Actuary of the Year winners

Serial technology founder Sam Zheng has been named the recipient of the 2026 Actuary of the Year award from the Actuaries Institute, recognising a career that has taken him from pricing motor insurance and modelling natural catastrophes to more than a decade of building artificial intelligence companies in Australia. 

 Sam began his career as an actuarial analyst at Suncorp and Zurich, modelling earthquakes and other natural perils and pricing motor and fleet insurance, before moving into data science at Quantium. He left to build products of his own, teaching himself to engineer along the way. 

 His approach has mirrored the field itself: try something, learn from it fast, and go again. He co-founded Hyper Anna, an analytics platform that raised A$16 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia China and was later acquired by Alteryx. He then started Curious Thing, backed by Westpac's venture arm Reinventure. Curious Thing was a voice AI platform for business phone calls, automating customer conversations across phone and other voice channels for organisations in Australia and abroad. That entrepreneurial spirit to keep building is now channelled into 477 Studio, which Sam co-leads with Dr Han Xu, his business partner of eight years. 477 Studio builds AI products and provides services to help teams and organisations become AI-native. He is also an active angel investor backing early-stage tech founders. 

More previous award winners

Read more about all our previous winners here .