The annual UTS Startups Awards and UTS Venture Day celebrate student and alumni entrepreneurs from UTS who are changing the world we live in for the better.
UTS Startups Awards and UTS Venture Day 2022
What if people really understood your idea, your product... your startup? What if that customer, investor, stakeholder really just “got it”? What if you could convince the world about what you do?
In 2022 for the first time ever, UTS Startups and the UTS Business School Venture Day teamed up for the Awards final on Wednesday 31 August.
The UTS Startups Awards are an annual celebration of the incredible technology-enabled startups at UTS and the flagship event in the UTS Startups Festival.
land and i just want to acknowledge the elders past present and emerging um the culture of storytelling and learning
continues here at uts and here tonight emma at the uts startups awards slash
adventure day collaboration awards time how exciting welcome everyone welcome
and hey welcome to uh to everyone watching from home on the live stream on
yeah whatever platform you're on i prefer linkedin i don't know it's just my thing easy yeah youtube facebook
wherever you are hello um good to see you but we're here tonight to celebrate some startups emma and it's been well
it's been a year it's been a year but it's also been five years dave yeah it's been five years of
the uts startups awards which means i guess we're we're four and a bit right yeah for some change yeah but we're here
to celebrate and i tell you what what a great feeling i wish everyone at home could see what we're seeing these beautiful smiling faces beautiful faces
uh it's such a good feeling so thank you all for being here we've also got some high school students because we are
inspiring some high school students we are welcome everyone if you're in high school um if you're in in the room on on
the line on the line um welcome and i'm feeling good energy from this side of the room is it because of our judges
i don't know we don't have to butter them up an amazing site yeah but they are beautiful that's amazing and um
someone else who is beautiful and also the tallest man i've ever seen is um our wonderful dean of the uts business
school carl rose who is going to come and share a few words welcome carl rhodes
thank you very much i'm more often called tall that i'm called beautiful so i really appreciate
that hi everyone i mean what a great vibe here tonight seeing people outside
gathering together after so many uh years of not being able to do this you know really great to to to see everyone
you know it's my absolute honor and pleasure um to welcome you here today at this event
uts startup awards and uts venture to the day together um welcome to those of
you out here i can't i got the lights in my eyes but from the side it's looking like a pretty full house so that's uh
impressive uh impressive as well um and um uh as well as to those people
uh live streaming and which again is good we're using the technologies available to get this out to as many
people as possible people who can't be here for one reason or another so that's that's great to see for the first time
these two events joining i think this is a synergy i think uh joining of uts
startups and the business school um you know is really a kind of one plus one equals three so that that's really great
to see and really to you guys out there who are participating in this the students of uh of uts and the kind of
dedication that you've shown by continuing studies progressing the startups projects despite or many many
challenging situations it seems to me you know if you come to university and all you do is go to class
and do your assignments and get grades and go home you're really not taking advantage of
the full possibilities of what a university education can be about i mean
you know we offer so many more opportunities uh than that this work with entrepreneurship
and startups is a key part of that we open those doors and see who who walks through to take advantage of it and you
have so congratulations and for years to come i believe these are the events that you will remember these are the uh
experiences you will remember and where you'll see real real value uh from being from being here a student at uts so well
done uh to everyone who's chosen to take that opportunity i mean over the course of the last four
years um there's been just over 900 student-led startups that have been
created and that involves about one and a half thousand students industry and alumni
more than 450 of those startups are still active and 49 entered this year's
pitch competition tonight we hear from the 20 finalists um so from
those of you who are amongst those 20 again congratulations for getting this far in the process
i'd like to thank all of the donors for their generosity in providing awards and
prizes to sponsors for supporting uh the whole event which many of you would have
enjoyed some of that outside just before coming in here there's many
great entrepreneurship courses across uts faculties that includes the executive mba in entrepreneurship and
the entrepreneurship honours here that are both in the business school where i work as well as other resources that
universities has to offer like the uts startups program um
also i've talked a lot about students let's not forget friends and family the people you know behind supporting you
all but there's a lot of those people here and let's let's thank those people as well
for their contributions
now at uts as a university we are extraordinarily proud about being part
of the entrepreneurship community we see our role as enabling students you
to develop the necessary knowledge and skills in this area we see our role as helping you meet the right people
develop and help you develop your entrepreneurial project and really being
change agents in realizing australia's innovation and entrepreneurial potential
i'd like to thank the uts startups team with many mentors and industry partners all teaching and professional staff and
the director of entrepreneurship murray herbs shout out to murray
and also to associate professor jacqueline schweitzer joking well done
and to everyone here who's played a role in different ways look it's going to be a great night have a great time you know
uh participate well judges you know don't go too hard on them they've been
working hard but you know make the right choices nevertheless and really looking forward to hearing the particu pictures
tonight from the finalists thank you very much
hello how are we doing good good come on how are we doing
okay oh my god look at this audience this is beautiful and to the thousand
plus people that are going to going to watch this stream hello uh i'm murray herbst uh director of entrepreneurship
for uts in the best thank you that mum thank you very much
in the best news of the night i don't have an opening speech uh so i'm going to keep this really short you have to
stay to the end to hear my spiel at the end i just want to get up for a second and say what an honor it is to work with
the business school on this event so joachim in particular and the business school as a whole
for years we've had a wonderful venture day program uh which i know a lot of people here have taken part in
and we've had a wonderful uts startups awards program and they've both been good but isn't it nice to see them come
together and do an even better job by working together to show the best entrepreneurs across uts
yes i find uts to be a incredibly
collaborative place uh filled with people i actually want to collaborate with and i'm really grateful for that so
i'm going to pass to my friend and colleague joachim schweitzer from the business school director of entrepreneurship he's
going to cover judging process and welcome our judges thank you very much joachim
thanks maria thank you so much and welcome everyone to the uts startup awards adventure day combined today i'm
really glad to have you all here in the room this is a fantastic event i'm so so so excited for all the pictures that
we're gonna hear in just a minute but before we get there there's a couple of things to do first up i want to
introduce our judging panel so if i can get the next slide i would like to welcome our judges on a big round of
applause for them already we have a couple of people who've come
to this event for many years now i think up to five years in the past so we have david langford here we have leila shema
we have karen ness we have peter kazakos ali linz maria mcnamara rebecca smith
jay calabric maxine shireen and walter kazzy big round of applause please
these people bring an incredible incredible experience to the judging process so it's a very tight ship
tonight we have lots of pitches so thank you so much for being here tonight and for also some of you being
representatives of our donors for awards and prizes tonight so if i can get the next slide we're gonna have a quick
overview of um what we're gonna have tonight on the table we have i would like to say almost a hundred thousand
dollars of awards tonight on the table and this is only possible because of our very very generous donors that are
including commonwealth bank and telstra the kasakos foundation the uts business school and many other people and
organizations donating and giving for this award so put your hands together for all these great graded awards that
we're able to hand out tonight so i'll leave it at that and i'm going to hand it back to dave i think and emma to get
us into the first round of pictures beautiful i was going to say we should judge who's better dressed out of the directors of entrepreneurship um
but but i think we all know the answer um anyway okay so dave moving along our
first startup tonight um is squadron so let's welcome jason
[Applause]
hey everyone i'm jason bestani co-founder of squadron it is no secret that the global pandemic
has flipped traditional work structures on their head and fundamentally changed the role work plays in their lives with
an ever-growing skill shortage corporates are struggling to find talent fast enough to keep pace innovation and
change on the other hand highly skilled professionals are leaving organizations in droves in search of independence
flexibility and meaning unfortunately the current gig economy is no solution as it is limited to
single-player low-impact task-based work squadron is here to change that we're
building an on-demand talent formation platform to help companies find deploy and scale cloud-based squads of
independent tech talent to accelerate their builds or go zero to one on new ideas
the carbon footprint of the everywhere workplace also cannot be ignored so we'll be offsetting remote work
emissions of our squads by purchasing carbon credits and becoming the world's first carbon neutral talent marketplace
for highly skilled talent once you have successfully created a profile and progressed through our four-stage vetting process you invited into a
close-knit community with other like-minded high-performing individuals for corporates squadron provides access
to world-class tailor-fit squads through the integration of ai and machine learning into our proprietary matching
algorithm we use a combination of skills and experience data along with behavioral science to compose squads
that have been optimized to best suit a company's project brief
market conditions are brewing the perfect storm for squadron to reposition the idea of contract work as a way to
solve big problems as labour market liquidity increases we plan to intercept quality talent and
provide corporates with the ability to respond to market uncertainty by scaling project resources up or down with ease
in terms of progress in the short few weeks of launching our landing page we have organically attracted over 250
weightlisters with a diverse mix of skills on the corporate side we receive eois
from four businesses and continuing lay stage conversations with a bunch of other corporates
our business model is incredibly simple we will charge a flat 15 service fee on top of the hourly rate set by our talent
back to the corporate squadron will not take any cut from the rate set by our talent
by looking at an average project with this by looking at average squad with a project duration of 12 months applying
very conservative growth rates retention rates and modest corporate leakage we are left with a very healthy ltv to cap
ratio of seven we are ready to address an extremely large and growing market
being very conservative if you only scratch the surface and capture 2.5 percent of our target market this alone
is a 657 million opportunity on a gmb basis
the model for productizing cross-functional squads of tech talent is still a green field space the
left-hand side reflects the traditional major freelancing businesses we don't see these types of platforms as direct
competitors as they only offer individual task-based work on the other hand software development
consultancies do have the ability to contract out full project teams however the caliber of talent is known to be low
and the corporate overheads are always so high thus not making them an ideal option for our target customer
in terms of our roadmap we will kick off with a 10 client test group using our mvp for moving towards an invite only
100 client closed beta ahead of our public launch in 18 months this staged approach is to allow us to
focus ruthlessly on solidifying our unique product offering ahead of formally hitting the market
this solution is close to our hearts as simona and i were part of the 330 000 australians who left their jobs in the
last two years as part of the great resignation in search of greater meaning and purpose
as a founding team we have a strong working relationship a complementary skill set and a shared fearless hustle
to deliver results as we look to get off the grantham nvp we are delighted to be part of the uts
startup community we're looking to speak with future of work experts corporates and passionate independent tech workers
who are interested in coming with us on this journey of pioneering the future of work thank you very much everyone
okay let's hear from some judges
i can hear might just kick off with the first question
how are you going to ensure that the contracted uh workers
communicate with each other and share ideas um in an effective way and quickly yeah now
good question so with us the power of our of our platform is in the community so once they've created
