Shark sighting alerts could soon reach swimmers and surfers while they are still in the water.
Shark alert platform Dorsal has developed new technology to close gaps in existing warning systems by combining public shark sightings with official alerts.
The community-powered app then pushes sightings out to users in near real time.
Former professional surfer and Dorsal co-founder Sarah Beardmore described the platform as an added layer of information rather than a replacement for government-backed shark monitoring.
“I think the official programs are amazing, but this is just a supplement and an additional layer,” Ms Beardmore told NewsWire.
She said with more people in the ocean than ever — and with drones, smartphones and thousands of regular beach users feeding in reports — more people were also watching the water.
For Dorsal, the aim is not to stir panic but to help people make better decisions before they paddle out or dive in.
Ms Beardmore framed it as a matter of practical risk, with beach users able to weigh up recent sightings and decide whether to stay, wait or head elsewhere.
“The knowledge is kind of the power and the power is in the knowledge,” Ms Beardmore said.
She pointed to her own habits as a surfer, explaining that if there were multiple reports at one beach in Byron Bay, she would simply drive further south and surf somewhere else.
One case that stayed with her involved a swimmer having their leg broken by a shark at North Lighthouse Beach in Ballina.
Ms Beardmore said within about an hour, there was another bump nearby and a separate sighting of a shark of the same species and similar size at another beach about 2km away.
For Ms Beardmore, who lives nearby, that was enough to stay out of the water that day.
On another occasion, she was contacted directly by someone in hospital after a shark incident. They wanted to alert Dorsal because they did not know who else to contact.
“All he wanted was to get a message out to warn the rest of the community. That’s the true spirit of what this app is about,” she said.
The company is now building a smartwatch app so alerts can reach people while they are still in the water.
“We’re doing a wearable in-water alert, so we’re going to do a watch app that will enable essentially those drone reports and everyday user reports to get to people who are in the ocean and on their surfboard because obviously their phone being on the beach isn’t that much use in those moments,” she explained.
That matters most in the hours when many beachgoers are still in the water but official surveillance may have stopped.
Ms Beardmore pointed to dawn, dusk, remote beaches and quieter stretches of coastline as some of the biggest blind spots in the current system.
“The drone programs are only on for a certain amount of hours,” she said.
She said that on less populated and more remote beaches, and outside scheduled drone operations, community reporting becomes even more important for people already in the water or about to head in.
Dorsal began after shark incidents in northern NSW in 2015, when people had seen sharks beforehand but had no clear way to report what they had seen or warn others quickly.
Since then it has built a sizeable audience, with hundreds of thousands of app downloads, more than 627,000 social followers and 255,000 email subscribers.
Over summer 2025-26, it became the second most downloaded app in Australia’s free sports category, behind only the Australian Open.
The platform is free to use, with the option to subscribe for $9.99 a year for ad-free access, photo and video on reports, and personalised beach alerts.
To fund its next stage, including drone integration, surf intelligence tools and the smartwatch rollout, Dorsal is opening an equity crowd-funding raise on Birchal.
For Ms Beardmore, success comes down to getting better information to more people, faster.
“The more people who are using Dorsal, the more Australians can feel safer and make those informed decisions,” she said.