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UTS Startups Awards 2020

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image of man speaking to audience

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. 

UTS Startups Awards 2020

Founders specialising in clean energy, social enterprise, biomedical, fintech, and marketplaces pitched live from the UTS Great Hall on Thursday 10 September 2020. After live judging, we're thrilled to announce the next generation entrepreneurs who are building Australia's future.

Meet the 2020 UTS Startups Awards winners

We would like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Upon whose ancestral lands UTS stands. We pay respects to Elders past and present acknowledging

them as the traditional

custodians of knowledge for the land. And with that

Welcome to the UTS Startup Awards 2020.

So glad you made it. We all

We made it! They made it! Exciting, and

lots and lots of people made it at home as well.

We've got some zoomers like right up there in that little camera. Everyone wave!

We can see you all right now. Thank you for watching us

And we've also got some cool cats tuning in via Ausbiz, which is awesome. So really really

good to see all of you guys

This is Emma.

Hello welcome. Thanks for coming, and this is Dave.

Again, thanks for coming!

We are your hosts for tonight and thank you so much already, just on the outset; for being

flexible for sitting 1.5

metres apart from everyone

For eating out of your snack packs, for dropping off your luggage as you came in

Really really helpful of you all to do that. So tonight we've got a whole bunch happening

We're here to see some incredible startups

But again

It's just all about you guys here being with us supporting us supporting our startups and

you guys at home

Supporting our startups and we're just gonna do it all together, which is gonna be fun.

Sounds good. Is everyone excited for it?

I probably know someone who's I would say the most excited in this whole place about

tonight

So we're just going to get him up here/

Yeah, that's you Murray yes, all right, so why don't you give a big round of applause

for our Director of Entrepreneurship, Murray Hurps. (Applause).

Thank you very much okay. A round of applause please for Emma and Dave. (Applause).

Okay

Can we try that again because we've got like 50 people in here

We've got like 500 people streaming in and they need to hear you. So please round of

applause for Emma and Dave. (Applause).

Okay

That's better

Okay, we need more of that tonight. Thank you very much. We have an incredible team

at UTS Startups that everyone here already knows

But i'll say also that there's an incredible night ahead so stay tuned this is going to

be really good

Last year firstly i'm Murray Hurps, Director of Entrepreneurship for UTS

My job normally is to get up and make a fool of myself at the start

To make life a little bit easier for everyone presenting after me

But it's 2020, and I thought maybe not the right time to be doing that

I'm going to say something important instead.

So last year we had about 200 people join us for these awards; that was fantastic. This

year,

thanks to our stream and Ausbiz TV, we've got over 500 people watching. Hello people

at home sitting on couches. Thank you for joining.

Technology allows us to do incredible things,

that is obvious.

But will Australia use technology to do more than watch me

do an awards program?

We're in the middle of a pandemic and a recession. Will Australia use technology to recover and

to thrive?

So...

When I was much younger, when I was in primary school, my parents didn't give me pocket money.

They gave me water tanks big water tanks and they said: “Muzz”.

“Stand on the side of the road and sell water tanks”.

It was a different time.

When I was in high school, I got the internet.

And using the internet I learned to develop software and to distribute that software to

hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Technology had enabled me to do something I couldn't do before and to reach an audience

that I couldn't reach before.

And that is

technology enabled entrepreneurship,

or “startups” that we keep banging on about.

And that's why they're important. That's they're much better than trying to sell tanks on the

side of the road.

And they're what Australia needs.

We can choose to recover quickly,

to thrive if we choose to.

And we need to be creating the solutions that make sense today using technology. We need

to be

Addressing all the people around the world using technology. We need to realize the opportunity

that we all have,

and that Australia has.

And most of all

We need to encourage this in other people. We need to support this in other people and

we need to celebrate this in other people.

Starting tonight.

Tonight, you're going to see some incredible examples of

people at UTS making incredible solutions using technology and providing them to the

world.

And I need your help.

I need your help encouraging these people, supporting these people and celebrating these

people.

Can you do that?

For people at home. There's actually quite a small number of people here. If you can't

see on the stream.

But they're very enthusiastic. Thank you very much for that

Where was I?

I should have expected this when I joined a university of technology.

And my wonderful boss Margaret Petty did warn me about this, but every day

I see people using technology here to do incredible entrepreneurial things.

These people are amazing and i'm looking at them here.

They are inspirational.

They are my heroes and they are the people that give me hope

That after this pandemic is behind us. We will have a better Australia to look forward

to.

I I really do love these people

And everyone else in the community. We have 374

student-launched startups today. I love them all. They're all

inspirations and amazing people.

I also love UTS,

and the things that are possible here that are this not possible anywhere else.

So thank you for joining i'm going to pause and introduce someone very special now someone

that I think is

the reason,

or one of the main reasons for UTS being the incredible special place that it is

Our Vice Chancellor and champion for technology enabled entrepreneurs, please welcome Attila

Brungs. (Applause).

Thank you, Murray.

And a very warm welcome to you all. It is a kind of an exciting evening,

something that i've been looking forward to for a while.

Again, this COVID period; having so many people in this room celebrating the incredible ideas

that you'll see tonight, is just going to be very

exciting.

As I often say, universities have a unique role in society.

We exist for public good not just those who come through our doors but for all of society.

And that's easy to say, but much harder to do.

We are living in interesting and challenging times when our role as a public institution,

focusing on how we can help society, is even more critical than it ever has been.

And regardless how challenging the circumstances get, we must continue to provide those benefits

for society

Many of the startups you hear tonight are designed to do just that

The things that they are creating the things that they are doing will bring real and concrete

benefits to our society

when we need it most

Tonight you'll meet UTS's finest entrepreneurial talent people have created tech enabled startups

that will really play

a deliberate role in Australia's recovery and regrowth from the COVID 19 pandemic, and

not only that they've done this alongside their studies,

and doing their studies in challenging and changing times.

These are people who can clearly do everything.

I feel inspired by UTS students at all times.

But particularly tonight. I feel inspired by the community who's going to play such

a vital role in reshaping our society.

When we need it most and as a University, I cannot stress how important it is.

That we also support our students beyond their studies to give them skills that will help

them be successful not just in their future career,

but in their lives.

Programs like UTS Startups programs that Murray's team have done, are critical to developing

these skills.

And these are skills which you don't often learn just in the classroom.

And by doing this we also give them the skills that will help them make this positive impact

that I spoke about, in Australia's future

When people look at universities they often see

the research impact that we have. “So this is how universities can change the world”.

I say pretty much at every graduation when I look out. Normally, I do look out at faces

of students

I haven't done that for a little while, I must confess. But when I look at the faces

of students,

it is the people in the room.