their profile and joined that platform it's about the sharing of ideas and we're going to hold separate events for that to happen once they're part of the
program we also have a few different strategies for them to get to speaking and continue that open dialogue we are
going to have remote working teams and we are going to also in build chat functions and also potentially look to
partner with certain platforms that that assist you with collaborating virtually as well and there's a bunch of startups
we're talking to in that space as well
how do you vet the resources you say you go through this vetting stage is that yeah manual computerized
i'll just get to that slide yeah so we're running a four-stage vetting process so initially it kicks
off with the discovery meeting to some type of functional interview then we move towards a case study or a skill assessment depending on the type of role
it is cross-functional teams of techs are not just engineers it's also creatives and marketing experts then
it'll be a culture ad interview which will most likely be with another member of the community then followed by sort of mission specific vetting to
ensure they can deliver that project that they're applying for and then a role in continuing excellence
to ensure that their skills are keeping up to date thanks everyone i tell you what going
first is no mean feat cool calm collected
very smooth very smooth i want to be in a squadron me too but i want to keep my job all right up next we have salvage
welcoming joshua
hello everyone please a quick show of hands who here has purchased an organic sulfate or
paraben free skin care or hair care product guilty that's a lot of you i too choose to
purchase these products because i don't want these chemicals on my skin the unfortunate truth is that these
chemicals are on synthetic textile dyes which spends most of their time on our skin
hi i'm josh and i'm the founder of salvage salvage is a clothing company that dyes all of its fabrics using
plants and vegetables the image behind me is a piece of silk that has been dyed with native australian eucalyptus
salvage was born here at uts during my dissertation research i looked at the effects that synthetic textile dyes have
on workers wearers and the environment specifically the carcinogenic effects of
these chemicals and the higher than usual rates of cancer among die workers and people that live near die plants
the great news though is that the things we need to colour our clothing are all around us it's in the trees bark leaves
seeds it's in our kitchen bins and it's in agricultural waste let me give you a
fantastic example the australian wine industry 200 000
tonnes of waste from wine grape skins every year a highly valuable dye source
everything we create and everything that i'm wearing is dyed with plants and
salvaged ingredients this top is dyed with avocado seeds this t-shirt
eucalyptus leaves these pants pomegranate skins
i don't need to tell you that the fashion market is huge you know that what's more interesting to me though is
organic skin care people don't want these chemicals on them and they're willing to pay for it 50 billion dollars
is what it is expected to hit within the next five years we look at our leaders in the industry
jack and jack basic camilla and mark aesthetic sensibility and many of them
have a commitment to australian made we're going to take the baton push it forward using natural dye
our model is very simple we sell online through our website and we have some select retailers but we
have a dream of a new kind of retail experience i want you guys to imagine this for a moment the salvage flagship
store you walk in what's that smell eucalyptus leaves the rumble of the die
pot the buzz of the overlocker a new kind of retail experience where it
happens like sitting at the chef's table or drinking at a brewery real genuine
transparency not just a web page we've had some good traction so far
we've been featured in vogue worn by celebrities like guy sebastian and rule and we have retailers in the us in aspen
in montauk and in new york this is our amazing team here
victoria she's my partner she handles all of our back end operation that's annalise she she runs creation
collective they're they are our um their partners our manufacturers here's toy here she's putting the button holes onto
some of our pants here's mason he's making some of her pants he's the whole team we're working on one of our new
shirt prototypes our road to where we are hasn't been a
straightforward one and to be honest it probably won't be but we have a lot of exciting things ahead we've just
finished designing our new collection it's being manufactured and it's going to drop on our new website in november
we're also going to continue to work in r d i'm obsessed with finding new colors and new dye sources we're also going to
find new equipment in order to increase our output and expand our retail network
at salvage we have a massive war chest that we use to crush our competition
in truth we're self-funded we bootstrap it self-funded we we go along nicely but
with proper investment we can really expand this business and bring it internationally
next slide anyway next slide we need people we need experts experts in finance experts in
marketing and chemical engineers with that we can expand the business as
well we need bigger divets please help us end synthetic dye chemicals for workers wearers in the
environment
[Applause] anything from the judges have you done
any analysis on fading with you i'm fading yes so we're constantly doing r d so there's uh there's so many different
things that we can create colors with but there's only a few that last so for example like uh pomegranate skins were
work really well a beetroot you think it works really well but it fades so we're constantly trying and
there's many different methods and different kind of temperatures and other variables needed but we spend a lot of
time working on that yeah my question was related um it was like how do you keep the colors fast
when they are these natural colors and without using chemicals to make the colors fast so you need to modent it so
what we would use is we would some of our things so with cotton would use oat gulls basically and you grind that up and you
would kind of leave that in that overnight for protein based things like silk and wool you have a fantastic
opportunity because if you got silk you shouldn't really be putting it in the wash but also it's protein and protein
has a fantastic bond with things that are high in tannins flavons or indigotons
how important is pricing power and the premium price point for your products and profitability
so do you want repeating that sorry it was a bit quick how important is a premium price point
for your profitability and pricing power i mean well at the moment we do sit at a premium price point but as we can expand
our manufacturing capabilities and as we can have more economies of scale we want to kind of bring it down to a more
realistic price point but at the moment we are sitting alongside pricing like brands like jack and jack basic camilla
and mark well done so good
i think it's time for us to upgrade our uts startups teams yeah i was gonna say i've dyed my clothes with beetroot by
accident and i can also tell you yeah washes out what if we eat the avocado and you die with it does that work
all right who's next hey um every startup founder is a hero in my eyes but there can only be one cover hero so
let's get nabi on stage to tell us about cover hero
gig economy by 2025 is going to be more than 50 percent of the global workforce
people get into it because they love the flexibility freedom and autonomy
but this comes at the cost of security someone very close to me had an health
episode which meant he couldn't work and his income was compromised and from that
point onwards it became my life's mission to bring the insurance industry
to the 21st century insurance industry is 200 years old so
it's its policies its tech its lack of diversity don't even go there
what we've done so far is build a platform that can understand
the lifestyle choices of a self-employed person and build an api driven platform
that can integrate into any gig economy platform we're talking about a fiverr
and uber anything in the knowledge economy and it's simple as dragging and
dropping our user experience into into your platform so think of after pay
for insurance what it allows us to do is simplify a very complex archaic process that was
designed by the insurers for insurers not properly fit for a modern society
where we want to work for ourselves empower ourselves at whenever we want wherever we want across multiple
platforms we've designed a whole range of products we launched hustle uh to the market quite recently we've
got 12 partner platforms signed up with a captive audience of over half a
million customers now breaking down these platforms we've got companies like
um accounting platforms banking platforms transport networks and the likes and what we're trying to do is
embed our api inside those platforms where we can quote bind issue and do all
of the functionalities of an insurance product within that platform without the user having to go and look for the
insurance product we've got a really great team behind us and we've raised
1.5 million dollars in precede funding we've won a number of awards emerging in
shoretech of the year in new york female fintech leader of the year finalist for two years and cover hero being in the
top 100 in short text globally where to from now those of you that are
self-employed please go to hustlecover.com do yourself a favor and protect your
income the rest of you that knows a marketplace has a marketplace who knows anybody that can be introduced to us
we'd love to get in touch and start collaborating so we can protect the income of australians
for the next 18 months we are raising three million dollars in our seed funding and it is to hit our revenue
milestones of monetizing the 500 000 customers through our partner
platforms designed by hustlers for hustlers thank you
[Applause] how does your pricing compare to other products in the market
so it's competitively priced the way our platform work is we partner with insurers and underwriters and co-design
the product on the pricing point that we see fit for the level of income so it's highly competitive
just as a general comment it seems like this is a space that plenty of traditional insurers are moving away
from why do you see that it's something that's an interesting opportunity where how do you actually create
um margin where others can't find it there's a big shift happening in the market with the great resignation and
the rise of self-employed people and it's a not a very understood market for the insurers gig economy being 10 years
old insurers and banking sector in general don't understand it so they don't want to play in a segment that
they don't fully understand but in terms of like things like loss ratios combined ratios there's historical data from the
corporate which can be applied to this so they're still waiting and watching what the startups do before they can
move into the place but there's still really great appetite around the world from the insurers
do you have plans to expand globally and how are you thinking about going about this yes so our next market is north
america into five different states before the pandemic that was our launch market we were in fact in silicon valley
for a whole year in plug and play in short tech accelerator program so we launch in the us market and then after
we hit certain milestones that we want in the five states then we will go into emerging markets in asia pacific
what's what's the risk that keeps you up at night finding great team members uh and
building a um building a collaborative team globally and and scaling it and letting go of
control as a founder
the claim operations how do you do that so in australia we work with tpas
that are tied to our underwriting agency that we work with um we would not be paying out claims but we will be
handling the claims triaging process so in each jurisdiction it has to be
compliant with with the legislation
well done navi i love it i think you stumped the judges which is cool
i love startups that make things that are typically difficult simple and that's one of them but i'm really
excited about this one dave because a lot of you in this room have actually sampled this startup tonight and for
those that haven't you'll find out how to so ryan tell us about refilled
technical difficulties what what are the chances at uts of something like that happening hands up in the audience who
has sampled refill tonight guilty quite a lot and hands up who are so intrigued that as soon as it hits
eight o'clock and we open these doors you can walk out and sample it who's keen all right enough from us here's ryan
[Music] hello everyone my name's ryan nelson and i'm the founder of refilled we offer
delicious drinks on tap minus the crap as you're probably all aware we're
facing a global problem with single-use plastics unfortunately more than half of all plastics ever created has occurred
since the year 2000 and we're now at a point where we're producing 481 billion
plastic bottles a year what's even worse is that less than 20 of these are ever recycled with the
other 80 taking over 400 years to break down in our oceans or landfill
once i started researching this space i quickly realized that it's in fact beverage brands that are leading this
climate catastrophe across all industry the top three plastic polluters worldwide are coca-cola pepsico and
nestle coca-cola's bottles were found on beaches rivers and parks of 51 of 55
nation surveys surveyed so how do we change and become more
sustainable we need to ditch the plastic all together
refilled is a technology company creating a sustainable solution for brands organizations and consumers to go
plastic free our circular economy is made up of a smart drink dispenser an rfid-enabled drink bottle and a
companion app that allows people to get a still or sparkling flavored beverage on demand without any waste
it's a byob system and you can walk up and unlike a traditional vending machine we don't produce any plastics
our vision is to create the most sustainable beverage company in the world by driving the transition towards refillables with the mission of
eliminating 100 million single-use plastic bottles by 2030.
