Ready for Repeat Success on the World Stage: Sam Kroonenburg Receives 2025 Pearcey Victorian Entrepreneur Award

The Pearcey Foundation today announced Sam Kroonenburg, the co-founder and co-CEO of Cuttable, founding partner of Glitch Capital and co-founder and CEO of A Cloud Guru (now part of Pluralsight), as the recipient of the 2025 Pearcey Victorian Entrepreneur Award. The award was presented last night by Professor Ed Hovy, executive director of Melbourne Connect. The event also featured the 2025 Pearcey Oration, which was given by the Honourable Victor Dominello, a former senior NSW Government minister, best known for serving as the inaugural Minister for Customer Service and Digital, a role he pioneered globally in 2019.

Sam Kroonenburg co-founded A Cloud Guru in 2015 (acquired by Vista Equity Partners and merged with competitor Pluralsight in 2021), an online learning platform that specialised in teaching cloud computing and related technologies. In 2023 Sam co-founded Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind AI advertising platform designed to help businesses create more ads, faster. The company is now preparing for USA expansion, taking its AI creative engine to the world's largest advertising market.

"Sam built a global success from scratch right here in Melbourne that has helped millions of students grow their careers and advance the cloud computing technologies that we all rely upon today. What stood out for the Pearcey Foundation in recognising Sam for this year's award are his continuing efforts and passion for technology and building companies with Cuttable, and in funding new founders and guiding our tech ecosystem with Glitch Capital," said Jordan Green AM, Chair - Victorian Committee, Pearcey Foundation.

"Cuttable is showing the world that the future of creative AI is being built in Australia. This award recognises the journey the team at Cuttable has been on, and now we're ready to take it global, starting with the USA. I feel very honoured to receive this award in a state and country with so many incredible technology founders and leaders," said Kroonenburg.

Sam Kroonenburg
Sam was born and raised in Perth. In 1998, at 14, he took a weekend job in a local computer store and in 2005 he graduated with a software engineering degree from Curtin University.

Sam's early career was with Microsoft in the USA where he did innovative work in operating system development and systems utilities like the disk defragmenter, backup and restore. His time with Microsoft included a stint in Oslo working on advanced, next generation search and SharePoint, working in C# and ASP.Net for both client and server side.

In 2010, Sam moved back to Melbourne and joined Kiandra IT, a consultancy helping clients with custom software development. In this role he gained a lot of experience: technically in full-stack development, Azure, and user experience; commercially while working on e-commerce and corporate solutions; and in project management and later, in executive and account management.

In 2015, Sam's older brother Ryan failed a job interview for Amazon Web Services in the UK. Back then, AWS was starting to grow rapidly so the two brothers decided to write an online AWS training course, which they posted on the Udemy online learning and teaching marketplace. It was an instant success with thousands of people eager for AWS certification preferring a $20-50 online course to paying $5-10k for in-person AWS training. Those first online courses were typically 20-30 hours long and presented in a way that was informative, fun, and interesting to watch.

A year later, unhappy with Udemy taking half of their revenue, they decided to build their own platform. At that time, AWS serverless architecture was very new, so building their platform and courses in parallel was state-of-the-art. Sam amazed his team as he helped build everything including video hosting, dynamic transcoding, payments, onboarding, instrumentation, forums, and more. He also led and drove the commercial effort and this company, known as A Cloud Guru, featured at conferences - their own, held in a warehouse in New York, and AWS Reinvent - and online. A special Black Friday offer at the time increased their sales 40-fold.

In 2017, A Cloud Guru opened an office in Austin, Texas. The B2C approach was making them famous, which led to a B2B approach to drive scale. Corporates started buying enterprise licences, and the company grew rapidly adding programmers, content creators, editors and other support staff. With a proven product-market fit, Sam raised a $7m Series A investment to expand offices, staff, B2B sales, and introduce new features, including a sandbox and exam simulation.

