Secure Code Warrior founders win 2026 NSW Entrepreneur of the Year

Secure Code Warrior co-founders Pieter Danhieux and Fatemah Beydoun have won the Pearcey Foundation's 2026 NSW Entrepreneur of the Year award, announced Tuesday, 27 October 2026.

The cybersecurity company they built now employs more than 200 staff and serves over 600 clients globally, including major banks, telecommunications companies and government departments. It started 11 years ago in Sydney.

Danhieux and Beydoun couldn't accept the award in person due to an overseas commitment. Secure Code Warrior director of communications Catie McHugh collected it on their behalf and framed the company's philosophy in concrete terms.

"Innovation comes from a desire to improve current standards, to challenge the status quo, and in our case, envision a world with safer software and more secure code," McHugh said.

She added: "At Secure Code Warrior, we have always believed in the power of nurturing and upskilling the next wave of security-conscious developers when they have the opportunity to grow, to lead, and contribute to higher quality, secure software."

McHugh closed with a nod to the broader founder community: "Let's continue supporting, uplifting, and inspiring one another as we nurture this sometimes very difficult journey together."

Who presents the Pearcey awards?

The Pearcey Foundation awards honour ICT entrepreneurship in New South Wales and across Australia. Former winners are traditionally invited to present, and this year the 2021 winner, Laura O'Reilly, handed over the trophy.

O'Reilly and her brother Jordan founded Fighting Chance and Hireup, platforms that help people living with mild to severe disabilities find purpose and receive appropriate day-to-day care. The startups grew out of the family's frustration navigating the NSW Government's disability support program on behalf of their brother Shane, who lived with cerebral palsy.

"People told us it would be too risky. 'People with disabilities can't manage it for themselves,'" O'Reilly recalled of the early scepticism. "We just knew through our experience that it was nonsense. And we were fortunate. It was lucky, but we timed it with the NDIS, and it was a problem in our family that was also shared by hundreds of thousands of others, and so it just took off like a rocketship."

What did the young ICT explorers show?

The Pearcey Foundation also runs the Young ICT Explorers Program, which gives school-aged entrepreneurs the chance to develop technology ideas, with the strongest entrants selected to present to live audiences.

Two Year 6 students at St Andrews Cathedral School, Antara Chi and Eleanor Ha, impressed the crowd with Project OWL, an initiative aiming to stop plastic pollution from entering Australia's oceans.

David O'Mara, a Year 10 student at Knox Grammar School, built Dialcaching — a Pokemon Go-style scavenger hunt built around Australia's network of 14,000 unloved payphones. Conceived out of adolescent boredom, the app awards points for reaching a payphone before other players and has already racked up more than 1,000 users.

Who won the incubator pitching contest?

The night also hosted the University Incubator Pitching competition, where emerging founders pitched their startups to a three-judge panel.

Jonathan Salgo took the win with Found, a platform he created that connects people living with a disability to care workers providing personalised care — echoing the disability-services theme that carried Laura O'Reilly's earlier ventures to scale.

For Secure Code Warrior, the award caps an 11-year run that has turned a Sydney startup into a global security-training business, and the Pearcey Foundation's showcase of school-age builders suggests the local pipeline behind it is far from empty.