They're the ones

who have the impact, they're the ones. By supporting them, that enables universities

ourselves to have impact.

So each person here tonight will have an amplifying impact.

They're going to do good work with the skills that they've learned in their studies and

in programs like UTS Startups.

They'll meet people, they'll change people's minds and through that again have an amplifying

impact on the world around them, and it wouldn't be possible

without programs such as we have here; inspiring, enabling and nurturing this talent.

So not only does UTS have the largest community of student-launched startups in Australia,

It has one of the most well supported programs in all of Australia. Some startups are working

with academics to amplify research.

Using the facilities including amazing algae research to innovate new and sustainable products.

Some are creating equal opportunity like Maslow, who's using

inclusive design to help young people living with paralysis live independent lives.

And some are working across a whole host of disciplines at UTS,

cherry-picking the best ideas right around the university to provide better medical technologies,

creating learning video games that target social resilience for people with autism spectrum

disorder...

And these are just a few you'll see a whole lot more tonight

and when you see them you like I

Will realize that we couldn't be in safer hands again

One of the joys of being a Vice Chance is I get to see all the students going through

and that makes me feel relaxed. I read the papers and I get worried. Then, I see the

students and I relax. Because

our future is in their hands and as you see tonight, we're in very safe hands. And once

again, thank you for coming. (Applause).

That makes me so happy only UTS as a Vice Chancellor

They can speak with that much authority on entrepreneurship and actually from his own

words

We are a University of Technology but i'll also say that I think we're in New South Wales,

and that is a state

for technology as well. We're very lucky tonight to be joined by the Deputy Secretary for jobs

investment and tourism

Under New South Wales Treasury, Kim Curtin. Please welcome her (applause).

Kim has kindly agreed to be a judge tonight, which is not an easy task.

But i'll say it's easier than getting up and pitching!

We are also very lucky to have tonight a special welcome message

From the honourable Stuart Ayers, Minister for Jobs, Investment, Tourism and Western

Sydney. Please take it away Stuart.

Hello, everyone

My name's Stuart Ayers and i'm the New South Wales Minister for Jobs, Investment, Tourism

and Western Sydney.

And to all the UTS students who are participating in today's startup awards program. I want

to say an absolute congratulations

to all of your efforts up until this point in time.

It's absolutely spectacular to see 300 startups being delivered by UTS students. It’s a

wonderful opportunity

to recognise and celebrate your successes.

It's quite a dynamic environment when it comes to startups and technology in Sydney right

now.

UTS is working very closely with the government around the delivery of our new Tech Central

economic development precinct

which will be the home of startup culture across Sydney.

We want to build on the successes of the Sydney Startup Hub and follow from the very early

stage beginnings of startups right through

to those Australian champions like Atlassian who are going to call Tech Central home.

For me personally, I think it's fantastic that you're at the leading edge of job creation.

The jobs that you're creating through your startups don't exist in many other locations.

You're the future jobs drivers of the future

You're the people that are going to create those new jobs for new employees

and an environment that's changing our economy in the post COVID world.

It's going to be you guys that lead the way, so take the time out today

to recognise and congratulate yourself on the fantastic work that you've done now celebrate

your successes because we need your ideas,

your innovation to drive the future of the Australian economy. Have a great day. (Applause).

Okay

So let's start with an award shall we, because we like to do things a little bit differently

here at UTS Startups.

Community morale is something that's not only important to UTS Startups, but the broader

community at large.

And this category really celebrates and recognises

a couple of incredible humans who have their own startup or should I say startups plural?

And they have contributed to the local community

in a way that actually creates real impact by giving people who are doing it a bit tough

at the moment

particularly due to COVID.

And opening a community street pantry in Newtown,

they have provided a place for people to go who need it, to

take what you need and leave what you can

And they've really served thousands of people in the local Newtown and wider community

So we'd like to recognise the community morale award to the Newtown Blessing Box. Michelle,

Maureen and their housemate Joy.

If you haven't already followed them on socials you should because it really is my daily dose

of positivity and happiness, the Newtown Blessing Box.

Look them up.

Tell us what inspired you to start newtown blessing box?

I think

There are a couple of things, but the two

main things that inspired us

were one which was quite unexpected. It was literally

that we live across from the asylum seekers center in Newtown and we follow them closely.

And one day Maureen got home

in tearsm she said that she had seen an asylum seeker

outside the center. It had been temporarily closed

and they had no access to any food.

So she came home in tears and said we have to do something and people can't starve and

people in our area

And and of course, so, what do you do when that happens you go out and you find a cupboard

on the street and you

stuff it with food.

Literally, they went out on the street and found a cupboard

In a laneway was it? Yeah, we did.

The second thing that inspired us at the time is

that we run we run a profitable business and that's what's linked to our startup which

is innovating in the area that

we're experts in.

We specialise in financial services, and we have we had all bar one client

put all of their work on hold

So we literally could have felt sorry for ourselves, but we decided to check our privilege

and we thought wow, what a great position

we're in compared to so many people in the world. And we thought you know what? Let's

use our skills for good and

yeah, and we committed to the Newtown Blessing Box in the same month, which was a godsend

and that just

grew

phenomenally, and I think, there are eight now around Australia.

Yeah, and we are so grateful and really inspired by you. If anyone does want to support Newtown

Blessing Box,

what's the best way to do that?

Come down. It's on the corner of Station at Bedford Streets in Newtown. And literally

you know, take what you need and leave what you can.

Thank you so much. Grab one of these trophies on your way out. We're not allowed to hand

them to you. (Applause).

Okay, so I just want to quickly introduce you to our amazing Judging Panel,

for whom we are incredibly grateful, for your time and support for our startups. We of course

have Dr. Alex Thomson (Applause).

She's one of my favourite humans at UTS actually

she

manages the Deep Green Biotech Hub who is also a major sponsor of the awards this year.

She also leads the Green Light Accelerator Program, supporting algae-based startups,

Dr. Alex Thompson. Thank you. (Applause).

And he doesn't need much of an introduction…

A long-time supporter of the startup ecosystem,

coach for founders Angel-Investor

Chair at Catalysr, current Entrepreneur in Residence at Remarkable, and my favorite the

recent creator of the “You’re in Mute” t-shirt

Alan Jones. (Applause).

And Murray did mention here earlier, we are very grateful at UTS. We do love to collaborate

and work in partnership

We are very lucky to have Kim Curtin here from New South Wales Treasury. So thank you

so much. (Applause).

But you are here to hear from some pitches.

So Dave is going to come back on stage and introduce the very first pitching category.

(Applause).

Thank you so much. Emma.

