Meet our 2025 Young Entrepreneur Award finalists
Paperly co-founders named finalists in the Business Week, 2025 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
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Two young founders from Perth are putting Western Australia’s EdTech scene firmly on the national (soon to be global) radar.
Paperly co-founders Dan Dawson and Jak Tidman have been announced as finalists in the 2025 Business News Australia Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, recognising the country’s most outstanding next-generation business leaders.
The awards
The Business News Australia Young Entrepreneur Awards celebrate the nation’s top founders under 40 who are shaping the future of Australian business. The program has previously spotlighted entrepreneurs behind some of the country’s most successful startups, including Canva, Go1, Linktree, and Mr Yum. Placing Dan and Jak in impressive company.
The national awards attract finalists from across every major Australian city, all of whom have demonstrated exceptional innovation, leadership and commercial success in their respective industries.
The story so far
As co-founders of Paperly, Dan Dawson and Jak Tidman are driven by a shared mission: to simplify school administration and give educators their time back.
Paperly was born from a simple observation; that teachers and school administrators were drowning in paperwork, disconnected systems, and manual processes.
Founded in Perth, Paperly has evolved from a local startup into one of Australia’s fastest-growing education technology companies. The platform offers a modular, easy-to-use system that connects the dots between school management and learning management tools, helping educators and administrators streamline daily workflows, from permissions to communication and compliance.
“We could see how much time schools were spending just trying to stay organised,” says Dan Dawson, Paperly’s CEO. “We wanted to fix that, to create software that just works and lets schools focus on what actually matters: students and learning.”
Dan Dawson
CEO / Co-Founder
Jak Tidman, Paperly’s COO and co-founder, brings a strong background in technology and systems design. “We started small,” he says, “helping one school manage forms and approvals more easily. Then we realised every school in Australia had the same problem, and that’s when Paperly really took off.”
Jak Tidman
COO / Co-Founder
Funded for expansion
Paperly is backed by Purpose Ventures, Western Australia’s first locally-focused early-stage venture fund and accelerated through the Plus Eight startup program. Both partnerships have played a key role in helping Paperly scale and invest in product innovation.
Today, Paperly supports a growing list of leading Australian schools, and has expanded beyond Western Australia with offices now in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and London.
