Sim Penzo is the CEO and co-founder of CodeFish Studio, an Adelaide custom software company he has spent 15 years building. He started writing mobile apps shortly after the iPhone launched and has grown the business alongside the market ever since. Today CodeFish delivers custom platforms, IoT integrations and AI agents for mid-market businesses across food and beverage, manufacturing and professional services.

Under Sim’s leadership the studio has been named among Australia’s Top 25 Fast Movers (2021 to 2023) and won Excellence in Business in 2023, built on a high-retention team and a background in Industrial Design that still shapes how the company approaches every problem.

His current focus is APEX, CodeFish’s embedded partnership model. Clients pay a retainer of around one percent of revenue and get a CTO-as-a-service: a partner that learns the business inside out, agrees what gets built each quarter, and measures success in dollars saved rather than features shipped.

Sim’s message to the produce sector is blunt. You can’t save on inputs, you still have to pay people, so operational efficiency is the only lever left. The repetitive admin and manual data work that doesn’t need genuine judgement won’t survive the next five years. The growers and producers who move first will hold a cost advantage that’s very hard to close.