In 2019, Sam raised a $40m Series B and then a much larger Series C to acquire a competitor. He managed the negotiations, merger and integration, making A Cloud Guru a global leader in AWS education and an AWS Hero organisation. He was regularly asked to give keynotes at AWS conferences and was invited to join the Forbes Technology Council.

By 2021, A Cloud Guru had grown to 2.5 million students and 4,500 customers worldwide, and in June that year, A Cloud Guru was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and merged with competitor Pluralsight in a deal valued at more than $2b.

In 2023 Sam co-founded Cuttable, a first-of-its-kind AI advertising platform. Cuttable enables ecommerce brands to create hundreds of social media ads in minutes, something which currently takes weeks. His purpose for this company is to give power back to the smaller brands who are competing with multi-billion-dollar entities.

Cuttable's platform is fully automated, powered by AI trained by senior advertising strategists, editors, designers and copywriters. Cuttable recently announced a $10M seed round, led by Square Peg.

In January this year Sam became a founding partner of Glitch Capital, a $50m venture fund that is the first collaboration in Australia of tech founders who have exited their companies after achieving multibillion dollar valuations.

"It's a 'founders-for-founders' approach that echoes the ethos and character of our recipient. Those close to Sam assure us his success hasn't changed him. They know him as supportive, gentle, enthusiastic, confident, and humble; always a collaborator and an open-minded problem solver," said Green.

As the Victorian Pearcey Award recipient, Sam Kroonenburg will represent the state in the Pearcey National Awards to be held in late November 2025 in Melbourne.

For more information about Sam and previous Victorian Pearcey Entrepreneur Award recipients, go to https://www.pearcey.org.au/awards/state/vic.

The 2025 Pearcey Oration

The 2025 Pearcey Oration was delivered by the Honourable Victor Dominello, a former senior NSW Government minister, best known for serving as the inaugural Minister for Customer Service and Digital, a role he pioneered globally in 2019.

Dominello is the co-founder of ServiceGen, a consultancy advising governments and organisations on innovative service delivery strategies; chair of the Services Australia Independent Advisory Board; senior advisor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change; and a professor at the University of New South Wales. He also serves as a director of the UNSW-UTS Trustworthy Digital Society Hub and as a director of the Tech Council of Australia.

Dominello's central message in his Oration was simple: if Australia wants AI-driven prosperity without social fracture, we need to urgently build three pieces of digital public infrastructure — the road, the key, and the licence.

Other State Awards

Australia Capital Territory Awards: the awards will be presented at an event in Canberra on a date to be confirmed.

NSW Awards: nominations are still open with the awards to be presented at an event on 14 October 2025. Nominations close on 23 September at 5pm AEST and can be submitted at https://www.pearcey.org.au/awards/nominations/state-nomination-form.

Queensland Awards: the awards will be presented in Brisbane at an event on 22 October 2025. More details to come.

South Australian Awards: nominations can be submitted at https://www.pearcey.org.au/awards/nominations/state-nomination-form.  

Tasmanian Awards: nominations can be submitted at https://www.pearcey.org.au/awards/nominations/state-nomination-form.

Western Australian Awards: Chris Morrissey, founder and CEO of Ever Nimble, was the recipient of the 2025 Western Australian Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The award was presented as part of the 34th annual WAITTA INCITE Awards, Western Australia's longest running tech awards program. More details on PRWire here.

--

About the Pearcey Foundation
The Pearcey Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organisation established in 1998 to raise the profile of the Australian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry and profession. It was created in the memory of one of the greatest pioneers of the Australian ICT industry, Dr Trevor Pearcey. By celebrating the heroes in our industry, past present and future, the Foundation is looking to attract and encourage young Australians into this most exciting of global high technology sectors of our nation.

Web: www.pearcey.org.au

X: @Pearcey_org #PearceyAwards

LinkedIn: Pearcey Foundation #PearceyAwards