Okay, so

We are obviously in a university and research is a big deal. And what's so exciting about

so many people at UTS Startups, is that they're

commercializing what they're doing in the research world in different ways. And so,

we are so

lucky tonight to have two of those startup founders that are about to come and pitch

to you

around what they're working on. Now, they're gonna pitch for three minutes and at the very

end you guys are gonna give them a big

round of applause both online and also here in the room.

And so the very first awesome research startup we're going to hear from is Deb from Greenlight

Healthcare Research. (Applause).

Okay

Hi

I'm, Dr. Deb. I'm a midwife and co-founder of Greenlight Healthcare Research.

And we're disrupting the health research market

to support health equity globally

So what's the issue with health equity

Well in Australia we know that in childbirth

we will lose one woman in every hundred thousand

but in

disadvantaged areas of the world like Africa and Asia

will lose one woman in every hundred

The disease burdens heavy and resources are scarce

And the research is lacking

And why is the research lacking well one of the reasons is that research recruitment is

so disorganised

Researchers can be pulled the clinicians pulled away from the bedside with no or little training

Yet

Nine out of ten healthcare researchers can't find a job

Also, we know that

Research funding may not necessarily be motivated

by

global equity

So our team

of founders outreach at Greenlight Healthcare Research with over 50 years of

experience would like to help

solve this problem. So myself, a midwife

Sasha, a social worker and Sarah a public health specialist,

we've been joined by Sam and his team with their

entrepreneurial expert business expertise

And also an IT partner

Who has a successful app in a similar market who's looking to joint venture with us?

So what is Greenlight planning to do we're looking to provide

efficient

local

quality research for

disadvantaged populations

using an embedded social enterprise

We'll be using a software that can connect recruit and recruit researchers from around

the globe

So that they can be in touch with each other and with us and also to find jobs and that'll

be user pays

And then we'll use revenues from the app

To fund our research in disadvantaged areas.

Traditionally, the market has been serviced by universities

Who are notoriously slow,

clinical research organisations…

They're always chasing the big dollars, and market research companies that have no clinical

input

So Greenlight Healthcare Research will provide efficient

local quality research that will help develop

healthcare locally

Will a model work? Well, we already have traction in four different markets

The market size there is up to five billion of global public funding every year

and we intend to scale up past maternity care so that we can

provide health care research to all markets all research areas

improving care and saving lives.

Thank you. (Applause).

Beautiful, stay with us Deb.

The very first pitch of the night, how do you feel?

Relieved!

Same! That was awesome. Judges, we'd love to hear from one of you around

any questions or any impressions at this point. Alan, you're up.

You're not on mute

Oh no, Alan is on mute!

I should have worn that t-shirt

Hey here I am

Thank you very much for being our first pitcher tonight. That's a difficult thing to do and

congratulations. You did a great job.

Thank you very much.

Could you tell us a little bit more detail about the commercialisation model, how that’s

going to be

paying for this research and

What kind of way will they pay? Will it be a subscription?

Per study basis. Yes. So the researchers who will be using the app will pay a small fee

so that it has value to them

but the healthcare

organisations around the world that will be

finding researchers to join their team. They'll also be paying

And of course, there's the possibility of advertising and of course we're hoping for

sponsorship

So we would also seek funding for the research projects from all the traditional not-for-profit

organisations as well. Thank you. (Applause).

Fantastic. Thank you so much Deb. We appreciate it.

Our next person to come up and pitch, is a long-time part of our UTS Startups program

She is working on something called the Change Hub. Please welcome Lydia as she comes to

pitch about The Change Hub! (Applause).

Now more than ever

the world is going through rapid rates of change.

However,

for the last three decades, 70 percent of change initiatives have failed.

So, we went out to organisations to ask them why that is.

They said that

projects go over time and budget,

there is a lack of change adoption, teams are suffering from change fatigue and so much

more

I'm, Lydia Moussa, founder of The Change Hub, a digital platform to navigate the chaos of

change

Having conducting my research and PHD in

change implementation, and publishing my work in the Journal of Change Management

all of my research findings throughout my journey pointed to the fact that

organisations do not have the right change-knowledge, resources or skills.

So for the last four years, we have been conducting strategies and change implementation

and we have trialled these during a randomised control trial.

The results showed that there was an increased level of adoption

in the intervention group using our change strategies and they were able to

do this two months earlier than in the control group.

Now, instead of reading my riveting three hundred thousand word thesis, we developed

The Change Hub.

An interactive digital platform that houses thousands of evidence-based resources.

Users can navigate different change approaches, they can

tap into training modules for change,

they can use evidence-based strategies, templates, diagnostic tools,

as well as create individualised stakeholder profiles,

plan their projects using our kanban board and more.

After conducting a detailed competitor analysis, we found that other organisational change

platforms

struggled to balance the people and project aspects of change and can cost up to $2,000

per user per year.

The Change Hub is a tiered SaaS model available for single users, teams and businesses.

Change consultants can cost $1,000 per day which means by using our platform

organisations can save on average

$250,000 per year.

The platform is built on the advice and ideas of experts in their field as well as collaborations

with our innovative partners.

It has been trialled by Bupa Dental, Coca-Cola and change professionals. So if your organisation's

going through change,

call us for a demo and navigate the chaos of change.

Okay, that was fantastic

Dr. Alex, I feel like you want to say something.

First of all congrats on getting through a PhD and then being able to spin that out into

something that is profitable.

That is amazing and I think it deserves a round of applause by itself.

I'm actually submitting it in three weeks. So

it's really like right at the end right now. Amazing. I wanted to know in terms of your

customer,

what would be your ideal customer profile or kind of the key targets that you are trying

to address with this?

So, ideally it would be medium to large size organisations who have some sort of change

capabilities in-house

but would like to scale that a little bit more so that they can build that change resilience

and that change culture in the entire organisation.

We have been speaking to Transformation Managers, HR Managers as well as Change Managers, and

usually

it's quite reactive

at the moment

So what we're trying to do is build a culture of proactivity around change so that when

a pandemic hits, they are ready.

Not after the pandemic hits then they can go and try and build their capabilities.

So it's a bit of a harder discussion

to think proactively, but I think now with the current climate, everyone's realising

hold on, maybe we need to be a bit more adaptable.

Fantastic. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Lydia. Thank you judges

We want to move on to something really important, which is our faculties at UTS.

We couldn't do what we do without the students that come from faculties

and so Emma is going to come and tell us about the faculty awards.

Just before that. I want to give a little shout out to everyone at home.

I know there's been a couple of issues with the audio but our amazing AV team is on it

and everything should be okay.