the market is absolutely enormous at 899 billion dollars worldwide and an immediate obtainable market here in
australia of 9.2 billion for soft drinks that are consumed out of home
our go-to market strategy is to target universities gyms and offices as these are captured audiences where people are
thirsty regularly attend and can remember to bring a drink bottle
there are some competitors in the space which is good news it's proof that we're onto something but here in australia
we're the first to market and if we're truly going to make a dent on single-use plastics we need to work with the
beverage brands that people know and love refilled works with beverage brands and
distributors to install refillers at these locations and make refills available to consumers
the price for a refill is about 2.50 and you can tap your credit card or your phone like any ordinary vending machine
or with our smart rfi drink bottles tap at the lid and you can access your drinks via our subscription
i won't bore you with the unit economics because we don't have enough time but the good news is we've crunched the numbers and we can make lots of money
validation and traction-wise our prototype has been installed at uts for the last four months we've saved our
thousandth plastic bottle recently and then machines out the back for you guys to try tonight we've experienced 100
month-on-month growth since our launch and have 10 signed lois from some of australia's leading universities to also
help their campuses go plastic free we also recently closed 500k seed investment
our key partners include dola lanza inventor and uts itself we wouldn't be here without the amazing opportunity to
test and validate this product we have an amazing team with over 30 years of experience in manufacturing
hardware and the beverage industry and we spent the last 18 months working
on this project so we can get to this point today and over the next 12 months we're looking to achieve our goals and start
to crush those single-use plastics we're looking for an additional 500 000
to get 50 refillers in the market but more importantly here tonight 10k
prize money sure would help we're also interested in talking to students and staff that are on campus if
they'd like to sign up to the subscription and i'm also interested in speaking to any students that want to become ambassadors and help
market refilled on campus my name's ryan nelson cheers to saving the planet from plastic one refill at a
[Applause]
time how are you coping with people not being not um coming together in large numbers
um it hasn't been an issue so far because our only prototype is here currently at uts uh it's been on campus
these last four months and students are coming back in droves so we've actually witnessed that people want to come back
they want to get out of the home they want to come back to the office they want to go to university and so we've seen huge
adoption of the machine since it's been here what advantage does your business and
your technology have over say the big beverage companies hitching onto this idea and coming into the market
so the reality is is that the big beverage companies are transitioning towards refillables they're doing this
but they have strong teams that invest in r d and hardware um there's no one
representing the thousands of other beverage brands that make up the market and so refills looking to work with
those independent private companies that still sell stacks of beverages and don't have
the technology or the ability to build a sustainable distribution channel so we don't care if coca-cola do it we want
them to buy us one day um and do you have a product line of
different bottle types and sizes available for the machine itself okay we've got this one here
yep so we've got our smart drink bottles down here for the judges um we can use any bottle or you can use one of our own
with the chip and the lid for your subscription and then in regards to the refillers themselves we've got a stand-up unit it's about the size of an
existing vending machine but we're also looking to develop with the funding a countertop version that's much smaller and easier to install
just very quickly what about uh health health issues when you're using
recycled bottles whose responsibility is it yours or theirs at the end of the day people use their
bottles and carry them around with them and fill them up at plain water dispensers so it's on the individual person to look after the cleanliness and
the sanitization of their bottle [Applause]
well done we have got
more in store when it comes to sustainability so i'm really excited we're going to hear about net nada from
lockheed burke welcome lucky
all righty so everyone here who works in a business runs a business manages a
business or just has a job if you get your phone out and scan this qr code my automated software net nada will analyze
your business's entire environmental impact by the time i finish this pitch
so my name is lockhee burke and i'm from netanyahu and what we do is we specialise in automated software that
analyzes environmental social and governance impact the problem is the typical consultancy
has huge costs and also takes a lot of time and most businesses don't have the
ability to engage with traditional consultancy in this in this way so what we created was net nada to
automate the sustainability consultancy space our solution
integrates directly in with your suite of softwares drags out the data and then analyzes your emissions in a matter of
minutes rather than a matter of months once we've done that we suggest tailored solutions to your business that not only
drive down your emissions but also provide you with return on investments and automate engagement with your
stakeholders both internally and externally we track the rois as your
emissions go down and we also look at ways that we can get your team engaged
to top it all off at the end we're accredited to certify you as climate active carbon neutral and
also give you neighbours ratings across your streams it's really really simple and really
really easy and what it takes is just for you to sign up and then be able to be on your way to make sustainability
one of your strengths our use cases are awesome to date and
we're very proud to announce that recently we've diverted over 2 400 tonnes from landfill and we've saved
over a million kilowatt hours of energy our market size is huge and so it should
be sustainability is a very very exciting space but we're just interested right now at looking at the massive mrr
or monthly recurring revenue opportunity within just sydney alone but in saying that we're currently operational all
across australia in new zealand and also over in the uk with our competition we know that as you
guys are probably already seeing in your email inboxes that we're very very fast we also provide the ability which none
of our competitors do to track the return on investment of solutions and we also have a very easy and functional ui
our competitive advantages are driven around the fact that our software is ai enabled and that we've
built on machine learning predictive analysis throughout all of all the aspects of our software this makes us
faster more affordable more scalable and also allows businesses to get certified
at the end our business model is quite simple it's just a subscription but we're very very
excited to recently announce that we now have our freemium product which you guys have just scanned on for
and we've also recently announced a partnership with xero and we're on their app store
our traction to date has been really really good we've got a bunch of businesses on who are all experiencing
awesome benefits and as i mentioned we're creating huge environmental impacts we've just
recently closed our seed and with some good revenue our team is also being able to grow we've got an incredible tech team
and also some great new marketing and sales capabilities that have come on board i guess alfonzo and myself are all
right as well with the roadmap we've been smashing through things and i think it's important to keep 2021 on there but as
far as 2022 and 2023 goes the plan is to make a hard launch in the uk at the end
of the year building off the back of our current six clients over there and the case studies we're making around them
and then hopefully by the end of next year we'll be looking to raise our series a
our ask from you guys is if you have any businesses or any people you know that
want to make sustainability one of their strengths please reach out and help us reduce your emissions while increasing
your profitability [Applause]
i was just sitting here with my mouth open thinking thinking hard and long um in terms of your um
sort of key client base to sort of kick off kick off with are they smes or are they medium-sized you know business
large business yeah really really good questions medium size enterprise is our target space um 20 to a couple of
hundred employees is where we target um in saying that our largest clients have about 5 000 employees and our smallest
is like coffee shops of one or two so we do cater each side but we're really targeting businesses who don't have the
money time or subject matter expertise for consultancy and that's typically medium-sized enterprises they know they
want to do something about it they know they need to they're being asked to do something but they can't and here we are
so what is the average dollar cost or business uh the average subscription is 250 a
month not bad compared to you know 100 000 bucks for a consultant
and in terms of your edge i mean how how would you sum up your edge really quickly just in terms of the technology
speed return on investments and automated stakeholder engagements
how do you how do you build credibility especially with enterprise customers yeah good question um our team we've got
about 35 years of carbon accounting and sustainability consultancy experience so that's that goes a long way we're also
accredited by the government to give certifications in australia new zealand and the uk um so that helps so any
certification that pwc or ey or any of those guys have we've got um so that yeah that's that's how we do it
wonderful thank you so much loki we are how's everyone going out there
are you feeling all right is it all a bit of an overwhelming situation hey i mean we're getting so
much info great start for me it felt like they went really really really fast everyone was super interesting so do we
even need a change of pace well you're very clever you see emma like for me i feel like yeah i'd probably love to
relax a little bit but bad news um we're not going to do that we're going to get faster
because we've got our 60 second lightning pitch round um and we're going to invite our first five lightning
pitchers on stage i'm going to read it because i'm going to get it wrong otherwise um we have got liberty with walking tall we've got nestique with
keith we've got mikuno with jono everheld with michelle and build a ninja
with james so welcome these guys onto stage we are gonna have our
first uh idea stage early stage and ideas staged lightning round so take it away liberty
thank you for people over 60 falling over is the second leading cause of unintentional
injury related deaths worldwide and will cost the global economy 240 billion us
dollars by 2040. existing devices in this market see mainly the walking frame and cane two
heavily stigmatized devices intended for post-fall recovery there is enormous
opportunity here for a preventative based device aimed at reducing the instance of falls from occurring through
prolonging user balance i'm liberty jacob and i've invented the walking tall poles which combine the
proven technique of nordic walking with the technology of the paralympic running blade to create poles intended to reduce
the instance of falling through facilitating fall prevention exercise the blade is a simple and low cost
addition to the existing walking pole manufacturing process to date this concept has
won me the title of new south wales young scientist today i'm asking for funding and mentoring to patent this
idea thank you [Applause]
with the rising cost of living it is currently difficult for people to keep up with their rent and travel freely
the solution is nesting a marketplace which allows you to get a guest to cover your rent while you're
away unlike airbnb our platform doesn't turn your home into a hotel just one guest
checking in for the full duration of your travels for the guests they get a property that's a third of the price for
comparable due to not having to pay short-term rental prices and having no cleaning fee
we also offer home content insurance just in case of any damages our business model works by charging 15
on the booking 10 from the host 5 from the guest 13 of people will be willing to get a
guest to cover the rent while they're away 19 of people would be willing to stay in a property that isn't
professionally managed to save on cost looking to raise 275 000 to reach our first 1000 bookings let's change the way
people travel forever thank you [Applause]
did you know that furniture manufacturers produce more than 47 kilos of carbon emissions for a single chair
similar to those using tonight at the same time if they're sold in a store in australia 84 of furniture items
end up in our landfills we think conscious consumers need better options and that's why we created mikuno
mucuno uses clever designs and unique on-demand 3d printing to produce
furniture from recycled materials and waste our process creates only two percent of
the carbon emissions of traditional furniture manufacturing and it also creates recyclable furniture
we're here tonight and we'd love to talk to potential partners around pilot programs as well as investors that are keen to help us grow
this year four million australians will purchase furniture and now they finally have a sustainable option to make a
meaningful change with their own homes thank you
[Applause] hello i'd like to ask everybody here to think about a loved one who's passed
away now imagine that two weeks after their passing you had received a personalized
message from them in your inbox reminding you of how much they love you and how they're always around
now imagine that you're sitting at their burial plot and you scan the qr code on the memorial plaque and you see the
recent tributes from family and friends at everheld our vision is a world where we no longer have to imagine these
scenarios but connections are no longer lost where memories no longer fade away but are maintained and preserved and our
clients and our partners see our vision this is why they recommend ever held services to their clients staff and
members because they know now more than ever we need to preserve connections we've also partnered with australia's
largest cemetery group to help them transform cemeteries into museums of
digital memorials and we're on track to hit a million dollars within the next
year from established partnerships alone our ask tonight is simple it's for everybody here to think about
