Startup West

Chris and Steve talk with Esther Oh, founder and CEO of health tech and AI-vision startup Agili8. Born in Singapore, and a top student at school, Esther was the only female software engineer at her consulting company. She moved to Perth in 2009 on a skilled migrant visa, as she wanted to raise her kids in WA. Agili8 was then set up after her son lost his eyesight. “The same thing with X-Ray vision...

Steve and Chris talk with Tim Jones, Managing Director of cyber security startup Hyprfire. Starting out as a lawyer, he moved into technology law, worked in Sydney, and then moved back to WA to work on various startups in the ASX and private space. He did some advisory work, helped fund tech startups and worked for a time at HealthEngine. Spun out of Curtin University, Hyprfire has raised some sig...

Danelle and Brodie talk with the recently crowned WA Innovator of the Year, Kate Lewkowski, co-founder and CEO of medtech startup Neurotologix. Her company is developing a remote patient monitoring device for dizziness and vertigo, which afflicts 2.9 million Australians, prompting over 350,000 medical appointments. An audiologist with over 20 years of clinical and epidemiological research experien...

A fantastic start for 2023 and our 5th season: Danelle and Brodie interview the Minister for Innovation and the Digital Economy, Hon Stephen Dawson MLC. Growing up in Ireland, the eldest of four children, he moved to Australia in his teens with his family, and became involved in student politics. His father had been active in the union movement. Starting out as a drama teacher, Stephen Dawson beca...

For the final episode of the 4th season of Startup West and 2022: a founders' panel recorded in front of a live audience in Fremantle as part of this year's Freo Startup Fest. Charlie Gunningham chats with Dan Nembhard (Wolfit Box founder), Holly Bridgwater, (Humyn.ai founder) and Kevin Mitchem (Co-Architecture co-founder). The session was titled ‘Pets, Property and AI’ for reasons that become cle...

Danelle and Chris talk with Stephen Cornish, founder and managing director of Pentanet, a Perth-based internet provider providing super-fast speeds for homes and businesses. A keen gamer, Stephen set up his first tower for himself so he could enjoy faster internet to play League of Legends. Years later, the company now owns the largest private fixed network in Perth, has listed on the ASX (‘5GG’),...

Chris Tan makes his debut on Startup West as co-host, with Danelle, and they talk with John Barrington AM, co-founder and managing director of Artrya, an ASX-listed (‘AYA’) AI-driven healthcare tech company that is looking to tackle the global problem of heart disease. Every 13 minutes, an Australian dies of a heart attack. 9 million die every year around the world. The company was set up in 2018,...

Danelle and Steve talk with Tim Hyde, co-founder and CEO of SWAN (‘scheduling water and nutrients’) Systems, a cloud-based platform that allows irrigators to make the most out of every drop of water and fertiliser. Former Carnarvon table grape and banana farmer Tim got together with co-founders Ivor Gaylard and Rod Campbell seven years ago to create a scalable software solution from their existing...

Brodie and Steve talk with Erin Clark, co-founder of Dark Stry (which is short for ‘Dark Story’), an app that features various immersive walking tours of Perth, including one recognising early female entrepreneurs. Originally from country Victoria, the former journalist moved to Western Australia 10 years ago with her husband, on what was supposed to be a two-year sojourn, and has fallen in love w...

Brodie and Steve talk with Kylie Dillon, co-founder and CEO of Realtime Conveyancer, a three-year-old proptech startup that is streamlining the real estate legal purchase process “from contract to keys”. With 19 years’ experience in conveyancing, she felt that the whole industry needed saving with technology, and sought out to develop it herself. As is often the case, the original quotation for de...

Danelle and Steve talk with Eliza Carbines, Founding Director of Tender Relief, who has built a tech platform to help businesses apply for tenders. Eliza has tackled a problem she saw across her client base, the tricky world of project tendering. Hear how she built Tender Relief from Karratha (in far north Western Australia), the challenges overcome and the progress to date. “If you're in that sta...

Danelle and Steve talk with Zach Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Ascend Health Group, which includes Ascend Health services, software company Bruno Health, and hardware operation Obdo. Established in 2017, the group provides care services in the national disability and health sectors. A physiotherapist by training, Zach and his team operate in Western Australia and Queensland, and have plans to lau...