Let us know in the chat if there are any more issues, but we've got your back. Thank you

so much for sticking with us.

But now of course the faculties. We are really lucky at

UTS that we have such a collaborative environment here and it's not something I just say to

be a little bit corny

it's something we do in practice every single day.

And the first award is Most Represented Faculty.

What's really interesting about UTS startups with over

750 members is that we have students from every single faculty here at UTS.

But there is one that has been quite a supportive feeder of

new, young, fresh, inspired student entrepreneurs

into the community. we won't get anyone from this faculty up on stage.

We will very safely ship you one of these beautiful trophies from Protospace, but we'd

like to thank the Faculty of Engineering and IT.

That one was pretty easy to determine because it was numerical.

This one is a little bit more subjective and it's been really, really hard for the entire

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit to decide.

So we want to recognise the collaborative efforts across campus

With a couple of honorable mentions, so let's start with the Science Faculty who

worked with us on multiple events, collaborated with us on the Startups Festival

and in fact has led the sponsorship of UTS Startups Awards through Deep Green Biotech

Hub.

So an honorable mention to the Science Faculty.

Another very honorable mention and thank you to Transdisciplinary Innovation School. We've

had so many events, really exciting events.

They bring their students, we try to support them with the Diploma of Innovation as much

as we can. We collaborate on events

they just get involved in so many ways. So TDI, we thank you.

But for the winner, there can only be one. I feel like Oprah

I get to give out all of the awards. You get an award!

This time, it is for a number of reasons not just the collaborative events,

not just the speakers that they provide to support and inspire our startups.

But something that's really, really exciting not just for us, not just for UTS

but for the whole country and the economy. We can't give away too much but

this School has supported us through the Entrepreneurial Leaders Advisory Board.

You can head to Murray's LinkedIn to find out a lot more about that and a lot of the

exciting projects that we are

working busily on now, so we'd really like to thank the Business School.

Again, Jochen we will send one of these beautiful trophies out to you, but let's get back to

the pitches.

We've got a really exciting category of Social Impact coming up. So Dave, who have we got?

Thank you Emma thanks Bianca. I'd just like to point out. We didn't know we'd have to

sanitise everything.

By that I mean like the mics and stuff like that.

So lovely Bianca is here just like spraying and wiping her little heart out, which is

awesome.

But Social Impact. The category, which I love this and

a lot of our startups obviously are centered around this stuff. They're doing incredible

things

so would you please join me in welcoming Steph from Arula.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was at this

moment that a huge wave of uncertainty hit.

Hi, I'm Steph and I'm the founder and CEO of Arula, where we're giving choice and dignity

back to women.

In 2020 alone, over 20,000 Australian women have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

That is 80 new cases every day,

over three new cases an hour,

with over 60 percent of these women needing some sort of breast surgery.

But it isn't just Australia. One in nine women worldwide will undergo some sort of breast

surgery

in their lifetime.

Women come in all different shapes and sizes, but the current breast prosthesis market does

not show that.

They're overly structured and unnatural and for women that can get reconstructive surgery

have to wait almost up to two years to have it.

That's where we come in. We have designed 3D printed

customised breast prostheses fitted for weight, shape and movement.

They're 75 per cent lighter than anything on the market and can be weight matched.

They're 3D printed to be completely customised and the best thing, they're comfortable. They're

meant to be worn in your bra every single day.

We sell directly to our customer and the best part is our product is a hundred percent rebated

through Medicare.

We've also been able to secure rebates in the UK, and New Zealand as well as an 80 per

cent rebate in the US.

Every single one of these rebates renews every two years so women can get a brand new pair

of prostheses

which can account for any changes in her shape and weight.

Through our research we've learned that our women

live in rural communities. So we've made our process as easy and efficient as possible.

Through 3D photogrammetry on any smart device we're able to scan an accurate 3D model of

them.

We can then set it up to one of our pre-made sizes

send it back to them for feedback and when they're happy ship it off to them.

We've currently secured partnerships with

support groups and breast surgeons and have just started our user testing leading up to

our launch in early 2021.

I'm Stephanie.

I'm a i'm a Biomedical Engineer and i've got a background in software development and product

design

and it's always been my passion to make easy solutions for people who need it.

I've also got an advisory board behind me with over 30 years in breast cancer experience

as well as business.

So, how can you help?

If you know anyone who'd be happy to test out prototypes, signing up to our mailing

list or supporting us on social media

We are Arula and we are giving choice and dignity back to women. Thank you

Judges, happy for any of you to ask a question at this point.

I really feel I owe this to the women in the judging panel tonight.

Okay, Stephanie, thank you very much that was a great pitch, of course.

I've seen you here at UTS Startups and at Startmate as well. You've done a fantastic

job getting to this point.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Could you tell us a bit about

the people who are testing the prototypes out there in the field at the moment. Are

they all here in Australia?

Are they overseas in the UK, New Zealand, the US?

Yep, so they're all here in Sydney. Over COVID

we reached out to a couple of facebook groups and we had interest from Brisbane, Melbourne,

everywhere, but we're keeping it super

contained in Sydney and then slowly we're going to build it up

over time up until our launch and then we'll have a wait list for that. Thank you very

much. Thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you, Steph. We appreciate you.

And another one of our incredible startups, aXonPlay, so please welcome Sinay.

Have you ever been rejected by your application or your crush? I know I have but although

it hurts us at first

we're quickly able to build resiliency.

But unlike a young woman, I volunteered with on the autism spectrum disorder, a simple

job rejection motivated her to jump off a

second-story building as she couldn't cope with that rejection.

People on the spectrum are unable to effectively cope with social resiliency.

In fact, we conducted extensive interviews with people on the spectrum and professionals

in that sector and we found that 85 per cent

mentioned that there are no sustainable resources out there to teach them about resiliency.

And this is why at aXonPlay we're here to fill in the gap and improve the lives of adults

on the spectrum.

Through our fun learning tailored video games that can be practiced and prepare them for

real life situations such as rejections.

And unlike other educational video games out there in the current market that will target

childish and quite childish and targeted the younger age group

we make video games for people that can be hooked on to our learning education and outcomes.

And we offer a scalable monthly subscription plan for our potential users ranging from

fifteen to a hundred dollars per month.

We're also in discussion with several other large organisations such as Autism Speaks

and Fighting Chance about using aXonPlay with their

participants in the future.

And aXonPlay is a perfect digital platform to allow this to happen, especially at this

time with the interactions

We can offer people a community

and a space, a safe space where they can really talk and reflect about everything that they

have learned throughout the games

in a safe environment and share experiences they have gone through.

And we are constantly growing.