whether they've created content to leave to the ones they love
hello a few years ago i went through a full renovation of a house i've never seen someone swear so much or spend so
much time on manual admin as a project manager specializing in software and as a son of a builder i
thought there has to be a better way do you know there are sixty thousand registered building companies in australia and eight hundred thousand if
you include the uk and us it's a massive market seventy percent of that market are currently using pen and paper or
using excel to manage their projects builders are faced with two options they either buy a very expensive and complex
full life cycle application or they buy lots of products and do their tendering on one they're estimating on other et cetera
i've the solution builder ninja is providing a simple full life cycle application focusing on 10 of the
capability the small builders actually use i've spent two years spoken with hundreds of builders i've worked with
two freelance smes to design redesign and re-redesign the application i
validated the design with several builders and gained input from the master builders association we're looking for legal and tax advice
skilled developers usability designers and cold hard cash thank you
oh that was good emma i love a 60-second pitch i do too incredible judges do you
love it well you're writing very furiously because you realize you have to score these um but at the same time we'd love some comments or questions
from the panel they're all like don't look at me dave just one or two from your choice and bear in mind they are
ideas in early stage so be kind karen i can see you watching yup
oh david thanks dave um question about everhell um
what you know what actually was your was the genesis of the idea
it's it just seemed a bit left feel to me and it's interesting and innovative
good question uh nearly a decade ago one of my best friends passed away at 33 and she had
two young children so we created this content for her and then over the years as a passion project
and on a volunteer basis my co-founder and i uh helped lots of people create this content
personally delivering it for them after their deaths then covert hit someone we had promised to help passed away they
were devastated their families were devastated all of everything they had planned was lost
and it was that moment that we said we've got to take this online and make this accessible to everybody so we're one and a half years into our journey
we've got amazing partners we have users we've made money uh yeah and it's just we've seen over the
last 10 years how it's just becoming more and more accepted and there's so much more attraction
[Applause]
karen go ahead
i'm just interested in building ninja um there are sort of i guess competitive products on the market um and as you
said there's been sort of low adoption of those so what do you think the key hurdles are for adoption what do i think
the key barriers are did you say for adoption yes yes um i think the complexity of the product i mean i've spoken to hundreds of builders they've
been things like transmittals you talk to a regular builder and you say what is this functionality they don't understand
it they don't need it they spend their time they spend i build on average about five projects
per per month and they'll they'll win 20 of those and the functionality they need is just too
difficult too complex it takes too long to do it so what we're trying to do is strip out the 90 they don't use and make
it easier and simpler for them to use it so we spent so much time going through the usability and do lots of peer
reviews to make sure it's something that actually is useful usable and have you got good feedback from the
builders as well on the product have they been trialling it or is it still idea stage um it's we we've got paper
prototypes we've walked through those and walked through this a few times um we've got great feedback we've got a couple of builders that actually wanted
to invest in us um and we got great feedback from the master builders association of australia as well so yeah
the resounding feedback is it's great it's a niche it's needed um but there isn't anybody sitting there you're pro
core and various other peoples of ipod and to be honest they're not focused on the small builders so that's the that's
the gap great thank you beautiful let's thank this incredible crew
well thank you guys we've got five more in five yeah this is not the time if you're watching from
home this is not the time for a magnum from the freezer break it is keeping on going i can't even say it
quick enough um let's welcome dave read your paper delta caddy snacks
stack tech snack savers and avat e come on let's give him a hand
i'd like to introduce delta a sas product for the structural design of tall timber buildings
my name is jesse hallan i'm a chartered professional structural engineer the un predicts up to an additional
three billion people on this planet to house those people we need to build
the equivalent of a new york city every month for the next 40 years
designers are developing systems using mass timber assembled like ikea furniture
this is designed for manufacturing assembly which is well suited to automation
delta will offer a suite of tools to automate structural analysis filling a gap for prospective customer gropius i'm
currently seeking support to help refine the business model and navigate australian grants and tax incentives to
help grow delta to a 200 million dollar business if awarded any prize money it will go to the 25k in matched funding
for the new south wales government mvp grant thank you [Applause]
i started caddy snacks to solve a really simple problem there was nothing decent to eat on the golf course
most golf courses their idea of sports and nutrition is a mars bar kit kat pack
of chips or a meat pie so i decided to make a healthy convenient and durable snack that was
perfect for the golf course jeff ogilvie the u.s open champion from 2006 describes it as the perfect snack
for the golf course but we think that it's got far greater potential than that
we think that it could be the perfect snack for everyone we've been on the market for nine months
and we're in most major golf courses around australia but we need to
grow our brand presence and get into cafes and become
the bar of choice for workers and students around australia
[Applause] g'day everyone my name is gabriel and
i'm here with stactek starktec is an ai technology based startup which specializes in the
contract management area of the construction industry we provide an integrated ai solution for construction
companies that streamlines the contract review process by extracting analyzing and summarizing the obligations of each
party we know that contract management is very complex it takes a substantial amount of
time and effort to review and interpret hundreds of page contracts summarize the obligations and identify
dispute prone clauses where if misunderstood can lead to delay of completion and litigation
costing companies time and money by automating the extraction of obligation in minutes instead of hours
stacked allows the team to save time and instead focus on managing the contract and making the right strategic decisions
to mitigate the risk of negative outcomes our solution is unique because our ai model can extract a high level of detail
to an accuracy of 90 our product development is flexible and can be customized to the clients needs
and finally we are there to support our clients thank you
imagine you walk into a bakery at closing time and they still have many pastries to sell
what do you think happens to them food businesses in new south wales throw away 30 of food they buy that's one
hundred seventy thousand phone killer attorneys every year or equivalent
i'm sorry um that's 170 000 tons every year
um oh my god
or equivalent needed to feed the entire country of iceland for an additional year
sadly by inevitably the uneaten food ends up in landfills causing damage to the environment for greenhouse gas
emissions but it doesn't have to be like this and i would like to do something about it my name is agatha i'm the
founder of snack savers a platform that lets restaurants and bakeries list and sell surplus food at reduced prices in
order to mitigate costs and eliminate food waste restaurants get to
earn additional revenue customers get to buy cheap and quality food and we are in
commission on every transaction what makes me optimistic is that 13 restaurants around mergvan ultimo have
already expressed interest in joining the movement what i would like to ask of you is access to customers and financial
assistance needed to make the platform running please sign up to be one of those snack savers by scanning the qr code thank you
[Applause] 49 of millennials are living paycheck to
paycheck younger generations are priced out of the housing market and drowning in student debt this means that many of us no longer
view employment as a viable pathway to a successful or fulfilling future so it's no wonder that a recent study
concluded that 72 percent of gen z want to start their own business by utilizing entrepreneurship
the problem is that most aspiring entrepreneurs are lost and don't know where to start so they waste a lot of time and money trying to figure it out
ivan e aims to solve this problem by providing an online education uh for
entrepreneurs that's trusted and specialized in entrepreneurship by being taught by uh trusted business
experts for a fraction of the cost time and friction as uh as traditional education or self-taught
alternatives thank you [Applause] come on up
let's move forward judges what do you think comments questions
your choice ali i feel like you've got something to say i just saw you sort of give us a
spontaneous clap and so the mic is yours i just thought there was some really fantastic
uh one minute pictures super hard to do and very well handled um i wanted to ask a question
of hold on quickly
delta what's the biggest hurdle you've overcome so far
uh i think finding a technical solution so rather than trying to build everything
myself um just through past work experience i've come across a lot of different products
which basically i've strung together and i think that's what gives us an edge
over the competition as well because while they're you know working away writing their own
software we can leapfrog them by leveraging really high quality open source and third-party
commercial products sam your revenue model how does that
work so it's a monthly subscription basically there's marketplaces out there like
udemy there's recently in north america there's been a couple of merging platforms like reforge and section four
but these are targeted at mba executives that are looking to upskill
or employees looking to upskill no one has niched down yet for the gig economy
style entrepreneurs and also accommodating to uh entrepreneurs for startups and and it's like it's a it's a
broad spectrum of entrepreneurs and startups so it's a monthly subscription thank you
thanks judges thanks pictures we are heading back to our four minutes
four minute pitching two minutes of q a yes does anyone need like a little shake
straight i feel like the tension just yeah i'm okay all right all right we've got
an incredible guy who is going to tell us all about maslow andrew come on out
[Applause] thank you so much dave and emma and thank you for being here
so this might come as a surprise to a lot of you but there are 1.65 billion people globally that are living with a
disability my name's andrew i'm a disability support worker and i'm also a co-founder of maslow and our goal is to
make it as easy as possible for people with disabilities to manage their care and therapy from where it matters most
at home to understand why that's so important to us i need to introduce you to one of my
teammates and best friends stephen when stephen in 2017 stephen was out
with some friends when he dived into a pool hit his head on a shallow step and was immediately paralyzed from the neck
down he spent an entire year in rehab hospital trying to learn everything he needed to know about managing his injury
from home but was when he got home that the complications started he said that
i'm sick of repeating my care routine to carers and support workers every single day it's impossible to remember what my five
or six different therapists want me to do at home and there's simply no handover between my ep my ot my support
work on my my exercise physiology just my family and everybody else he's not the only one experiencing this
there are 4.4 million people in australia that require care and therapy due to having an ongoing disability
there are 19 000 service providers that provide support to them and there are 2.65 million support workers and
caregivers just like myself that deliver that care in the home every day we've spoken with thousands of them and they
all unanimously agree the paper-based status quo is broken and unsustainable
so we formed a team of support workers therapists and young people living with disabilities to address this challenge
and we created maslow maslow is a mobile platform that puts the user back at the center of their
care and therapy from home people with disabilities and caregivers can remotely access therapy programs
from all their therapists they can completely personalize and share their care plans with every single support
worker and caregiver that requires that comes to the home to give them support and all of that adherence data outcomes
and feedback is remotely monitored to ensure that the care is delivered with quality dignity and consistency
our business model is remarkably simple it costs 299 dollars per year to the
family and because it enables choice control and independence it's been completely subsidized by insurers like
the ndis in australia and the ministry of health in new zealand and we've proven that this is viable and
that there's huge demand for this more than 10 000 users in australia have signed up been invited or been referred
by their therapists nittan my co-founder over there has personally onboarded more than sixteen hundred people with
disabilities their families therapists and support workers to control their care and therapy from home and as a
result we've generated more than 70k of annually recurring revenue to date and we're growing massively month on month
but that's really great but so is the impact that we've made to families at the end of it all take emma for example
who is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis requires a number of support workers and therapists to deliver her care in the
home she said you should take her weeks on boarding support workers but using maslow it now just takes her minutes
we've nailed our direct to family model and reached product market fit in fact it costs us fifty dollars for nintendo
over there to acquire a new family and onboard them resulting in a 299 per year annual sale and we're just
