How This Quiet Aussie Is Revolutionizing Asia-Pacific’s Smart Cities

What we talked about.

Simon Maselli, founder of XVision, joins Sunny Ray to discuss how his company is building software defined road infrastructure for smart cities across Asia Pacific. Simon traces his path from a curious kid pulling apart engines with his father, to dropping out of school at 17 for a fitting and turning apprenticeship, to earning engineering and MBA credentials through hands on industrial work at a paper mill. A cold, painful moment on a ship in the North Sea while validating a digital twin sparked his belief in IoT before it was a buzzword, leading him to found Minnovation in 2013. He shares lessons on aligning top down and ground level decision making, and how a single sensor saved a client eighty five thousand dollars. The conversation also explores Simon's daily rituals, from waking up early to visualization practices inspired by Dr. Joe Dispenza, that fuel his consistent energy. The episode blends personal philosophy with deep engineering war stories.

An Aussie engineer turned entrepreneur explains how sensors, discipline, and mindset built the future of smart road infrastructure.

The questions, and the answers.

What's XVision building?

We're building the future of road intelligence, software defined infrastructure. We've got a device that goes onto a street corner and takes the place of a whole heap of other technologies traditionally used there. We'll dive into that a little later on.

You grew up in Australia and trained as an engineer at RMIT, but what got you hooked on building physical things in the first place?

My father handed me an old engine in the garage and said pull this apart and see what you can make of it. I put it back together with more parts left over than I started with, but I loved the process of figuring out how things worked. At 17 I dropped out of school and did a fitting and turning apprenticeship instead of continuing traditional academics.

What did those mills and plants teach you that a software career never could?

I ended up managing a maintenance management system at a paper mill, which turned into a software engineering role despite my mechanical background. I leaned on people around me and became good at managing that software process rather than coding itself, eventually rolling the system out across an entire fleet of paper mills with assets in the tens of thousands.

When you walked the floor of a large paper machine upgrade, what did you notice about how decisions actually got made on the ground?

There are two extremes, top down decisions from senior management and board level, and ground level decisions from people on the shop floor. Everyone wants the project to succeed. The best outcomes happened when those two decision streams were aligned, and I saw real friction and reduced success when they became misaligned.

You started Minnovation in 2013, well before IoT and AI were dinner table words. What were you seeing that other people weren't?

While validating a ship's digital twin in the freezing North Sea, I realized we needed remote sensors instead of manual measurements. My employer rejected the idea since they sold consulting time, so I pitched it to a client in the roads industry. We built a custom sensor for tunnel fans that saved them eighty five thousand dollars in two months, which launched the company.

There's a quote of yours that stuck with me, data is like crude oil, lots of it around but worthless until refined. When did that click for you?

It became clear when I saw how easy it was for organizations to produce large amounts of data, yet most of it sat unused. Raw data on its own has no value until it's processed and refined into something actionable, similar to how crude oil needs refining before it becomes useful fuel.

How do you maintain such high energy and cheerfulness?

I came across Dr. Joe Dispenza's work, the idea that if you visualize your best self and truly feel that gratitude or joy, you begin to become that version of yourself. Once you become it, you stop chasing things and start attracting them. I also wake up very early and stack my mornings with things like working out, sauna, and journaling so I start each day already feeling whole.