We are currently wanting to expand to other countries globally to Australia and Japan

in 2021

as social resiliency within people on the spectrum is a global issue.

And we are the perfect team to allow this to happen.

We're passionate about creating a better platform for adults on the spectrum through our

tailored video games and therefore we made it our mission to allow this to happen.

We consist of professional game developers, designers, artists and programmers and

we really want this to happen.

So if you know anyone facing these complexities, please reach out to us and become a part of

our community.

My name is Sinay and I'm the founder of aXonPlay.

That was incredible. Kim, I think it's time we heard from you

I want to hear what you think

Oh, but I think everything's amazing. That's the hard part.

I see on your roadmap there that that you're launching or you have just launched an

MVP a minimum viable product.

Can you tell us a bit about how you've launched that, on what channels and how has that been

received so far?

We haven't launched it just yet. But because

creating a game, it takes quite a long time we actually made a really immersive

comic interaction book where you can really get to introduce all the different characters

and pick your own

category and their own dialogue. And that way people can really immerse themselves and

pick the right choice

and also allow other people who aren't on the spectrum to get this

empathy and see the mindset of someone who's on the spectrum. Awesome. You've done a great

job tonight. Thank you very much

I hope everyone watching at home or on the zoom is loving this as much as we all are.

We have one more startup who's gonna pitch in this category. So would you please

welcome Linda from Nestwell

Nestwell was born when I wanted to make my holiday home available for emergency accommodation.

It's a home I have had for nearly 20 years, way before

2013 when Airbnb started in Australia and proceeded to grow its listings by over 1300

per cent

to saturate the market with short-term rental accommodation

That's one side of this two-sided problem.

The huge oversupply of fully furnished properties intended for tourists and visitors

and the many Airbnb hosts who are desperate to pivot to a different source of demand.

The flip side of this problem

are the 100,000

requests for short-term emergency accommodation that went unmet last year. That's pre-pandemic

pre-bushfires and the organisations providing these services that don't have a ready source

of supply or a means to tap into it.

As part of the discovery process. I offered my holiday home to some of these organisations

to use as a resource

to see if this area of demand could be joined up with a plentiful supply of holiday rentals

in a tourist area

that is the Blue Mountains

One of these organisations was Link2home a state government service

that helps find and fund accommodation for those who are homeless or at risk.

Next I approached a women's refuge given that women are twice as likely as men

to have those requests for short-term emergency accommodation unmet.

And finally, I approached a community housing provider

about making my home available on a medium to long-term basis

It was clear that what I was offering was somehow outside the normal operating model

of these services

like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Nestwell addresses this two-sided problem with a two-sided marketplace by connecting

this area of demand with the plentiful supply of short-term accommodation.

Kind of like Airbnb for crisis accommodation, but where Airbnb has hosts and guests

Nestwell has hosts and organisations that assist clients with urgent housing needs.

Nestwell generates its revenue only from the host side of the platform by taking a five

per cent commission on the price of each book tonight.

Unlike Airbnb's business model which takes its cut from both sides of the marketplace.

Nestwell would like to co-design its marketplace with organisations by better understanding

the pain points they face in the client assessment and intake process and in tapping into housing

supply.

Nestwell is a social enterprise startup coming out of Little Owl ethical tech design and

venture studio. We have an awesome team of ours

with a strong track record in helping ventures take flight and scale. My name is Linda and

you've been learning about Nestwell

A two-sided platform for crisis accommodation. Thank you.

Alex I can see you giving me the eyes

That was really fantastic and I honestly got a little bit emotional thinking about bushfire

victims being able to connect up with such

an amazing resource really, really well done.

I wanted to know if you had your dream in five years. What would this look like?

It would look very much like Airbnb

except for crisis accommodation if if we could actually pivot

that source of demand

away from tourism and and visitors

and see that demand coming from three areas that is government services

the not-for-profit sector and the insurance sector.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Linda. I appreciate it

Fantastic. Well, in a couple of minutes we're gonna

mix things up a little bit

We're gonna yeah do something different with a few startups that are at the very beginning

of their journey, which is really cool

but right now

I just wonder if I feel like the air con on is on a little bit strong

and so if you guys could just have a little stretch have a little shake because we're

in this for the whole ride

and what I want to do is talk about the Most Inspiring UTS Startup

Which is a category that Anita one of our team was talking to me just before this.

She was like if you could sum up UTS Startups in three words, and I can't help but say the

word

“inspiring” because the truth is so many of these guys absolutely inspire me and so

I have been yeah living in Newcastle lately. I don't get a lot of packages on the doorstep

for me.

It's usually my wife that does online shopping. Hey, babe watching at home.

And this pack this package a couple of weeks ago was addressed to me and it was pretty

much like Christmas

in a box because I got my Espresso Display

Big deal. Scott, get up here. We want to know all about

what it's been like. Have you got one? Came prepared.

Welcome mate, all right.

So good to have you here. I guess we don't have long but

if you could just think of one

crazy thing about the whole covid experience that has affected you guys, what would that

be? So we had to go to

manufacturing for all of our Kickstarter backers who put a lot of faith into us.

We're going through the manufacturing and product development process for the first

time and then we have to go through and continue it remotely.

So that was an absolute massive challenge which all of our backers, many here in this

room tonight

including yourself and much of the UTS startup team. Number 53. No big deal. Yeah, exactly.

So

everyone like beared with us the entire time, entirely supportive and we couldn't be more

grateful.

That is awesome. Um, I just realised I probably didn't give everyone a chance to find out

what an Espresso Display even is

so give us a rundown

So if you've ever worked from your laptop and you wish you had a second screen.

I know we're working from more places like at home or anywhere else. We've made an ultra

thin portable monitor that's touch screen.

It's the first touch screen for

MacBooks as well

And so we've made one, just plugs in it works and gives you extra screens when you want

to work from anywhere else.

And just because I like talking. So at the last startups awards where you pitched Espresso

Display, which was last

Help me

November, yeah, November at what point of the journey were you then?

We’d just finished our Kickstarter and we still only had prototypes.

So, turning a prototype into a mass-produced product

is a very big jump

And you just won an award today, right? It was announced yesterday. So we won gold in

the Good Design Awards

So that's one of the Australia's top awards for the product design

Pretty much

the most inspiring, yeah

I'm so grateful to know you and to have an Espresso Display and we just really appreciate

you Scott and your whole team and everything

you've done. So one more big round of applause for Scott.

And you can

Emma, can you buy an Espresso Display

online through our Showcase Marketplace

You can, but it's not live until Monday, so watch this space. I just said the wrong thing

over to Emma.

Well, we can't leave them hanging on Monday at our first ever UTS Startups Festival 9am

on the dot

we will open up our first ever you Pop-up Marketplace.

