Out on a wind farm, two hundred metres in the sky, it’s near impossible to look at a turbine blade and see a tiny crack. But it sounds different as it spins.
A technician might catch it during an inspection, but only if they’re standing in the right place on the right day.
Matthew Stead heard a business opportunity in that problem. What if a machine could pick up the change too, and keep listening all day, every day, without waiting for the next site visit?
That question led him to start Ping (now Eologix-Ping) in Adelaide.
Today, the company operates in more than 25 countries, monitoring more than 2,000 turbines and detecting blade damage, lightning, and other faults early, before they turn into expensive repair bills.
Learning to listen for problems
Before Matthew became a founder, he was an engineer.
He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Adelaide, where acoustics (the study of sound) was taught by some of the world’s leading researchers.
“I liked building and making things, so I figured engineering was probably the best way of doing that,” he says. “And I loved the noise and vibration courses.”
That interest pulled him into acoustic consulting, testing how sound and vibrations behave so spaces and equipment work the way they should.
On a billion-dollar construction project like the Royal Adelaide Hospital, that work starts at the scale of the building. A rescue helicopter on the roof would send noise straight through the whole structure if the acoustics were not controlled.
In research facilities, the focus is much smaller. Electron microscopes can detect movements so tiny you’d never feel them yourself. Acoustic consultants run tests so that a tiny vibration isn’t mistaken for a hairline crack in a semiconductor because a door was left open on the other side of the lab.
Over time, it trained him to notice faint signals other people might dismiss: a vibration that should not be there, a pattern that feels slightly wrong.
Learning business inside another company
Early in his consulting career, his employer gave him room to grow a service, work with clients and make commercial decisions, while still giving him the safety net of an existing business.
“I was able to learn how to build businesses,” he says, “and then I was able to do it with my own money.”
A lot of founders have to learn sales, hiring and operations while building the product, with all the risk sitting on their shoulders. Before he risked his own money on a startup, Matthew had already done some of those reps inside someone else’s business first.
His consulting work also taught him that even in a technical field, the work still depends on people: trust, relationships, sales and communication with others.
“Consulting is basically a people business with a bit of technical thrown in,” he says. “For our product business, it has to be a people business.”
The idea came through Matthew’s network
An expert in the wind industry had noticed that technicians could often hear when a blade was damaged, and reached out to Matthew.
From this idea, Matthew’s first move was not to build hardware, but to test whether a business case stacked up. That took him to Denmark for a wind turbine conference.
He wanted to know whether this was a real global problem, whether someone had already solved it, whether customers cared enough to act, and whether they would pay enough to make the business viable.
What he found was a real problem, but not an easy business. More than 3,800 blade failures happen around the world every year because of lightning, hail, sand, rain and wind.
“Many of these turbines are only visited once a year,” says Matthew. “If there's an inspection, and then the week after, a storm comes through… that’s damage just sitting there.”
This can cause millions of dollars in damage, but operators were only willing to pay a modest amount for monitoring. The numbers did not line up with the kind of device many engineers would build.
“Others had tried it before us,” he says, “and others had failed because they were trying to sell a $10,000 device when the customer was only willing to pay $1,000.”
That early research killed the first version of the idea. In 2013, the cost of building the hardware at the right price was still too high.
So instead of forcing it, Matthew shelved the concept.
Starting again with a product that did not work
Five years later, he pulled the idea off the shelf.
Hardware was now better, and the cost had dropped enough to take another look. But even then, Matthew did not rush into building the final version. Instead, he launched what he calls a virtual product:
“We launched it with something that looked like a product, but actually didn’t work,” he says.
It was made from 3D-printed parts and had no electronics inside, but it gave him something people could react to.
Customers could see the size, picture it on a turbine and respond to the idea as if it were real. He could test the price, uses, and features without getting trapped by the cost of building too much too early.
It also gave him room to make mistakes without burning too much cash.
“There were enough problems afterwards,” he says, “that it was nice to have less problems at the front end.”
How the product protects turbines
A wind turbine is more than a tall pole with blades attached. It is a large working machine, with blades, electronics and moving parts all operating high above the ground in changing weather.
The product Matthew created, which looks like a speaker hooked up to a tiny computer, sits on the turbine tower and listens.
The system uses one device per tower, with sensors listening to the blades. It listens for damage or unusual weather, sends that data back to a dashboard, and alerts operators when an issue needs attention.
