SiteHive Recognised as One of Australia’s Most Innovative Companies

SiteHive

, 29 October 2025

SiteHive has been recognised as the most innovative company in the Property, Construction and Transport category by the AFR Boss Most Innovative Companies 2025 awards.

The awards celebrate Australia’s vibrant innovation ecosystem, highlighting the creativity, resilience and ambition of the business community. The award is a testament to SiteHive’s focus on delivering innovative, impactful products that solve real issues for construction and operational organisations.

What is the AFR Boss Most Innovative Companies List?

For close to 40 years, The Australian Financial Review (AFR) has compiled authoritative rankings that list Australia’s most successful companies. It recognises the achievements of Australia’s best and brightest across the economy and the community through several awards initiatives.

With the Most Innovative Companies List, compiled annually, the AFR recognises and celebrates Australian businesses that are challenging the status quo and shaking up industry standards.

The companies that are chosen for the list go through a rigorous selection process, looking at their innovation and impact across multiple aspects including processes, management, product development, customer service, impact, success and future potential. It’s a comprehensive judging framework, managed by Cognizant, that ensures the process is rigorous and fair, and that the best companies are awarded.

SiteHive’s award-winning innovation

Since its inception in 2019, SiteHive has been focussed on innovation that delivers real results. SiteHive works closely with academics, researchers and industry experts to turn great ideas into products that help transform how people work: making it easier, more effective, lower cost.

Co-founder Ben Cooper-Woolley says, “SiteHive has been focussed on delivering innovative, useful products from day 1, so we’re thrilled to be recognised as one of Australia’s Most Innovative Companies.”

“In the construction industry we saw how we could make things easier and much more effective, and we worked directly with construction companies to achieve this. Everything has been designed and developed at the coal face, working with real project teams facing real problems and challenges.”

SiteHive has brought innovation to environmental management across many different areas over the last few years. For example, SiteHive was:

The first company to use MEMs microphones in monitoring devices, enabling monitors to be smaller and more mobile.
The first company to provide images and audio files alongside monitoring data to enable easier identification of events.
The first company to develop AI-powered audio classification for construction and industrial operations, saving time by automatically listening to and identifying sounds.

SiteHive’s game-changing AI Audio Classifier was recognised – what does it do?

This year’s Most Innovative Companies award recognised SiteHive’s Audio Classifier product. The Audio Classifier uses AI to automatically identify and classify construction noise in real time, saving a significant amount of time and effort and helping to make construction and operational sites quieter.

The SiteHive Audio Classifier uses integrated hardware and software technology to replace what has traditionally been a manual process. In the past, construction teams would need to listen to potentially 1000s of audio files to identify the causes of the noises. This process is very time-consuming. It also happens too late, as by the time people can listen to the noise it has already happened – so it can’t be mitigated.

Now, the SiteHive Audio Classifier analyses the sounds in real time, and compares them to a comprehensive database of construction and other noises. The Audio Classifier identifies the noises, and automatically labels them – for example as a “digger”, or “drilling”, or “traffic”.

The classified sounds are colour-coded and labelled in SiteHive Enviro Pro, SiteHive’s cloud-based environmental management software. Project teams can see at a glance and in real time what’s causing noise, and if it’s related to the construction site. So they can take action to address and prevent noise issues as they happen.

Enabling confident decisions, quieter operations

SiteHive Hexanode monitoring devices provide powerful information to construction project teams, including real-time data on noise, dust and vibration, as well as contextual information such as images and audio files. This breadth of data is used by the SiteHive Audio Classier and SiteHive Enviro software to enable decision-making.

Cooper-Woolley says, “With rich context and information, people can make much quicker and more confident decisions, understanding what’s causing a noise, if it’s being caused by the construction site, and, if so, manage it proactively before exceedances occur.”

“What SiteHive does is to help really demystify and simplify the information for environmental teams. We ensure the technology does the heavy lifting, providing tools that make things much easier for the people dealing with issues and processes on sites.”

Collaborating with clients to drive innovation

Since their first product, the SiteHive team have been involved in some of Australia’s major infrastructure projects, including the Western Sydney Airport, Sydney Fish Markets, Allianz Stadium, and the Western Harbour Tunnel in NSW, as well as Vicroria’s Big Build and Level-Crossing Removals projects in Melbourne.

Cooper-Woolley says it is thanks to large construction teams such as Laing O’Rourke, CPB Contractors and John Holland, who saw the potential and took a chance on SiteHive early in their business.

“We’ve done all of our development and iteration on site with industry in market, collaborating with project teams across various industries. Plus we’ve got a deep research partnership with UTS,” Cooper-Woolley says.

“Everything has been designed and developed at the coal face, so we’ve been able to move really quickly, iterating based on live feedback from the site.”

This approach allows SiteHive to deliver products and innovations that make a difference, solving the challenges that people face on construction and operational sites every day.

Innovation with a broad appeal and potential

SiteHive began with a focus on the building and construction industry, but as the product set has expanded so have the market opportunities. The company is now providing services to industrial operations, such as ports, mines, quarries and data centres. As well as looking at local councils and community issues.

For example, SiteHive products are being used to measure the noise of trams in Melbourne compared to general traffic noise. And SiteHive is also working with local councils on the management of buildings and community issues or complaints.

In terms of what’s next, both founders are focused on what else they can do for the building, construction and operational industries in Australia and New Zealand. Co-founder Adam Ferguson says the company has seen strong growth since their inception, and will continue its current focus.

“We’re now a team of 25 people. We’re on over 350 projects across Australia and New Zealand,” Ferguson says. “We have close to 1000 of our monitoring devices in the field, monitoring noise, dust and vibration across Australia and New Zealand.”

“We’ll continue to focus on innovation that drives productivity and delivers real benefits to our clients and the industries.”

Additional awards

Recognition in the AFR Most Innovative Companies list is the latest in a long line of awards and recognition that SiteHive has received. This includes two Good Design Gold Awards, Property Council of Australia Best New Proptech, iAwards, IoT Award winner; Smart City Awards, and being named by CEMEX Ventures as one of the Top 50 startups globally.