It's a place where you can go and actually buy some of our startups products and services,

demo, sign up to their mailing list and just see all of the really fun things that some

of our startups are doing.

But let's get back into some pitches.

This is a really important category that might need a little bit more supportive eyes, ears

and round of applause

than some of the other categories because this is about the very, very early stage of

their journey, the ideas stage.

And we're doing this not only to give a few extra startups an opportunity to show you

what they're working on and the great ideas they've come up with

but because we want to inspire more students at UTS to see exactly what's possible.

All you need to join UTS startups is an idea and some ambition and here is a small taste

of

the early stages of the startup journey. So, we'll kick things off with Shivangi from Caelus

Intelligence

Hi everyone

I'm

Shivangi

and my co-founder Amir and I formed Caelus Intelligence to address the challenging issue

of obtaining data insights and satellite imagery.

There are 5,000 active satellites orbiting around Earth.

However, it takes up to weeks to obtain satellite imagery and data analysis, making the information

outdated for time-sensitive uses.

Our goal is to create a platform that enables instant access to recent satellite imagery

and more importantly, its accompanying data analysis.

All through our specialised machine learning tools that automates a currently lengthy process

and makes it an easy

and accessible stop for all of our customers. Our customers, including small to medium businesses

can access this process within a few taps of our app, Caelus, which is accessible via

the app store.

Our goal is to reduce prices through economies of scale

so more people can access space technology to make critical business decisions in industries

such as insurance,

agriculture and construction. If you're interested send us an email. Thank you.

Well done Shivangi. So I should have mentioned earlier, for the idea stage

we're keeping it simple; 60 second elevator pitch, and we won't put them on the spot for

Q&A. But next up

We have a very talented student here; Phoebe Butler from MedEQ.

Doctors don't have sufficient training in emotional intelligence and unfortunately

it shows. For many practices this leads to poor reported patient outcomes

to the point where NSW Health have recognised a need for clinical innovation in this area.

An increasing problem; not only for clinician managers but for us as patients.

We've collected testimonies of patients that were subject to medical error at the result

of poor doctor-patient communication.

My name is Phoebe Butler, and I'm the founder of Medical Emotional Intelligence; a SAS Platform

that

positively influences the doctor-patient relationship

by tracking a patient's emotional progress both pre and post consult.

Through SMS access and software integrated systems, clinicians can track not only their

patients’ mental health statuses

but also the quality of their service.

I'm here looking to meet with clinicians to begin product development; if you're interested

head to mymedeq.com.au

to support men, women and children to better health experiences. Thank you.

Amazing Phoebe.

Gosh, you'd think that they've done this before, but for most of them

this is their first time pitching in front of an audience let alone at a competition.

And one thing that I've noticed when we see these amazing applications come through

there's been a little bit of a trend

I don't know what it is, but a little bit of a trend in MedTech startups

and we do have another one specialising in mental health element of MedTech; we have

Adam from PsycTools.

45 percent

of Australians will suffer from mental health issues at some stage of their lifetime.

This person could be you or someone you care about. My name is Adam and I've dealt with

anxiety most of my life.

I realise the difficulties of maintaining calmness in a state of panic. PsycTools is

here to help. Together with my co-founder

Ayman, we are creating a two-sided

subscription-based platform for psychologists

billed per patient, empowering the completion and tracking of

critical post-consultation tasks.

Ninety percent of psychologists surveyed have indicated a great need for this system. We

are currently developing our

web app as our MVP, and our first user trial will begin in early 2021.

We have an opportunity, an exciting opportunity to impact the 4.5

million psychology consultations each year.

The person closest to you will most likely experience mental health issues at some point.

So what can you do about it? Our ask; please introduce psychologists and invite them to

get in touch with us via our website.

Thank you.

Great job Adam. Thank you so much.

So we've got another really cool startup coming up,

I'm not the most creative person when it comes to design and animation

but this guy is. We have a really interesting startup, Stack Creative Works, please welcome

Conor.

In 2020

It's harder than ever to create meaningful shared experiences for live audiences. Streaming

has made us all accustomed to passively consuming content

isolated to individual experiences.

I'm Conor Stack, Masters graduate from the Animal Logic Academy, and my mission is to

put the power in your hands

to actively control the real-time generation of entertainment.

Stack Creative Works is developing a high-tech, low budget production and a new format of

interactive media

that allows audiences to democratically choose their own adventure together.

Soul Rebound is the studio's first original IP, an interactive cartoon series aimed towards

anime and basketball fans age 14 and up.

At pivotal moments in each episode

the audience will be able to vote on online polls to decide the path of the story.

Thanks to this innovative method of audience participation

people will be more invested in the stories

they consume, and come together as a community.

I'm currently building an MVP and would love to show each and every one of you. Come and

say hello.

Thanks Conor, great work.

So exciting. I love elevator pictures, they're really fun, nice and zippy, but they just

don't seem like the idea stage,

maybe we need to bump them up into the established

category.

This next startup I

really really love, if you are looking to support a startup that wants to empower young

people

then Vanessa is your lady. Please welcome YPower.

Goal ideation, career knowledge and mentoring support are not freely given tools in the

workplace, and they should be.

If every young Australian who'd lost their job since the start of March

was officially counted as unemployed the youth unemployment rate would be 26.5 percent.

Now without support young people will continue to struggle much like I did.

My name's Ness and I'm a community builder and it took me seven years to figure that

out.

I'm a person who thrives on person-to-person communication and I'm an empath, so I don't

know why it did take that long.

But Tallulah is one of our mentees in our program,

she's kicking some huge goals, and she'll be tackling her first tax return next week,

which i'm very excited about.

At YPower

we're creating solutions for young people aged 17 to 27 through our mentoring program,

and evidence and experience based workshops.

Our team consists of remarkable young women

across multiple different industries who are committed to guiding young people based on

their interests and goals. Crazy, really.

We believe that with radical empathy and collaborative skill sharing we can empower a generation

of young people

who are confident and engaged in the workplace.

Now we have a brand new category for 2020 which is really exciting,

something close to my heart and we thank Deep Green Biotech Hub for sponsoring this one.

This is the best UTS Startup most sustainable category and this is for startups who

have not just thought about ways to incorporate environmental

sustainability into their startup, but in fact

they've gone one step further and have made it part and parcel of their business model.

So we'll kick things off with a gent’ Nick Dominique-Bouvat for Algatex.

Everyone in this room is connected by one thing,

the toxic chemicals that exist in the colors of the clothes that you're wearing.

Hi, we're Algatex and we remove heavy metals from textile productions.

