Alisha Aneja is the co-founder and technical lead at Space Penguin, responsible for the product, platform, and everything under the hood. She is a Melbourne-based software engineer and AI specialist with over a decade of experience building full-stack systems across biotech, fintech, and govtech — including stints at Commonwealth Bank, CSIRO, and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge.
She co-founded Space Penguin after one too many genuinely frustrating experiences trying to find a decent place to work — paying $150 for an hour in a boardroom at a major coworking chain, turning up to a space that had closed without notice, working from food courts that doubled as nightclubs. She and Rohan built Space Penguin to make finding a great workspace as simple as ordering an Uber.
On the technical side, Alisha has built Python backends, React frontends, cloud deployments on AWS and Azure, and automated CI/CD pipelines. She has delivered compliance-driven systems for NSW energy certification, enterprise data tooling for IAG, and asset attestation platforms for Macquarie Bank. She currently teaches JavaScript, TypeScript, and React Native at TAFE NSW alongside her work at Space Penguin.
Alisha writes about business setup and registration in Australia from the perspective of someone who has built and registered multiple companies — navigating ASIC, ABN applications, business address compliance, and the practical tech decisions that underpin a modern Australian business. She holds a Master of Computer Science from the University of Melbourne and a Life Science Ventures certificate from WHU.