With the mining boom cooling, Australia is rapidly shifting away from a resource-backed economy.

Analysts say technology start-up companies may help to plug in the gaps left in its wake, though a point of weakness is recognising where to invest and how to identify high-potential opportunities.

"The idea is to shift from being a mining dependent economy to more so domestic demand driven economy," Stan Shamu, IG's market strategist in Melbourne, told the ABC.

"The only way to do that is to make funding cheaper and obviously encourage people to bring ideas across.

"I think you need to look at economies like the US, where innovation has really driven the economy to where it is now."

In 2014, IPOs for technology companies in Australia totalled $859 million, the highest level on record for that sector according to Dealogic, a financial software firm based in New York.

In a joint report in 2013, Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers modelled the potential economic growth of Australia's technology start-up sector, finding that it has the potential to contribute $109 billion, or 4 per cent of GDP, to the Australian economy and 540,000 jobs by 2033.

Moving towards ideas

January's unemployment unexpectedly surged to 6.4 per cent and, in the same month, another PricewaterhouseCoopers report warned that Australia would struggle to remain in the top 30 largest economies by 2050.

Technology ecosystems can buoy primary sectors of the economy, such as mining, for instance through efficiency gains, observed Asher Tan, the CEO of start-up CoinJar, in an email to the ABC.

"Technology isn't just about start-ups and online companies, but a sector seeking to create productivity gains in existing industries," he wrote.

CoinJar, based in Melbourne, was founded in May 2013 through a start-up accelerator program, with the company raising capital through angel investors.

The company provides a platform for users of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to trade globally.

CoinJar, however, is a somewhat uncommon success story. A recent nationwide survey of the Australian start-up community by Startup Muster found that only 14 per cent of Australian start-ups who tried successfully raised funding.

"There is a growing number of VC [venture capital] funds and angel investors in Australia but, compared to other forms of capital investment, it still represents a tiny percentage," said Mr Tan.

"There needs to be an increased willingness for Australian capital to take risks on start-ups and, at the same time, local start-ups have to prove that they can indeed reach profitable outcomes like their peers globally."

According to Startup Muster, the majority of start-up companies are based in Sydney, with 48 per cent based in New South Wales.

Murray Hurps, the founder of Startup Muster, said high growth companies like software developer Atlassian and crowd-sourcing marketplace Freelancer provide good models.

"They're leveraging technology to do something impactful, they're all companies that can do something special," Mr Hurps told the ABC.

"The money, the resources that we have, there's money to invest but not the specification to identify the opportunities that are here yet."