Fashion is a

750 billion dollar industry and it's getting bigger.

With textile mills producing more garments from our favorite brands

more heavy metal has been produced and dumped into our environment.

This is a really sad fact,

but worst of all the textile mills are getting away producing 20 percent of the world's pollution

because it's cheaper to not notice.

So what you've got at hand is

a toxic environment,

toxicity in humans and toxicity in the economy, or what we like to call profit over planet.

And this is where alcotex comes in.

Our biodegradable algae position is not only biodegradable but also cost effective, less

water reliant and

great for the planet. By removing textile waste water we also

produce clean water back into our environment.

We achieve this with with our biosolution that allows textile fabric to decompose in

landfill

and here's another wow factor, that landfill can also be used as a fertiliser. Yes you've

heard right,

you can now chuck away your favorite t-shirt and grow tomatoes with it.

And best of all the algae is reusable because our process is cyclical and can be supported

by local algae cultivation,

meaning we create jobs for the Australian economy.

So why us? Simply we're four individuals banded together by a passion for sustainable fashion.

We believe if we're going to disrupt a worldwide industry we're going to have to think and

act differently.

So this is where we're at at the moment, this is what we achieved. The Green Light Accelerator

program

has given us,

the Green Light Accelerator program has helped us

form our dye methodology. Our partnership with the King’s School has given us lab

access

to explore different algae species.

We anticipate the rollout of our MVP as early as 2021

with a full pilot program by Q2.

As a side note COVID has not deterred our progression, in fact

we're on track to delivering a full commercial licensing model by Q4.

So what are we asking? We're seeking investment $250,000.

Your investment will help Algatex pay for 12-month runway for future algae R&D. We're

also seeking

investments to purchase,

to purchase equipment as most of our previous

experiments were done manually. As well your investment will help us

fund our IP.

So

this,

so if what you've heard today has struck a cord then please come support us and

scan the QR code on the screen. Thanks for your time.

Great job Nick, you did well. You did really really well.

A quick little question. I can see some eyes from Alex,

anything for Algatex?

Hey Nick, well done.

You're obviously pitching out something very close to my heart, algae.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you've currently been able to develop, and in terms

of the products that you're able to offer?

That's right. Yes. Thanks for the question. We've just finalised as of today,

my co-founders confirmed that we have finished our primary colors,

both the yellow and red where we sort of finished off with the Green Light. So we've achieved

that. We're also working on

working on the MVP at the moment. So we're hoping to launch our MVP as early as next

year.

Amazing. Thanks Nick. Well done, you did so well.

Now this next startup,

I find this one really interesting because when I think of a sustainable startup environmentally

this is not something that had ever come across my mind. This is all about

sustainable data. So please welcome Pavel from Fasade.

Hey everyone, I'm Pavel from Fasade. And today I'm going to tell you why data is the new

plastic. Did you know that the internet and cloud services currently produce one and a

half times more

pollution than all of the planes around the world?

Why is that?

Vast amounts of energy that is generated is used

by data centers.

Data centers are huge data warehouses, full of computers that run 24/7, 365.

They are the infrastructure that provides us with cloud services that make up the internet

and all that data. Now,

we're not even halfway through the adoption of the internet- we're not even halfway through

the world adoption of the internet,

which will

eventually generate even more pollution,

more digital clutter, more digital waste,

causing all that pollution.

Why does it matter? Because data never sleeps, data grows exponentially,

but data capacity grows linearly.

This is expected to cause severe environmental and economic concerns.

But how does that impact you and your businesses?

As professional teams try to grow their businesses they have to deal with dispersed systems and

avalanches of unstructured data.

Recently, I looked at my own services, Google Drive and OneDrive and I found that 60 of

all of my assets were duplicate.

But

there was no way for me to understand

how that impacted me and my business.

At Fasade we're building a multi-cloud data management solution that turns dispersed systems

and avalanches of unstructured data into actionable intelligence.

We are both solving for historical duplication and inefficiencies, and creating structures

going forward so that people can save time,

money, improve cyber security and most importantly, reduce carbon footprint.

We have multiple early adopters in the pipeline

but the most exciting for us are the COPDs as we aim to help their clients reduce their

carbon emissions and

meet their CSR goals.

While the market size is fairly huge, low hanging fruits for us are cloud adapters and

data management struggles.

We're going to make money in three ways;

software as a service, and by working with resellers, the third one is green data certification.

In the future we aim to certify companies for low carbon emissions data management practices.

This is the Team Fasade; Ankita and I, who's sitting over there,

we've been mates for the last five years and have worked in many projects, and have experienced

this problem literally everywhere,

and for that reason we aim to become the world leader in digital sustainability.

We've already received lots of support and have

met the CFC Cleantech mandate for Australia's commitment to the Paris climate agreement.

As a result of that

we just received funding.

We're looking for additional funding, early adopters, R&D partners, and advocates so that

they can help us to raise the awareness,

because to create sustainable digital society, we all need to start recycling the digital

garbage as well.

Please scan the code if you're interested, and next time you enter the cloud consider

the environment. Thank you.

Amazing!

See what I mean about really thinking outside the box and being innovative and sustainable?

Now I'll throw to you judges. Kim or Alan, do you have a sneaky little question for Pavel

here?

I think I love Alan’s questions! So I love hearing the answers.

Pavel, it's good to see you, and that was a great pitch. It was the first time I've

actually seen your pitch on the stage.

Thank you. Good to see you too. And I know that was hard. Could you tell us

a little bit more about how

your revenue model works? Are people paying a subscription

for the amount of storage that they have with you, is that how it works?

Sure, good question. So

because we haven't launched yet and we are working with the yellow adapters on finalising

the product

we're still also testing the different hypotheses we have around the revenue models, but

right now we

we get stuck with the software as a service

essentially; subscription monthly or annually, and we're essentially trying to

fill out the the gap in the market. Because when it comes to data management and multi-cloud,

usually it's only companies that serve the blue chip company, there's nothing really

in between. And so we want to help the small companies

you know, scale and grow,

and that's why.

So in terms of the pricing we're still figuring that out as well.

Please help me, I have all of my stuff duplicated on iCloud and Google Drive and Dropbox and

I know it's there and I don't know where to start. So thank you very much.

We'd love to help. Thank you.

Amazing. Thank you Pavel, well done! Lots of hungry customers who could really benefit

from your service. We've got

just one more in this category- two more, I lie.

This is a great startup, if you wanted tips on how to use TikTok

innovatively, to reach a young audience, this guy knows his stuff.

So this startup is called UCarryit, welcoming Charlie.

Awesome.

All right.

Cool. Hey everyone! I'd like to start off with a quick game.