Steve and Brodie talk with Matt Hart, co-founder of Perth-founded smart wearables tech company Soter Analytics, who is passionate about reducing injuries at work. Scaling the business to more than 50 staff over the past five years, the company is now headquartered in London, with a development team in Estonia and an office in Perth. Their most recent funding round was more than A$16M. The boy from...

Steve and Brodie talk with Julie Adams, co-founder of Chemo@Home, who with her business partner Lorna Cook has scaled up the home-based infusion service to more than 100 staff over the past 9 years. Both Julie and Lorna mortgaged their houses to fund the business, which quadrupled in size during Covid. 1,400 doctors across the country use the service, and more and more patients can have their chem...

Danelle and Brodie talk with Dr Paola Magni, forensic scientist and senior lecturer at Murdoch University. Originally from Turin, Italy, a centre of criminology, award-winning researcher Dr Magni has pioneered crime scene investigations (CSI) using virtual reality (VR), with her CSI VR project in Western Australia. “So we decided to sit down and storyboard the story, exactly like you do for a movi...

Danelle and Brodie talk with Jon Gregory, founder and CEO of Vitruvian, a global personal fitness device and platform operating from its head offices in West Perth. A decade ago, the former investment trader realised that while the algorithms he was using were very fast and efficient, weight-training seemed to be about “pushing weights”. In 2019, he took some investment from a local angel investor...

Brodie and Steve talk with Nicole Gazey and Rebecca Loftus, co-founders of IDEA (Innovation Design Entrepreneurship Academy), a brand new ‘alternative school’ for young innovators, entrepreneurs and creatives. Having graduated from last year’s Plus Eight tech accelerator program, IDEA raised some funds from BetterLabs Ventures and launched the academy earlier this year, with their first cohort cur...

Brodie and Steve talk with Professor Peter Klinken AC, the Chief Scientist of Western Australia, about his role as a government advisor and cheerleader for researchers, innovators and startups. He’s been in the role for 8 years, and has just signed up for another three years. He talks about the startup sector, which had been almost ignored when he first came into the job, but now seems to be flour...

Brodie and Steve talk with David Pettit, cofounder and Group CEO of PictureWealth, a fast-growing fintech company that has successfully digitised financial services, which it sells to its tens of thousands of clients. Originally from Queenstown in New Zealand, David landed in Perth, worked in financial services and saw a gap in the market to set up PictureWealth in 2018. Since then, the company ha...

Steve and Brodie talk with Angie Keeler, cofounder and CEO of Zella DC, a next-generation data centre provider disrupting traditional server rooms. Originally from South Africa, together with husband Clint, Angie and her team have developed a mobile data centre - about the size of a fridge - that can be placed in harsh environments such as remote mine sites and pretty much anywhere. “Definitely it...

Danelle and Steve talk with Mihailo Bozic, founder of Envited, an events platform that does not need Facebook, and works across all social media platforms. Only 2% of teens use Facebook, so this cohort needs another means to set up and share events. He started working on the concept last year while still at university, recently raised a $350,000 pre-seed round to employ some staff, and is about to...

Danelle and Steve talk with James Flanagan, co-founder of newly launched HoverIT (‘Hover It’) which is looking to provide a single platform for small businesses to reach and sell to their customers directly. Originally from the west of Ireland, the former oil and gas worker and commercial diver launched the service in Fremantle earlier this year with his Uncle Luke as co-founder. “Definitely the b...

Danelle and Brodie talk with Annie Brox, the founder of Origo Farm, an agtech business that recently won both a Boosting Female Founding grant (one of only 3 in WA) as well as an Accelerating Commercialisation grant in 2019, for her farm-based IoT platform and devices business. From growing up in a farming family in Norway, to working in telecoms, she arrived in Western Australia to found Origo, t...

Startup West is back for series 4 and 2022, with two of our new co-hosts Danelle Cross and Brodie McCulloch. In this episode, they talk with Louise Matson, founder of Louise M - a corporate shoe brand for women. Working in the aviation industry for more than twenty years, Louise always felt there should be a better, more comfortable yet stylish shoe, that women could wear all day. She created Loiu...

For the final episode of the 3rd season of Startup West and 2021: a founders' panel recorded in front of a live audience at Little Creatures in Fremantle as part of this year's Freo Startup Fest. Charlie Gunningham (Startup News) chats with Julian Ilich (founder and CEO of Tiller Rides), Mel Bainbridge, (co-founder of The Pack Australia) and Glen McIvor (founder and CEO of Solv). The session was t...