short of profitable in this uh this model alone they've invited hundreds of their service providers to use the platform we
recently had a successful b2b pilot and we're about to re-launch to those hundreds of service providers and we're
about to scale this model so watch this space we've also got massive interest for major partners we recently had
partnered with hireup secured our first international customers but we're lacking the resources to properly capitalize on these opportunities which
is where you all come in with just we're looking for grant and angel
investors in fact with our model with just 10k of funding we can onboard 200 new families to control their care and
rehab at home which generates an additional 59.8k of annually recurring revenue so back us
and let's create a world where people with disabilities are at the center of their care and therapy from where it
matters most at home thank you [Applause]
congratulations on the work that you've done it's an enormous job for families to manage
in terms of um managing therapy schedules so is that
what first of all is there time frames so is there a sort of a calendar that you met that you manage and also is
there is there a way of um managing outcomes or measuring outcomes of the yeah absolutely i'll
tackle the second question first because this is the one that the disability service providers and the government have been most interested in we have a
feature called outcome measures and um they they determine what data they want to track in terms of outcome and
progress and the support workers that come into the home are actually able to report on that and it's the best possible insight into the quality and
outcomes that are being delivered to someone living with disability or the elderly in the home that's never existed
before whatsoever so yes we can measure outcomes in terms of the therapy schedules the way that
the product is used is that as someone living with a disability you might go through five or six different therapists in your lifetime you don't stick with
one person what it enables them to do is take a therapy program that will follow you for life and ensure that you're not
reinventing yourself every time you go to a new therapist so that's the way in which the therapy programs feature actually um is used do you have a
mechanism for ranking providers for ranking providers again that's also really interesting so we've got one of
the most unique data sets about quality consistency and satisfaction for support workers we've been building that
database a lot of our users users take it to their ndis annual reviews in order to justify their funding fire some of
their crappy support workers and move to better providers this is only for in the home or is it
also useful for families managing patients in hospital or aged care
providers yeah that's also really interesting we originally designed people with spinal cord injury because
that's what our friend had and it just so happened that it was parents with children with autism or sons and daughters of elderly parents that wanted
to keep them in their home rather than moving them to an aged care facility that this became really useful for so
our market's growing really really naturally and we're just trying to keep up thanksgiving well done masso
thank you andrew i like many australians went overseas emma and i wish i got an
upgrade on my flight but we're about to get an upgrade on our performance so
minnie why don't you come and tell us all about upgrade your performance
scary stages my hands are shaking now
that big audience my mind has gone all blank oh my god does anybody know why this is
happening well i know what's happening it's called
stage anxiety and in this room you any at home you all know at least one person
a friend or a relative who has experienced stage fright for musicians it's called music
performance anxiety and from any interviews and surveys that i conducted i found out that 70 percent of them
experience it which means that only in australia us and uk there are 20 million musicians
who freak out during the live performances 16 of them are already paying for a
solution not to mention that another 10 percent didn't even know they could fix the problem
hi my name is mini i've been a performing artist myself since 2006
and i found it upgrade your performance to help life performers beat stage anxiety from day one
you know since 2016 i have taught master classes and one-on-one sessions to guitarists and singers and the results
were amazing i still remember gabriele a classical guitarist who after a two hour
masterclass saw improvements in his life concerts in a matter of days
but what if i could reach your friend or relative and help them too what if i could reach performers
worldwide that's why i designed an online course which is based based on an acronym that
i invented magic it's a simple routine that performers can use to stay focused
before during and after their performance it combines sports psychology and my
personal experience on stage to give them effective tips and habits relevant
to their job and this is what makes me different from any other solution out there you see individual sessions with a
psychologist are quite expensive and most of the times are not related to the performing arts industry
relaxation apps are a very limited solution and other courses might come from performers who do have experience
on stage but not always the supporting research-based theory
well i'm going to target all of their customers those 4.5 million musicians
and those who haven't paid for a solution just yet let me show you how first i'm going to create the pocket
performance coach an app that performers can use anywhere
anytime whether they have to perform live audition or rehearse the pocket
performance coach will guide them back in the zone with a series of exercises videos and even sounds
but this is just the beginning i have planned a fully scalable range of
services that will go from free to bespoke this is the legacy i would love to leave
to my colleagues because i know i can make a difference but to do so i need your help
an investment of five thousand dollars today would help me promote the course
magic which is ready to launch in three months and the youtube channel 10k today would help me outsource the
editing of all the content for the app ready in six months but twenty thousand dollars today would
help me hire a developer bring the pocket performance coach up to life and
really revolutionize the world of performance whether i win an award or not right here
right now you all can already help me grow my business subscribe to my youtube channel and why
not start upgrading your performance thank you [Applause]
any questions comments the top of that triangle you have like a vip one-on-one type
coaching service yes how many of those do you think you can do is that you doing it or is it hiring people to do that
i'm going to do it for now that's an amazing question because in my mind that goes runs
at home at night there is the idea of creating the academy for coaches
that can coach others that's the only way um that the person
individual sessions can become scalable otherwise i still have 24 hours per
day thank you how would you describe the magic in
magic the the magic the magic the magic because it's simple
because with those five words five yeah let me go back to
because with those five words methods achievements game isolation collaboration
anytime during your performance you know okay stop do this
it's sometimes simple is better rather than
theories that are behind but that you don't want to remember while
you're here thank you
how would you get the word out that's a great question my servers and interviews were contact
conducted most reaching people on social media definitely and i have experience on
youtube with another channel that is already monetized so definitely youtube facebook and reddit
have given me lots of responses and engagement and that's where i would try to find
them also why not live academies conservatory
schools thank you for your time thank you thank you minnie minarelli a name you will
always remember i wish we'd spoken to you about an hour and 15 minutes ago but what can you do what can you do
i love a prop dave cause this guy's got a prop he does and we're about to hear all about it bear hug pallet wraps tom
field come on up speaking of stage fright
i spent the last four years at motors transport new south wales largest craft beer transport company
after the end of every day i'd have up to half a kilo of plastic per pallet i delivered in the back of my truck
i'd go to woolies and i'd try to make rational decisions as a consumer buy the sustainable products i'd come to work
see this i don't see the point in it enough pallet wrap is produced each year to wrap around the earth 8 500 times it
accounts for 1.2 percent of all global plastic waste our recycling infrastructure is so lacking that pallet
wrap cannot be recycled back into pallet wrap and can virtually not be recycled at all
a solution exists half a solution exists and we're going to be the first to bring it to the australian market
a single reusable pallet wrap can be used a thousand times replacing 450 kilos of plastic saving a business 1 500
over its life however you deliver a pallet wrapped in a reusable wrap you're going to want to take it off hold on to your investment a
person receives a pallet that is not wrapped they're going to want to wrap it for protection hence zero net effect
half the time chep own 300 million pallets and lease
them out to businesses across the globe these businesses can therefore deliver goods and a pallet and pick up a spare
pallet to keep their inventories balanced we're going to be the first to apply this model to a reusable wrap now you
can pick up a spare pallet and a spare reeves will wrap keep your inventory balanced
we're going to continue improving on the floors of existing products we've already built some prototypes that allow
pallets to be stacked on top of each other with reusable wraps biodegradable pallet wrap remains triple
the price of traditional pallet wrap and so is not viable we've been testing existing products and
our prototypes with modus transport stone wood and hawkes brewing as well as doing a lot of work with
convoy on feasibility given they operate a attract share and reuse model for kegs
similar to ourselves a single reasonable pallet wrap design can cover 70 of the total available
of the total pallet wrap market giving us a 5.8 billion total available market we'll be purchasing 400 existing
products and leasing them under our model improving them as we go and launching our own product to the new
south wales craft beer market here we will show investors our monopoly potential leading to our global launch
we had to pay 200 for the delivery of a single pallet wrap from one of the nearest overseas uh suppliers
we will be able to offer customers uh ten dollars for a single reusable wrap over a month trial period
network effects will be driven by referral incentives that are proportionate to the size of the customer that is referred
stone would have said that they will be adopting whatever system their largest trading partner does we've since had our
first pitch to that largest trading partner and we'll be using this as the basis of our diffusion uh model for
going global we'll be able to offer customers 77
savings on their current pallet rep expense through our subscription model or 90 through our outright model
turning a 29 000 investment into 70 000 gross profit over three years
our team has experience in the industry in entrepreneurship and in
beautiful technical minds as well as well as experience in building and launching products
and it's gone um what's next
it'll come to me thank you oh no um what's next
we talk about the team my ask is 25k in matched funding for the
new south wales mvp grant this will be feeding into r d as well as purchasing those original products
uh i'll jump to the conclusion um so the global logistics market demands nothing but
integrated cost-effective and streamlined process and by delivering on exactly that we can solve 1.2 percent of
the world's plastic puzzle thank you [Applause]
on um the labor involved in actually using the reusable wrap as opposed to
using the one-off wrap so plastic wrap itself takes two minutes
to apply um that's not really factoring in the fact that a forklift has to come over drop it on a rotating machine and
someone else has to stand there wrapping the pallet two people forklift weights there uh
takes up warehouse clutter with the wrapping machine itself um as well as the driver
um our products can take up to uh down to 90 seconds um
competitors claim 40 seconds but that's not true um but as well as that it removes all the
waste disposal requirements um many other things that bring indirect costs for businesses thanks
is the process by which you put your wrap onto the package manual or automated and can
people get hurt doing it it's manual no one's got hurt yet plenty of people have got hurt wrapping with
plastic it's it's awkward i don't need to go into that automated customers will be the biggest difficulty for us and the
biggest opportunity um stone would have asked for it they're one of the only brewers that do uh that have automated wrapping
equipment already um and they're asking us to think of something that can drop down from above the industry is not necessarily moving
towards automation for cost saving it's for whs
um so if we can fulfill that automation requirement that is for all the largest
uh businesses in the global market those are the people that we want to have at the centre of our diffusion method so if
we satisfy them then it goes global thank you well done tom i'll grab the prop i said
i love a prop i did it again who's up next
don't forget your plastic mate um beautiful hey we're gonna hear all about campus iot angus come on up and tell us
all about it [Applause]
well they're bright good day everyone my name is angus um before i start i did just want to give a little shout out in
the back there is the development team at compass and literally i did nothing of this they did it all um
and i'm so so proud of them and grateful to them as well um so compass i.t
let's see this works compass iit is a road intelligence company um
thank god we do roads and not rail today right but essentially what happens is that if you own a new car
it's connected so it doesn't matter whether it's a toyota or a ford or a tesla or a bmw
it tells us where that vehicle is and how it moves around the network whether it's swerving or braking
and this saves the government problem of trying to understand how vehicles move on the road network
which is currently pretty expensive so what do we do
we have about uh well there's about 22 trillion data points coming through our system now it's been running for over
three years and what it does is it essentially allows a user to pick any road anywhere
in australia and select how vehicles are swerving braking where they start from
