Tuesday February 25, 2025
By Yolanda Redrup
Jamila Gordon came to Australia thanks to the kindness of a stranger. Studying here transformed her life – and now she’s changing the food industry. From the upcoming March issue out on February 28.
Jamila Gordon, founder and CEO of Lumachain, photographed in Chicago. Kevin Serna
When Jamila Gordon fled Somalia for Kenya aged 18, unsure if she would ever see her family again, her father, Abdirizak Sheikh Noor, gave her three pieces of advice: Make yourself useful, be the best version of yourself and have big dreams. Ever since, Gordon’s life has been signposted by big dreams. Her latest is for her business, Lumachain, to become the world leader in food provenance and traceability and, in doing so, set a new standard for the quality of what we eat and drink.
It’s a dream that was unimaginable to the teenager who arrived in Australia with no money and barely a word of English. “Those big dreams are not going to make you survive, they make you thrive,” says Gordon, whose business has raised more than $37 million from backers including Bessemer Venture Partners and Main Sequence Ventures. In October, American fast-food chain Chipotle also became an investor.
Born in a small village in Somalia near the Ethiopian border with no electricity or running water, Gordon, now 55, was one of 16 children. As the second eldest, she looked after the house and helped raise her younger siblings. When she was 12, a drought forced her father to move the family to a two-bedroom apartment in the capital of Mogadishu. Her dad, who could not read or write, had a shop selling dried goods. She helped her father in the morning and went to school in the afternoon.
When Gordon was 18, the country was on the brink of a civil war. She pauses, closing her eyes as she recalls the memories – it’s a time of her life she has tried hard to forget. “You could feel the tension. My dad acted early and any human trafficker who would take us, [he’d give us to them],” she says.
Four of her siblings went to the UK via Syria. But for a long time, she presumed all of her family were dead. Gordon moved to Kenya, living with her father’s stepbrother. But they were also poor, and he did not want another teenager to feed. “I cannot remember how long I was there ... it wouldn’t have been more than six months,” she says.
On Wednesdays, nightclubs were free for women and there she met an Australian backpacker. “I remember this guy walking in,” Gordon says. “I think he felt sorry for me because I had no one. I didn’t speak much English [but] we managed to understand each other.”
The backpacker, who she is no longer in touch with, sponsored her to come to Australia. When she arrived in Sydney, she had access to unemployment benefits that enabled her to learn English at a free TAFE course. “My life would never have been possible without the Australian government,” Gordon says, emphasising her desire for this to be included in the article. “I love this country.”
After finishing TAFE, Gordon moved to Bendigo to study at La Trobe. “It’s a beautiful town, a student’s town,” she recalls. “Just people who were there to study and have fun.” She worked in a restaurant where the owner, eventually a mentor, taught her to tie her shoelaces. “In Somalia, we didn’t have shoelaces to be tied.” She was encouraged to study software, and became so enamoured that she switched and graduated with an IT degree.
Gordon’s first role out of university was as a software developer for now-defunct UK company QSP Software. Roles at GIO and Deloitte followed before she was headhunted by IBM in 1999. Her big break came when an IBM colleague phoned from Europe, asking her to take over a major project. The project manager had become unwell and Gordon was one of just a few people with the required skill set.
She got the phone call on a Thursday night and on the Monday, she had relocated to Budapest with her husband, an Australian she met when they both worked at Deloitte. “We nailed it [and] IBM EMEA noticed me,” Gordon says.
Over the next four years, she would work on multibillion-dollar IT transformation projects for the likes of AXA Insurance and ABN AMRO Bank. She joined Qantas as chief information officer in 2007 and drove its $200 million-plus Oracle implementation and the completion of its shift to Amadeus for departure control systems. When this was finished, Gordon became group CIO for Leighton Holdings. “I enjoy the meaty, heavy industries that are needing major transformation,” Gordon says.
Between Leighton and Lumachain, there is a gap in Gordon’s LinkedIn profile. In February 2017, she joined failed logistics software start-up GetSwift, quitting less than a year later. The company was later prosecuted by ASIC for misleading investors. In the court case it emerged she had stood up to its directors, but was subjected to bullying and rude remarks in return.
The idea for Lumachain took shape after Gordon left GetSwift. A friend who worked for meat processor JBS told her about food and safety issues in factories. At Qantas, Gordon had worked on a project to design luggage tags embedded with tracking technology, and another to track aircraft spare parts. This concept, Gordon realised, could be applied to food and beverages.
Lumachain combines artificial intelligence-powered computer vision technology with Internet of Things sensors to create a digital system to track food such as meat as it moves through production facilities, detect safety issues and connect broken links in the supply chain in real time. Its camera systems watch and advise on product safety and quality.
Teaming up with Tony White, her former Qantas head of supply chain, the pair struck a deal with JBS to use its factories to develop software. “Every day for three months, we were in the meat factory in Homebush from 4am,” Gordon says. Landing the first investor cheque was not easy.
She approached “almost all” the venture capital investors in Australia before eventually scoring the support of CSIRO-backed venture capital fund Main Sequence Ventures. “Resilience and positivity really help. Both of them I learnt when I lost my family. When you hear ‘no’, or have setbacks, you have to know there’s something better [out there],” Gordon says.
During its first major funding round, Lumachain struggled to win local funds. It was renowned US investor Bessemer Venture Partners that joined Main Sequence in its $US19.5 million Series A raising. Today, Lumachain is based in Chicago, counts McDonald’s and Chipotle supplier OSI Group as customers, and employs 80 people.
Gordon is acutely aware of the life she has now and how it compares to the one she left behind. She has only managed to find and reconnect with three of her 15 siblings. It’s a source of deep sadness, but Gordon does not dwell on it. “I am grateful for every support I got along the way, and I’m grateful for this wonderful country.”