Every week, thousands of Australian small business owners type something into ChatGPT they probably shouldn’t. A contract clause. A client’s medical situation. A staff performance note. The content of an email from their accountant. They’re not being careless, they just don’t know where that data goes.

The short answer: overseas. OpenAI processes data on US-based servers. Anthropic (Claude) does the same. When you paste confidential business information into these tools, it leaves Australian jurisdiction the moment you hit enter. Under the Privacy Act 1988, that’s not always illegal, but it’s often a problem you haven’t thought about yet.

A Canberra company called Trellis Data has spent the last year building an answer to that problem. They call it Agentaus.

Who Built It

Trellis Data Pty Ltd was founded in 2016 by Michael and Rachel Gately, a husband-and-wife team based in Canberra. Michael, the CEO, has positioned the company as one of Australia’s earliest full-service AI providers, which, if you look at the founding date, is a fair claim. Most of the current wave of AI startups didn’t exist until 2022 at the earliest.

The company’s early work centred on explainable AI, systems that could show their reasoning, not just produce an output. That background matters for what Agentaus became. It’s not a wrapper around ChatGPT. It’s a purpose-built platform built for environments where transparency and accountability aren’t optional.

Trellis rebranded in September 2025 to reflect the full scope of what they now do. Agentaus launched in May 2026, the consumer-facing, free-to-try product built on the same sovereign infrastructure they’d been running for government and defence clients for years. RSM Australia is listed as a formal business partner. The company has two investors on record via Tracxn and is listed on the AWS Marketplace.

What Agentaus Actually Does

Think of it as an AI assistant that knows your documents, and stays in Australia the whole time.

You upload your internal materials: SOPs, policy manuals, HR documents, client correspondence templates, compliance frameworks. Agentaus uses them to answer questions. Ask it to draft a job description based on your company standards and it does it in under 35 seconds, in your organisation’s writing style, grounded in your actual documents rather than whatever it scraped from the internet.

That’s the core use case. But the architecture underneath it is what makes it different from every other AI tool a small business might already be using.

Protected Mode vs External Mode

Agentaus runs in two modes, and the distinction matters.

Protected Mode runs entirely on Australian infrastructure. Your prompts, your documents, your outputs, all processed on Australian-owned servers, never routed overseas. The models running underneath are Australian-built. Nothing leaves the country.

External Mode gives you access to Claude or ChatGPT’s capabilities through Agentaus, but the results are stored and processed in Australian infrastructure. Your data doesn’t go to OpenAI or Anthropic’s servers raw. Agentaus acts as a proxy, keeping the outputs under Australian jurisdiction even when the model doing the heavy lifting is overseas.

For most small businesses, External Mode is probably the practical everyday option. You get the power of the best frontier models without handing client data directly to US companies. For businesses in healthcare, legal, or defence supply chains, Protected Mode is the one that matters.

The Zero-Training Guarantee

This is the commitment that ChatGPT’s business plan doesn’t match for free-tier users: Agentaus will never use your prompts or data to train or improve its models. That’s a hard written commitment, not a setting buried in a terms of service page.

OpenAI’s standard terms have historically included data use for model improvement, with opt-outs available in some tiers. Agentaus makes the zero-training guarantee the baseline for every plan, including free.

Compliance Built In

Agentaus is certified to Essential 8 Maturity Level 2, the Australian Signals Directorate’s baseline security framework for government-connected systems. It also meets the requirements of the Information Security Manual (ISM) and the Defence Information Security Manual (DISM).

For businesses in the defence supply chain, this removes a major headache. DISP (Defence Industry Security Programme) accreditation requires demonstrating that your digital tools meet specific security standards. Agentaus checks those boxes out of the box.

For businesses outside defence but still subject to the Privacy Act, which covers most Australian businesses handling personal information, the Australian data residency alone is a significant compliance argument. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has been increasingly clear that offshore data transfers require careful handling. Agentaus eliminates the question.

Pricing, In Plain Numbers

All prices are in AUD, excluding GST.

Free plan: A daily Protected Prompt allowance plus a monthly credit for Claude/ChatGPT queries via External Mode. Access to Free Tier agents. No cost to sign up, no credit card required.

Standard, $24/month: Five times the Protected Prompt allocation of the free tier, a larger monthly External Mode credit, and access to all Open Tier agents. Early access to new features. This is the “most popular” tier according to Agentaus’s own pricing page, and at $24 AUD it’s in the same ballpark as ChatGPT Plus ($30 AUD/month).

Professional, $107/month: Unlimited Protected Prompts, a large monthly credit, Private Agents (customised AI assistants you configure yourself), and corporate integrations included.

For teams, there are equivalent tiers at $24/seat/month (Team, 2–19 seats) and $107/seat/month (Business, up to 999 seats), both adding role-based access control, central billing, and audit logs. Enterprise and on-premises deployments are available for classified environments or organisations that need air-gapped infrastructure.

The free tier is a genuine entry point, not a bait-and-switch. You can run real queries on real documents before spending a dollar.

Who Should Actually Use This

The honest answer is: not every business needs it, but more do than realise it.

If you run a legal practice, you’re regularly handling privileged communications and client matters that you’d never want processed on a US server without explicit client consent. Agentaus lets you use AI on those files without that concern.

If you’re an accountant or financial adviser, your clients’ tax details, financial positions, and personal circumstances are sensitive under both the Privacy Act and professional obligations. The same logic applies.

If you work in healthcare, My Health Record data and patient information are governed by strict Australian health privacy laws. Using a US AI tool on that data is a compliance problem waiting to happen.

If you’re a defence industry supplier, or trying to become one, DISP compliance is a real gate. Agentaus’s DISP Assessor Tool (a separate product from Trellis Data, launched November 2025) can analyse your current security posture against DISP criteria and produce a gap report automatically.

For everyone else, small businesses that just want a document Q&A tool and aren’t particularly worried about data sovereignty, Agentaus is still a capable option. But ChatGPT or Claude will serve you fine if you’re not putting sensitive information in.

The Practical Setup

The most immediate use case for a small business: upload your standard operating procedures and policy documents, then ask questions. “What’s our process for handling a client complaint?” “What does our data retention policy say about email archives?” “Summarise our supplier onboarding checklist.”

That’s the document Q&A use case, and it works without any technical setup. You don’t need an IT team. You upload files, you ask questions, you get answers grounded in your actual documents rather than a guess.

The free tier is enough to test whether it’s useful for your business before committing to $24 a month.

The Bigger Picture

The ASD’s guidance on AI security has become more explicit over the past year. Government agencies are increasingly required to assess AI tools against Australian data sovereignty requirements before deploying them. That pressure is filtering down to the businesses those agencies work with.

Trellis Data saw this coming in 2016. Agentaus is the product of that foresight finally becoming accessible to anyone with an ABN and a curiosity about AI. The free tier launched in May 2026. It’s worth fifteen minutes of your time to find out what it does.

Sources

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This profile is part of our Australian AI Companies series.

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Agentaus Is the AI That Keeps Your Business Data Inside Australia — And It’s Free to Try

Who Built It