where they end and that's so you can plan a better road network so he who here lives in northwest sydney
yeah anyone yeah so the halved crashes that's north connects so the customer there was trans urban anyone live in
south sydney northcott road yeah a few down there so the 73 million bridge was used used our data to justify
its widening um and that's basically determining are vehicles swerving at the entrance to the
bridge or not road deterioration we're the only company that could survey roads in lismore directly after the floods
and then i'll show you some tmr stuff in a second for queensland freight
the cool thing is over the last three years the company has grown to have quite a large
uh customer base i'm particularly proud of some of our regional rural customers like city of
darwin and stuff like that but it does cover most councils indeed if you live in northern sydney it's almost certainly planned by our software now the new
south wales government the queensland government the vic government the south australian government and the western australian government are either on
trial or on currently so if you know anyone in the northern territory or tasmania let me know
how it's different so the old way of doing this is usually with phones
right but if you run a road network you're not tracking phones you want to understand where trucks and cars are
going so we tell them what makes and models are going where so you can separate between say a b double truck
and your car going into work for example
oh yes very important if you're a software startup licensed revenue is definitely the way to go preferably upfront in full
we were google cloud's customer of the year and that was actually for um the lismore floods project um so
essentially what happened is we can tell the roughness of a road based on gyroscopes in the car it's a machine learning model but um gcp either we paid
them enough money or something but they then said we were the best customer
um the revenue is growing pretty strongly year on year we're sort of running out of space in australia so we've now
started to make foot in out of all places greece new zealand and the uk
the it's not actually net profit it's net margin is that number um and we only do a small number of contracts every
year indeed the average contract value is more than 30k so we only do a small number of very
high value contracts and this is the team i'm so proud of
um yeah so um we have a few new product lines coming down the the pipeline um i
won't go into super detail but they basically involve the ada systems if anyone knows what that is basically the
cameras around the car and sensing the road network and all the things around it we call that road intelligence
um we got vic so you don't need to worry about that but if you've got any introductions of the feds that would be lovely as well
[Applause] how are you getting the data and in relation to privacy and that sort of
thing you know how are you getting the information you use we have sophisticated anonymization
algorithms um so we know for example the street a vehicle starts from
and the street that it ends on and there's certain limitations for that in regional rural areas as well to protect
for like property owners and stuff like that but essentially we know that a vehicle is traveled on a road um as opposed to
that's the house that that vehicle belongs to and that basically hides who the owner of the vehicle is
where does the data actually come from we signed contracts with manufacturers
and third-party aggregators so um i was recently in germany doing stuff with in munich with bmw to basically like round
off the ad cast stuff um but basically the manufacturers are every vehicle that's led off the lot now
has a sim card in it so they're collecting it passively and we aggregate it for australia okay
so it's not an extra device on the car that's the beauty thing about it yeah we do not deploy any hardware at all
so we have a million more than a million cars with no hardware
as the number of cars on the road declines as people move to automated transport
does your market increase it decreases so actually the change is the opposite way
so um every new car that is sold is connected so what's actually happening is the old
fleet wasn't connected if you buy a car from the 1990s for example it wasn't connected just didn't have a sim card in
it whereas if you buy the new toyota land cruiser or hilux it's connected so the number is going up
autonomous vehicles are definitely connected so we're safe in that market but i suppose it's in our interest as a
society to have a better rail network and yes that does probably slow it down
thanks angus well done mate dave i'm a bit sad there's only one pitch left we've done
so well it just feels like that flew by but don't worry there's more coming but yes you're right there is only one pitch
left lucky last we've got export connect come on up with john
a lot of hands and faces all right i'm not charles i'm not quite as tall as
charles but we wish him well cool so increased world creation has incr has
resulted in global food exports to rise by 17 in the last year
now what we've realized is that exporters not just australian but internationally
are in the dark they lack access to organized market insights they lack access to detailed competitor data and
they simply don't have their export expertise enter the export connect portal
we've developed an all-in-one platform that provides these exporters australian
suppliers australian manufacturers with market insights trading category data competitor data
a video library as well as resources and tools they need to export their products successfully to a global market
from a market insights perspective we provide them with detailed channel information key consumer trends
demographic and economic data from a category perspective
they'll be able to within just two weeks of registering for the platform get access to key detailed insights
pertaining to their food and beverage category whether that be fruit and veg whether it be milk or anything else
at the same time we'll be able to provide them with detailed category data that highlights whether or not their category let's say milk is growing
whether it's stagnant or whether there is export market potential across any market that they
want globally at the same time in that same period we
can provide them with detailed competitor data so they'll be able to essentially identify
on any given market who their key competitors are what are they selling for where are they selling for what are
their key claims what is their pack size and are they running any promotions within any specific outlets directly and
very easy now trade data is very important because for our clients they may not necessarily
have the tools or the expertise to identify the correct market for them our trade data process essentially
identifies where australia is exporting products within their category and where
if they so wish in terms of the markets that they target are products being imported from if that makes
sense now we've also curated expertise and resources on our platform
that helps them across that export journey from beginning all the way to the end
we've got an export video library as well that highlights master classes as well as market specific insights where
we've brought in expert buyers from many different markets from hong kong singapore the middle east
all the way to europe now we feel that we're better than our
competitors now we've done detailed research into all of our competitors the likes of euro monitor pwc market line
and what we found was that these guys are extremely expensive and it's not that easy to work with them especially
if you're a small food and beverage exporter that's just looking to dip your toes into the game
additionally these guys are not tailored to specific client needs what we do is we have purely pure focus on every given
company focusing on their product line our market insights our competitor data
is curated exactly for their products it's not general information it's specific
now what would that matter to these businesses well by using our platform they get to save time they get to save
money they get direct access to over 50 years of expertise in our team
and they get to stay current with trends competitors insights and more
don't take our word for it just talk to our clients um now affordability is key our annual
membership is 299 and subscriptions are 190 each with 220 dollars for an
advisory session our partners include a range of stakeholders and they act as multipliers
and today we have sold over 200 memberships and 170 subscriptions
we know it's profitable we've white labeled it and we have a target of a global market
if we were to sell 10 000 memberships and an average spend of 679 we'd make a revenue of 7 million at 35
profit margin that equals to 2.3 million dollars of profit and essentially we're at the pre-mvp
stage we're looking to go global in the next 12 months and what we ask is essentially some
funding to hire bring in another software engineer thank you
[Applause]
intel's a bit the data that you have collected to be able to provide this service yes is that all in sort of
written form we're in the heads of all these people yeah absolutely no so we've we've got a partnership with global data
which is one of the largest data providers globally um they cover all food and beverage categories that they
cover health and wellness products personal care products um so you know food and beverage is just the start for
us we're going to be expanding across multiple categories we're going to be expanding globally we know who our target audience is we know who the
stakeholders are which will act as a multiplier and we're very confident that with our expertise with our experience
and with the feedback that we've received from our current partners that we can essentially go global with the
platform have you thought about the risks of sharing this kind of data between
competitors absolutely and companies companies may be concerned about that and that's a
great question but for us it's it's about growing the industry as a whole our vision is to see a thriving export
industry not just in australia but globally um once we share say a company that sells milk
comes to us and buys a subscription then they're only going to be receiving that subscription their competitors won't receive that subscription um so you know
take advantage of our platform and take advantage of the opportunity wonderful
well done john well hey um emma that was that was wild
ten four minute pictures yes 10 60 second pictures yes
i tell you what i don't want to be one of these 10 judges well these 10 dungeons are actually vermousing out of
here because they've got to make a decision about who wins uh we're gonna find out in minutes literally minutes um
20 minutes yes i know 20. follow y'all yeah to this point so judges we appreciate you so much and we'll see you
in a little while thank you so much while you're at it i want a prize emma i
i feel like i want one of these prizes ten thousand dollars cash maybe it happened for you unless you join uts
startups as an alumni i could i am i'm a proud business alumni in fact jochen was my
professor and um you know what i i learned a lot i don't know if i pitched as well as these guys probably didn't um
but it was a good time okay so we've got a few things coming up now so don't don't leave if you're
watching at home the best is um in a few minutes time i'm going to find out who wins um some of these prizes and if
you're here in the room just wiggle your butt a little bit get the blood flow stretch um you know you need a massage
got your young henry's you're refilled or your savvy under your seat take a little sip yes i was responsibly
enjoying that young henry's gin and tony it was delicious um and we love you young henries um and savvy and refilled
and all of the partners but hey we love our community a lot um and one of the
things we always talk about at ucs startups awards is the community morale award for the year because while many
startups in fact like almost 500 at the moment make up the community we all hang out in
we like to just call out one specifically for doing incredible things giving back
so with this community they don't just give back to help us inspire people to
become entrepreneurs they do it themselves they give back to our community through peer-to-peer learning
through running cultural lunches to get our members coming into the spaces meeting each
other helping each other out even more what else do they do uh look they put on a lot of good friday
night drinks um which i appreciate as well and everyone else appreciates that i think we need to just talk about who
it is yeah i feel like we need to lift a little on this um so ujan where are you get up here mate where is alexia here as
well the winner of community morale this year export export connect who we just heard from
[Music] now fun fact oh john how how far ahead
of time did you prepare for that particular pitch um i found that about an hour and a half before the event
started yes because charlie's sick that's that's a community right there
you guys um wow this is this is amazing um i just want to thank the uts startups team you
guys have created such a positive and conducive environment and that's really encouraged us to sort of give back to
the community for any any of you guys that are even thinking about you know joining the startup community i would
encourage you times 10 like for us we've leveraged other startup
members we work with other startup members and our portal would not be where it is right now we wouldn't be where we are right now if it wasn't for
the uts startup team and the uts startup community so thank you thank you mate beautiful um do we give
them we give them one of those so we've obviously rehearsed this uh john have a
less stabby trophy than last year but that is thanks to proto space our awesome travies and you guys can take
that home or take it back to the office and we appreciate it amazing community members and for giving all snacks to our staff
desk that's true right behind ours so thank you so much thank you guys should we announce one more winner for
one world award reckon we should most inspiring tell us how and why we
chose that one dave hey we love entrepreneurs that inspire others to think about entrepreneurship for
themselves and especially entrepreneurs that are doing things that are super different we heard a few tonight but this one particularly was super cool
because her uh product you might have seen it before online on tv in the windows at uts startups at central um
her product was so good that it actually got copied by a significantly large competitor and goliath story that not only was
handled with an incredible business mind to further grow the business but it was handled with grace as a human as well
and we are so so proud of nakisa williams from craft club where
are you yes come on jump up