Matthew jokes that at one point the business collected nearly every startup buzzword going.
“We had edge computing, we had IoT, we had cellular comms, we were using satellite, we were a space company,” he says. “The only buzzword we didn’t have was blockchain.”
The value comes from catching damage early, as continuous monitoring shortens the time between damage and repair.
Matthew compares it to a chip in a windscreen. Fix it early and it is manageable. Leave it, and the whole screen may need replacing.
On a wind turbine, the cost jump is much bigger: “A very simple lightning strike can turn into a $10 million exercise,” he says.
The hardest problem was selling it
Matthew had to bring together electronics, hardware, software and cloud systems to build the product, and that was far more difficult than he first expected.
But the hardest challenge in the business was not technical, but commercial.
At first, Matthew thought every wind farm in Australia could be a customer. On paper, that sounds sensible. If the problem is happening at the wind farm, sell to the wind farm.
But that is not how responsibility is structured.
The company that owns the turbine does not always maintain it. The original equipment manufacturer may have the maintenance contract. Some costs sit with the owner. Some risks sit with the maintainer. Some events, like lightning strikes, may fall outside normal maintenance terms.
The incentive to buy a monitoring system is spread awkwardly across multiple parties.
“The risk is split. The reward is split. The costs are split,” Matthew says. “It’s just too hard.”
That fragmentation made sales harder than expected. In an ideal world, both sides would buy in. In practice, a split customer is a difficult customer.
The solution was to tighten the focus and sell to operators able to hold the risk and the reward together. Those customers could see the full value of acting early because the cost of failure landed with them.
That shift gave the company a clearer customer and, with it, a stronger path into the United States and global markets.
The merger that changed the business
Three years ago, Ping Services merged with Eologix, an Austrian company also working in wind turbine blade monitoring, but using a different method.
Ping had built remote acoustic monitoring. Eologix had built sensors that sit on the blade itself. The products were different, but the companies served similar customers, and Eologix wanted to grow in the US, where Ping had built traction.
The introduction came through the Chair of the business, who knew both companies.
“He was like a matchmaker,” Matthew says. “You guys should really get married.”
The combined business became Eologix-Ping. For Matthew, it was a clear sign that he was no longer working on just a technical project anymore. It had become a valuable business asset.
“I had a sort of exit,” he says. “I’d built a business that was recognised and worth something.”
Stone & Chalk gave the company peers
For all the technical and commercial complexity, one of the other things Matthew needed was connection: people who understood the strain of building a business.
Matthew and his team joined Stone & Chalk as part of the first Adelaide cohort.
He was overseas when the team first moved in, so he returned to a workplace that was already up and running and had to find his feet quickly. For him, the main value was not the desks or the office, but the people around him.
“It was about meeting other founders, peers, people who had been through similar things,” he says.
That happened through formal events and introductions, but also through everyday moments: chats near the coffee machine, informal conversations and staff swapping ideas with people in nearby companies.
One part stood out in particular: the founder roundtables.
Those sessions gave founders space to talk about the hard parts of building a company. Not just funding rounds and wins, but bad decisions, costly mistakes and the stuff that gets flattened out on LinkedIn.
“The worst mistake you can make is a mistake someone’s already made,” Matthew says.
A founder who had already gone through one kind of crisis could save someone else from walking into the same wall.
What Matthew tells founders now
For years, startup investors repeated the line that hardware is hard. That made software look more attractive: faster to build, cheaper to test and easier to scale.
Now, with AI speeding up software work, Matthew thinks hardware stands out. You still have to build the thing, test it, install it, break it, fix it and learn from what happens in the real world. You cannot shortcut that cycle with a prompt.
“You can’t just AI, hardware,” he says. “Hardware has become cool again.”
In terms of lessons, Matthew says he is naturally a bit scattergun, someone who likes trying several ideas at once. He can see now that the business would have benefited from fewer moving parts and a tighter vision.
“I wish I’d been more focused,” he says.
He also puts a lot of weight on partnerships. Over time, he has worked hard to build relationships with possible acquirers, partners and people who might become important allies later.
“But you should always give without expecting a return,” says Matthew.
A company built by taking sound seriously
Eologix-Ping is a reminder that some of the best businesses come from noticing a problem earlier than everyone else.
Matthew’s edge was not just technical skill, but taking a faint signal seriously enough to build around it.
In business, as in engineering, the people who pay attention early are the ones to avoid catastrophe, but also, find the biggest success.
