Finance and Insurance Corporation (EFIC), Australia’s export credit agency, enabled Intellection to expand in the United States as a base for leveraging export opportunities in the Americas.

EFIC Headway, a financial guarantee from EFIC to a participating bank, enabled Intellection to access additional working capital finance from HSBC.

“HSBC supported us with working capital but when it came to funding the US operation properly, we were in a grey area,” says Calvin Treacy, Intellection managing director and chief executive officer.

“EFIC Headway gave us the ability to plan a fairly aggressive market entry strategy in the US with the confidence that the funding was there.”

EFIC Headway enables eligible small and medium-sized exporters such as Intellection to access additional working capital from their participating bank, without the need to provide added security.

HSBC, NAB, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, BankWest, Bank of Queensland, Bendigo Bank and St.George distribute EFIC Headway.

“The boom is a worldwide phenomenon and a big reason we have gone into the US,” says Mr Treacy. “We tried to service the US from Australia but that doesn’t work in their market. If we’re going to grow the business, we have to have a long-term US base with ‘US-speaking’ people.”

In just five years since start-up, Intellection has grown dramatically to become an export force in the United States, Canada, Chile, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Russia.

Intellection’s world-leading technology originated at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in the 1970s with the use of a scanning electron microscope and x-rays to analyse and identify minerals. Intellection’s brief was to further develop and commercialise the CSIRO technology.  

The result is QEMSCAN® – Quantative Evaluation of Materials by Scanning Electron Microscope – technology that analyses rock texture, type and mineralogical content and, within seconds, measures and identifies thousands of points in a sample. 

QEMSCAN’s® applications are in mining, oil and gas exploration, clean coal use in electricity generation and post-mining environmental restoration – all important factors relevant to the global minerals and energy boom. It can even play a crime detection role in police forensic investigations.