we would okay so i have never cross stitched that's the truth that's a that's a real uts startup confession
right now um but tell us how cross stitching became your thing cross
stitching i mean kind of rock throughout the thing now but we started with cross stitching yeah so we make diy craft kits
that empower your creativity and we encourage people who maybe have been told that they can't be an artist or
that you know create a creative careers and not a thing that you should pursue uh and it came from that background that
we decided to make diy craft kits that empower that creativity uh it started
with cross stitch kits because that was kind of an affordable product to start with and try and now
we've sort of been come known for rug making kits and that's how that's our gem but um so many craft kits to come
and nakisa tell us sorry dave when a certain thing happened by a certain
really large competitor copying a certain design of yours walk us through how you felt and how you approach that
that was a crazy experience that i can't talk too much about but um i mean it was wild
i think the most incredible thing was the community that we'd built already i kind of at the time i didn't realize
that we had such a strong community that would really speak up for us and um you know lift our voice up and speak for
the small businesses and the startups um about what was the ethical thing to do and and yeah that was the biggest
takeaway from it i think it was a pretty wild ride but yeah thanks for teaching us how to do it with
grace with brains and inspiring us to be creative thank you so much thank you
nikki hey if you want to find out more about craft club co just google it you'll find
it but murray we're going to get you up i'd also love it if we could close our door because i can hear everything that's going on out there which means
everyone else can too thank you murray what are we going to do thanks very much
okay i i love when the judges disappeared and it felt like about a quarter of the
room disappeared as well and then five minutes later everyone came back with a savvy beverage
awesome young henry's and has enjoined themselves so thank you very much for coming back um
firstly so we've got the judges working away hard out the back
and a couple of people are going to win some awards and decent piles of cash as well i think we need a pla a practice
round of applause for those people to make sure we give them appropriate support when they come back
okay i think we need to try that one more time okay okay
beautiful sorry to do that again but it's getting late in the night and i appreciate you and the audience uh i've also figured
out going later in the agenda is not as good because i can look around the room and i
can see so many people in the audience that i respect so much um and people that are paying a lot of
attention to other people that present really really well uh so the back of the agenda is not the place you want to be
but i'm really proud to be here with you tonight i just want to say a couple of things really quickly
and then i'll throw back to yourselves i was looking at so firstly this is a
fifth uts startups awards i never thought we'd make it five years in terms of
running uts startups and the awards um and it's made me kind of look back on
where we've come from it's nice to be here it's nice to be
doing this in collaboration with the business school as well i think you'll agree the result has been better this has been wonderful
but firstly so we started uts startups almost five years ago and four months in we ran the first awards program
four months so it's a little bit optimistic in terms of timing for saying okay this person deserves an award but
we had 115 startups or something at the time so it kind of worked out all right
raise your hand if you were here with us uh back then down in the business school okay you
have a couple of people thank you very much yep i know there are more as well um that's been one of the wonderful things
about what we do the good people that stick around and continue doing good things uh raise your hand if you like watching
videos of yourself from five years ago yeah nobody so i'm gonna save you the
trouble of watching that video i watched it for you um but it kind of struck me watching the
speeches back how consistent our approach has been in uts startups
so back then i can pretty much reuse the speech i was talking about how we were
going to engage with as many people as we could and we're going to inspire them to think about creating their own jobs
with tech entrepreneurship and then support them to find what they need for whatever they're working on
pretty consistent i talked about having the easiest job at uts
because of the wonderful environment of uts and the naturally entrepreneurial people of uts trust me it's a wonderful
place to be doing this kind of work um i talked about the need for me to give a bad presentation so that other people
have a chance to shine and stand out so again that works better at the start of the night at the end it's a
bit of a letdown um but here we are five years almost later
and not much has changed we're still engaging with as many people as we can with us doing a lot more of it we're
still inspiring as many people to pursue tech entrepreneurship as we can we're just doing a lot more of it we're still
supporting people to find what they need in each other and external sources and everything else or this doing a lot more
of it a lot better i still have the easiest job at uts in
terms of a wonderful supportive environment across uts and people at uts that are
entrepreneurial and this get on with doing things and we get to be part of their journey uh and i still give bad
presentations at awards nights um but i will say there's a few things i am
particularly proud of so in expanding what we do
for example the uts startups at school program so when we talk about engaging with people we're engaging with uts
students originally now we visit a hundred schools a year aaron
shout out to aaron and a round of applause for aaron please
100 schools a year around uts and around newcastle as well with the university of newcastle
with entrepreneurs yes another one definitely but with entrepreneurs trained up to speak
convincingly convincingly and then measuring desire for entrepreneurship before and after and that's ensuring
year nine and ten people want to be entrepreneurs at that kind of scale 20 000 people a year
uts startups at central so again when we talk about engaging with a lot of people we took over the busiest street corner
in sydney 50 000 people a week walking past seeing different entrepreneurs at uts and what they do
buying their stuff partnering with them hearing their stories uh not just people
pitching but genuine revealed truth about what actually enabled them what they actually did what they actually got
and people scanning qr codes and streaming those stories about a thousand people a week streaming those stories
incredibly proud of that again could only do that at uts our inspiration work across the
university led by dave nobody does the work that we do nobody does it as well or at the scale that we
do or with the resources of the community that we have with the wonderful communities that we have supporting all
of our work that i'm incredibly proud of thank you dave
[Applause] raise your hand if you've been in a
workshop with dave whoa okay um i think that's saturation but uh it's
a testament to your workday uh and the support that we have i think we have gotten so good at figuring out
all of the ecosystem around sydney around uts and connecting people well to what they need
but also i think our community has gotten so good as well and i think that's the secret weapon in what we do
at the start when there's four months of bringing people in it was whoever we could find and okay you'll do come on in
but now people have started and then grown over those four years and you've seen a lot of them tonight incredible
entrepreneurs like angus that was already incredible when he came in but has increasingly become
when you think you can't get more impressive you get more impressive and you don't leave you keep giving back
and speaking to high schools and to people around uts and supporting less experienced entrepreneurs so the next
generation get their shot as well that i'm proud of as well i'm proud of the uts startups team as a
whole i've never worked with such good people as i do at uts it's
like every single person is incredible and i'm just grateful to be able to work with you all
what else i think i'll how much time do we have left judges
five okay i'll wrap up but you guys can come back out um i'll say a few quick thanks uh i
know a few people are in the audience sam horton thank you very much for your support in making our schools program
possible and your guidance in the programming that we have you've been incredible in getting that off the ground and allowing it to now expand to
what it is today i can't see out the back but i believe you're up there somewhere thank you very much sir
also aj bardia i know you're watching at home thank you very much for your support as well uh for the same programming
uh city of sydney i know anitra is in the audience and a few other people as well you've been wonderful to work with a
wonderful supporter uh how good is sydney
yeah uh there is no council in australia doing better work than city of sydney it's a
wonderful place granted please uh the icc no better venue in australia
they're wonderful to work with as well uh new south wales government as a whole michelle long i believe you're here somewhere as well thank you very much
round of applause for new south wales
and that's pretty much it i'll just end by thanking the community as the most important people to thank thank you for
turning up doing the amazing things that you do for yourselves and then inspiring other
people to do amazing things and then supporting other people to do amazing things as well nothing we do would be
possible without yourselves so thank you very much and thank you very much for joining me thanks murray
now is it okay with you and okay with everyone if we do something fun that we
did in 2020 dave but yes should we repeat something fun yes because i
personally want a snapshot of this so why don't we just take a selfie yes i love selfies emma
uh where is mustafa from hayes and one of our other incredible startups who's doing the videography and photography
here tonight get you to jump up jump up on stage everyone can do something be fun yeah standing up i reckon stand
up yeah why don't you stand up we're gonna have uh yeah here you are mate okay we're gonna have the judges in here
in a second but just before they do i reckon we all need to get photographic evidence of how good it was to be here
so everyone jump up we'll come down with you guys yep um and i reckon a few of the startups
team that are dwelling over there if you can kind of stand in front of the table and make it look less weird that they're not here that'd be good
or we could sort of photoshop them you know i guess couldn't we because it's 2022. um but okay um who's never done a
serve before no one cool you all know what to do we are gonna get mustafa are you up here or what's going on
okay perfect clearly we planned this yeah should we should we jump down so we're not the giant head in the photo
okay
do you want to come up and do one of our social media selfies just on a phone how does that sound so linda
we go with the flow here at uts startups you can use my phone if you'd like
no we've got it thanks all right let's practice one two three selfie
come on guys hands in the yeah you can do better
it was great but we can do better good start guys good start
are you going to counter soon or should all right
three two one woohoo
so uts startups uts [Music]
thanks guys beautiful everyone all right i feel like i'm in a wedding
all right i feel judge energy approaching i just
don't see them um but hey one thing we haven't done yet emma and just before we kind of get to that point i know
startups are probably like nervously twitching like did i win something what's it all worth um hey
ucs startups is something that not if you've got an idea for a startup that's cool if you've got a business existing
or you've just got an idea or you've got something that's fully fledged awesome we'd love you to join but uts startups is not just about that there's whole um
different ways that you can join and be involved like murray was saying before support get involved emma what are some
of the ways that perhaps if you do not have a startup of your own you can get involved you could come along to one of
our friday events at uts startups at central um every friday at what time
3 30. 3 30. so uts startups confessions so you can hear from one of our startups
there's a new one every week maybe see sample interact with their product hear
about their service and then afterwards we have some friday wind-up drinks where you can meet some startups and maybe
join one of them that could be a way into startups if you don't have an idea you could look for someone who wants to
build their team network join absolutely if anyone here works at a school or maybe you've got a
kid at school someone in your family at a high school particularly year nine and ten at school
we are working on as murray mentioned our ucs startups at school program which is super cool to be involved with aaron
my good mate over here who's been showing you where to sit he is one of the best people ever to work with but
also runs our school program and so you get to go to schools talk to students about entrepreneurship but you also get
to bring out founders along with you um who kind of inspire other people with their stories so that is something that
we do so if that's you you probably on or under your seat have a little flyer telling you all about uts startups at
school as well and of course if you are a student here at uts not at those other
universities but that's okay if you're here at ucs or you are an alumni of uts uh you're
it's your lucky day because you can join uts startups with justin i'm cool you're alumna yes uh we both
are i'm from business school which tonight means a little bit more i feel like but that's okay you can take that one yeah you can take it um hey all you
got to do is startups.ucs.edu.edu find us find out about our program get
amongst it um and who knows you could be the next startup winning awards up here you could be one of these people the
next nestique you could be the next bear hug palette wraps um you could be the
next walking tall you know where's your oyster and now that we've gone to high
schools we are going even younger than that uts startups at crash
yes we also have a crash did you guys know for those parents in our community
and wider ecosystem we thanks to the center for social justice and inclusion today we have a pop-up crash called the
little e-ship see what we did there and there we've got some um bubs and
kids in the back with some activities and play and fun and some carers looking after them it's all about
