From NASA to $400M: How physicist Daniel Shaddock built Liquid Instruments

Daniel Shaddock was not the child who dreamed of physics. Growing up in Canberra, he was more drawn to football than equations. What he possessed instead was a competitive instinct and an almost stubborn need to wrestle with difficult problems. Physics became his arena not because he fell in love with the discipline itself, but because it offered an endless supply of challenges worth solving.

The problem that captured him most was gravitational wave detection. For centuries, humanity had learned about the universe almost entirely through observation—light, radiation, the electromagnetic spectrum. Gravitational waves represented something fundamentally new: a way of sensing the cosmos that had never been available before. It was, in Shaddock's framing, like giving humanity an entirely new sense organ. He pursued this work with the intensity it demanded, eventually landing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped adapt gravitational wave detection technology for use in space. The systems involved were among the most complex measurement instruments ever built. Shaddock began experimenting with reconfigurable hardware—equipment that could perform multiple functions through software rather than requiring separate physical devices for each task.

When he returned to Australia as a professor at the Australian National University, Shaddock and his colleagues began to see something they hadn't anticipated: the technology they'd developed for detecting ripples in spacetime had applications far beyond research laboratories. The insight was simple but powerful. If software could reconfigure hardware to measure gravitational waves, it could reconfigure hardware to measure almost anything. In 2014, they founded Liquid Instruments to pursue that idea.

The company's core product was elegantly disruptive. Rather than selling scientists and engineers a shelf full of specialized instruments—one for measuring electrical signals, another for analyzing frequencies, a third for something else entirely—Liquid Instruments offered a single reconfigurable platform. Software updates could transform the same hardware into different tools. When the company launched, their first device could replace three separate instruments. A decade later, the same hardware could replace seventeen, each new capability delivered through a software update rather than a new purchase.

Shaddock had walked away from security to build this. He was a tenured professor at one of Australia's leading universities with what he calls a "cushy job for the rest of my life if I wanted just to run down the clock." The decision to leave was not easy. He had spent his academic career skeptical of commercializing research, convinced that most opportunities were too narrow to matter. But this felt different. He believed the technology could serve hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide. The fear he felt about leaving academia was real, but he reframed it: maybe the fear itself was a signal that the problem was worth solving. "The trick was convincing myself that the fear was excitement," he said.

Once committed, Shaddock adopted what he calls a "go big or go home" mentality. He had no interest in building a small Australian company. From the beginning, Liquid Instruments looked outward, establishing itself in the United States and competing globally. Technology companies, he reasoned, don't win by being the best in one country—they win by being the best, period. The strategy worked. Within more than a decade, Liquid Instruments had become one of Australia's most prominent deep-tech companies, with customers including NVIDIA, Apple, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and BYD. The company employed around a hundred people and generated tens of millions in annual revenue.

In 2026, Liquid Instruments raised $70 million in Series C funding, valuing the company at more than $400 million. For Shaddock, the valuation itself was less significant than what the capital enabled. The company had always possessed more ideas than resources to execute them. Now, with fresh funding, Liquid Instruments is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The vision is to let engineers describe what they want to measure, and have AI generate the instrument configuration automatically. Because the platform is software-defined, it has the architectural hooks needed for AI to operate at a fundamental level. If successful, this would transform the work of measurement itself—turning instrument creation from a specialized task into something any engineer could accomplish on demand.

For Shaddock, this next chapter is simply a continuation of the work that has defined his career: solving hard problems and building tools that let others solve theirs. "I really do like building instruments," he said. "It's not just useful for my own project—I can share it with a lot of other people and help them do their work better as well."