inclusivity in our community and we're really grateful we hope to be able to continue to do that so parents can get
involved and maybe i'll bring my bub along next time yeah i mean when we're nothing if not good at branding emma
around here yes um so hey we are still um gonna just we're just gonna talk
about meaningful important things while we interrupt this really yes go ahead broadcast that we're definitely not
trying to extend so the judges have more time to let everyone know that it's currently out in the balcony room that
it's time to return to your seats so that you can see the announcement of who will win today at the awards so could
everyone in the balcony room please return to your seats
[Applause]
why don't you join us on stage and let us know what is going on or are we hearing from david
must have been a tough one i was trying to do some calculations in my head and i tell you what it's tough you're all very
very deserving and i hope you're proud of yourselves we're proud of you but it's more important for you to be proud of yourselves so thank you all so much
everyone here you've done an amazing job judges on stage please
thank you do we have everyone peter please thank you how good was that oh my god oh my god my
head's spinning okay david over to you for a little uh q and a with our judges thank you
thanks johan i was just absolutely blown away by the way the pictures have gone tonight been
involved in venture day since its inception i think it's five or six years ago now and
it just seems to get better and better every year but while you've been here every year pretty
much what did you think of today it's phenomenal i love the the fact that
you know we've joined the two actually i think it works really really well the pictures were um there's a lot of diversity which is which is great a lot
of brilliant ideas and you always judge a by you say well if i had you know a checkbook would i write a check
and there's a few definitely you know i would invest so that's always a good sign of a good event in it for a pitch
and peter you're a veteran of investing in new businesses give me some ideas
i think that were very well evolved this year i think a lot of them were very well thought out and also the data they got in terms of
competitive analysis statistics i think was really well done and some very interesting
opportunities there very quickly leila what do you think
from a health perspective um honestly very very impressed um took
me years of training um working in the corporate world to get to presentation skills that some of you
demonstrated so naturally so well done but some amazing ideas i'm
so super impressed by the social responsibility concepts that are incorporated into some
of the business ideas um and from a health perspective i think
i think we're going to see wonderful so i think i might just uh move to the
uh the awarding of the prizes
thank you so much judges we appreciate you
[Applause]
with such wonderful pictures it's always a real difficulty for the for the judges to come up with uh
ways of uh separating the the sort of high quality ideas but we've done our best and here
are the outcomes so first of all i'll announce the astron award for the best market traction
and that's um to the value of 5 000 of in-kind services
and the winner is maslow and andrew [Applause]
[Applause]
the next award is the gilbert and tobin uts venture day prize and the value is five thousand dollars
of in-kind ip services and the winner is salvage
[Applause]
the next prize is the beta capital bishop and fang ventured a prize
and the value of this award is 16 800 of in-kind services
and the winner is angus at compass iot
[Applause]
the next prize is the uts startups idea stage startup of the year award and that's a thousand dollars in cash plus a
thousand dollars of in-kind uh services provided by glmr law plus
five thousand uh dollars of in-kind services by astron
and the winner of that prize is james at builder.ninja
[Applause]
our next award is the uts business school dean's award for a female entrepreneur
and that's for five thousand dollars in cash and the winner is
nabi at cover hero [Applause]
awesome
the uts business school dean's award for technology adoption is for five thousand
dollars in cash and the winner is net nada and loki
[Applause]
the uts business school dean's award for social justice venture
which is five thousand dollars in cash and the winner is refilled ryan
[Applause]
the kazakos prize in entrepreneurship for a social venture
is five thousand dollars in cash and five thousand dollars of in-kind services
and the winner is bear hug pallet wraps [Applause]
the next prize is again a kazakhos prize thank you peter
uh it's the kazakhos prize in entrepreneurship for an early stage venture
it's five thousand dollars in cash and five thousand dollars of in-kind services
and the winner is walking tall liberty
[Applause]
and last but not least the
commbank and telstra best venture prize which is ten thousand dollars in cash
and the winner is maslow andrew
[Applause]
and i'd just like to congratulate everyone who's pitched tonight and might not have won a prize but it's been an amazing competition and well done
thank you david langford and thank you joking if you guys could
just stay here with us for a second we just keep the love on stage there's one more left number what
is going on one more did we make a mistake or was this all on purpose i think it's all on purpose we don't make
mistakes around here surely murray oh yeah we introduced this a
couple of years ago um do you want to tell us why this particular award was introduced
and how we go about it i'm not sure i remember
you can do the honours sure so this was recognition of an all-rounder
a startup that has demonstrated traction um is actively working on their startup
and making progress because that's really important no matter how small or big that step is
constant progress work effort momentum and it's also someone who has really
contributed back to our startups community at uts startups so and they've also got to be an
all-round good human we like good humans in our community it's almost like person of the year and i think this person in
particular deserves person of the year as well sure um but continue you can you can announce the winner so this is uts
startup of the year for 2022 prize is
dollars cash very grateful to uts business school for providing that for this award we are incredibly grateful
but murray who is this year's uts startup of the year remember that year i got it wrong and
yeah i i feel like i should have written it down um
i do know his mother's in the audience does that does that eliminate some other
people that takes out half the people here but i'm gonna track you down
if i may uh uh your mother um to ask how you raise such an incredible
person because uh without this person the community would not be what it is and i would give my left arm to have an
army of this person and their startup uh they are just exceptional as a person exceptional as a company
urban plant growers woohoo
congratulations dilhan we are so proud of you do you want to
just share a little bit about your incredible journey not from start to finish but just maybe the last couple of
years or even this year sure so um first off glad to be classified as a great human i'm sure my
mum will love that urban plan goes it's been a long time it's been four years since we started
the company um and i still remember the very first days when we came to uts startups and our very first employees started
working in the hot desks i think it's a long way since then now having a warehouse in marrickville
and having an awesome team of seven people over there give us a shout out
um we sell easy to use consumer hydroponic goods that help people grow their own indoor plants herbs and leafy
greens in the comfort of their own home and we've had some more some traction so far with that
do you want to tell us a little bit about that traction where can we find you how do we get our hands on one of
your incredible products sure so we're in david jones flower power costco harvey norman and eden
gardens we're also online so if you go to urbanplankrows.com you can find us there at the moment we're doing an
equity crowdfund so we're trying to raise a million dollars and so far we're on 720 000 with seven days to go
so if you want to find out more about that you can head to equitize.equitize.com
and then look for urban plant grows and uh find out a bit about that
thanks dilham we're really proud of you joined this lineup of incredible people dave sad to see the end to this year's
it's the beginning of the party though oh it is yes exciting um but before we do that we've got to say a massive
massive thank you to you guys for being part of the journey here thank you to everyone who's helped put tonight on
leah and the team up in the sound desk the whole uts startups team nicola lourdes rob aaron olinda crispy you me
murray all of them blue wherever you are hey we are going to have a whole bunch of fun next door in the balcony room so
please stick with us it's going to be good um and what else have i got to say
uh thanking our incredible mentors who further support our startups yes we really appreciate you and the wider
ecosystem so thank you to those of you at home joe jacobs tom bass we love people everywhere appreciate you we
appreciate you thank you so much thank you so much that's it for this year
that's the end of tonight we'll see you we'll see you in a year for another tour thanks so much
you
Meet the 2022 UTS Startups Awards and UTS Venture Day winners
Awards category winners 2022
CommBank & Telstra Best Venture Prize
There are 1 billion people globally living with disabilities. Maslow is a mobile platform that makes it as easy as possible to coordinate care and therapy in the home. Team members: Andrew Akib (FASS), Ilya Thai (FEIT), Nitin Fernandez, Steve Ralph |
Kazacos Prize in Entrepreneurship
Bearhug Pallet Wraps (Social Enterprise) Bearhug are Australia's only supplier of reusable pallet wraps and will be the world's first operator of a share-and-reuse model to accommodate their exchange. Team members: Thomas Field (Business & BCII), Lucy Bryant (Comms & BCII), Tom Murray (FEIT & BCII), Jack Conwell |
Walking Tall (Early Stage) The Walking Tall poles are preventative walking aid which combines the proven technique of Nordic Walking with the technology of the Paralympic running blade - all while drawing on biomimicry of the kangaroo's tail, known for its properties of stability and balance. Team members: Liberty Jacob (Law / Business) |
UTS Business School Dean's Award
Refilled (Social Justice) Refilled is on a mission to prevent 100 million single-use plastic bottles from ending up in our oceans or landfill. Their smart drink dispensers are BYO-Bottle for flavoured refills waste-free! Team members: Ryan Nelson (FEIT) |
NetNada (Technology Adoption) NetNada is an AI/ML powered software that automates the analysis of business carbon emissions/sustainability and then suggests the best ways to reduce emissions, drive ROI’s and stakeholder engagement. Team members: Lochie Burke (Alumni - DAB), Afonso Firmo |
Coverhero (Female Entrepreneur) Coverhero protects you by protecting your income. Team members: Naby Mariyam (UTS Business) Upgrade Your Performance (Female Entrepreneur) Techniques for your peak performance Team members: Mini Minarelli (UTS Business) |
Bader Capital, Bishop and Fang Venture Day Prize
Compass IoT uses data from cars to help transport professionals build better, safer cities.
Team members: Angus Mcdonald, Emily Bobis
Gilbert & Tobin Prize
Salvge is a fashion label that uses native Australian plants and food waste to dye clothing, eliminating the negative impact of synthetic dyes.
Team members: Joshua Saacks (Alumni - DAB)
Astron Award for Best Market Traction
Maslow is a mobile platform that makes it as easy as possible to coordinate care and therapy in the home.
Team members: Andrew Akib (FASS), Ilya Thai (FEIT), Nitin Fernandez, Steve Ralph
UTS Startups Awards
Builder.Ninja (Best Ideas and Early-stage) Builder.Ninja is a estimating, ordering and scheduling app for builders that sits in the clear space between the apps built for large companies and the narrow siloed apps. Team members: James Elvin |
Craft Club (Most Inspiring) Craft Club is a craft kit business providing modern and fresh designs for people wanting to start a new, creative hobby. Team members: Nakisah Williams (UTS Business School) |
Export Connect (Community Morale) Export Connect helps food & agribusinesses attain important, hard to find data and analysis. Team members: Najib Lawand (Alumni - UTS Business), Alexia Matsas (UTS Business & BCII), Marie Janssen (UTS Business), Charles Lawand (UTS Business), David Leevers, Oujan Paad |
Urban Plant Growers (Startup of the Year) Urban Plant Growers empower everyday people to grow their own food using innovative hydroponic smart gardens and grow lights. Team members: Dilhan Wickremanayake (FEIT & UTS Business), Peter Cole (FEIT) |
Prizes
A suite of cash and prizes valued at over $95,000 from community partners were awarded to the 2022 UTS Startups Awards and UTS Venture Day category winners.
2022 Prize pool
Name OF AWARd |
CATEGORY |
prize |
---|---|---|
CommBank & Telstra Best Venture Prize | Open |
$10,000 cash |
Kazacos Prize in Entrepreneurship | Social Enterprise |
$5,000 cash and $5,000 in kind |
Kazacos Prize in Entrepreneurship | Early Stage |
$5,000 cash and $5,000 in kind |
UTS Business School Dean's Award | Social Enterprise | $5,000 cash |
UTS Business School Dean's Award | Technology Adoption | $5,000 cash |
UTS Business School Dean's Award | Female Entrepreneur | $5,000 cash |
Bader Capital, Bishop and Fang Venture Day Prize | Open |
$16,800 in-kind support |
Gilbert & Tobin Prize |
Open |
$5,000 in kind |
Astron Award for Best Market Traction | Open | $5,000 in-kind |
UTS Startups Best Ideas and Early-stage | Ideas stage 60 second pitch | $1,000 cash + $1,000 in-kind provided by GLMR and $5,000 in kind from ASTRON |
UTS Startups Most Inspiring | Non-Pitching | espresso Displays bundle valued at $1,036 and $5,000 in kind from ASTRON |
UTS Startups Community Morale | Non-Pitching | $2,500 in-kind provided by Lawpath and $5,000 in kind from ASTRON |
UTS Startups Startup of the Year | Non-Pitching | $5,000 cash from UTS Business School |
Awards Supporters 2022
The support of our community is critical to the success of our startups. Thank you to all of our partners for their contribution to helping build Australia's future.
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Beer, cider and gin & tonic will be provided by Young Henrys. Non-alcoholic Brain Boost drinks will be provided by Savvy Beverage, and still, sparkling and flavoured waters will be provided by Refilled. The little E'ship', pop-up child-minding facilities were available free of charge, thanks to the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.
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