I want you to find something in this photo, have a quick look!

All right, time's up. What you're actually looking for is me. Hi everyone,

I'm Charlie and this is a picture from the 2019 climate strike in Sydney

where 80,000 people, many of them students, marched to demand action on climate change.

It's here

our team decided that we wanted to leverage the power of climate activism

and turn it into more sustained action. This is how we started UCarryit, and we make educational

algae kits.

So the people we're targeting are high school students aged 12 to 16. Why this age group?

Well, here are the problems that they're dealing with: number one, they're afraid of a climate

change future and they want to help,

but this leads to their second problem: how can you have a serious impact when you're

between the ages of 12 and 16?

Jen, who is 16 told us “the future is uncertain

so to be really helpful and useful to learn about a process that will affect all aspects

of my life very soon”, and Toby

just 13, told us “I want to help in the study of climate change to give a future to

the next generations”.

We listened to our target audience's problems and we saw that they wanted to help and to

learn.

So we did Zoom workshops with schools and we used TikTok to see what resonated with

our target customer segment,

and so that we could create a conversation with our audience, and this is because at

UCarryit

we co-create with our users so that we can enable them to help

and to learn in ways that they actually find fun and interesting. And this is how we created

our educational algae kits.

Here's our second minimum viable product kit

which we've sold to every year 9 science class at Wenona High School.

The kit contains videos that show the students how they can make their own mini algae

bioreactors, and the students learn how algae and other emerging solutions have the potential

to transform our most polluting industries,

and also the students can create experiments to compete to grow the most algae

in ways that are creative.

It's here where we're creating curious citizen scientists that feel less fear

and less powerlessness as we instill in them a sense of hope and optimism for our future.

Traction; we get awesome engagement on our TikTok, we had 44 applicants for our first

prototype giveaway

and the winners had a lot of fun with their feedback as well as the input from heads/teachers

of science.

We co-created our second minimum viable product kit. The 12 units

we sold to Wenona were priced at $65 a kit for a total revenue of $780.

Right now we're iterating on our kits to ensure product market fit among the customer segments

of schools and e-sales via TikTok,

and the reason we're doing well is because of our amazing team.

We're a passionate trans-disciplinary group with backgrounds in design, science and business,

and we've also had incredible help from our mentors

in science and entrepreneurship, during the 2020 Green Light Accelerator program.

We're creating educational kits for students to learn about climate change and STEM in

a way that they love.

Our vision is to make hundreds of Australian schools the centers for sustained climate

action in our communities.

So we're looking to partner with principals, teachers and mentors to roll out our kits

through more schools.

So if you scan this QR code or head to our website at ucarryit.com

you can leave us your email and we'll reach out to you, thanks.

Amazing! See what I mean about TikTok? He's your guy if you need some advice. Judges,

do we have any takers?

Is it too obvious to go with you Alex, because you know everything about algae?

Look I'm happy to ask any questions.

Look, yeah, I'll take it away. Charlie, thank you. Also, thank you for bringing awareness

about algae and how amazing it is, yes!

What I wanted to know is you've got your first prototype, it's doing amazingly well, congratulations,

where do you see your next type of kits going?

Yeah, sure. So we're really interested, our whole team's been really inspired, you might

have seen “Fight for Planet A”?

We're really inspired to see how we can push

kits that not only educate kids in ways that teachers want them to be educated and STEM,

in

areas that they want

to develop as people, but also in ways that they can actually push change within their

communities and within their schools.

So we're really looking to see if we can develop kits that not only solve the problems that

teachers are facing but also can

have impacts on a wider scale within schools and communities.

Amazing, thank you. Love it, who doesn't love STEM? Thanks so

much, Charlie!

So we'll snap back into the most sustainable category.

It's the last pitcher of the night and this guy sort of epitomises that side hustle. About

13 minutes ago

he finished teaching a lecture at UTS. He is a casual academic here

but he's working on a sustainable startup.

This is something that if you like surfing, if you like the ocean,

if you like just going to the beach and wearing things that are great looking and great for

the environment,

this is a startup that might be

on your radar.

Can you tell that I am wasting time while our amazing AV team figures out the pitch

deck? What else

can we say about Black Goat that won't ruin his pitch?

He joined UTS Startups maybe last year,

MBA student,

...amazing student...

How are we going here?

Back to sustainability.

Last pitcher of the night,

three minute pitch plus one supportive

question from our judges. Are we ready for Mark? Yes thumbs up, Mark from Black Goat!

Hi guys I'm Mark

and I'm the founder and also part-time designer of Black Goat wetsuits.

So let me start with two quick questions in the beginning.

First of all, do you know what regular neoprene is made of, like normal wetsuits? I'll give

you the answer: it's petroleum-based,

it's oil-based, it's basically plastic, it's the same thing.

Second of all, if you look into the lineup, if you look into the surf lineup,

all wetsuits are black, like mainly male wetsuits, they're just black.

So our team wants to fix this that they're just black. So we are

Mark, Emma and Mona and we are working at Black Goat wetsuits.

I'm, the founder, part-time designer, Mona and Emma with their marketing background are

my strong support.

So here are some of the samples that we're currently testing in the waters.

You see four steamers, so long wetsuits for men with the designs

and here are two more for men and two more for women. We also have long ones for females.

We have a whole variety of designs.

But the main thing is, so besides the designs that we have that will change the monotone

surf culture, we also focus on sustainability. So as I said before, normal neoprene is made

from oil,

we use limestone materials. So limestone neoprene, besides that we produce ethically, is not

oil-based but as the name

implies; limestone-based. It's abundant, less destructive, less toxic and has actual superior

features such as more stretch, it dries quicker, it's easier to get in and out and we're adding

stuff like

fleece linings inside tape seams, it doesn't flush, it's warmer and it's easier to get

in and out,

so it's superior sustainably and it got the designs.

So, who are we looking at? So 81 percent of all surfers are male,

so that's our target market, and the male’s wetsuits are the black ones. We have female

wetsuits, too

so we cover everything, but the male ones are our main

target market.

The wetsuit market is about 1.2 billion US dollars big, 50 percent surfing so we got

even room to improve and extend our range.

Our competition;

basically Billabong, Rip Curl, the big names that some people might have heard. They usually

offer just black wetsuits, non-sustainable,

the sustainables are extremely expensive and also just black. We kind of cover all of these

three boxes,

we tick all of them. So what's next? We're already promoting the wetsuits online, on

Sydney's beaches

We promote our Instagram. A giveaway is starting literally 15 minutes ago on our website for

a big surf pack with other brands

And we are planning to do our next full wholesale order still during this year

We want to have a third professional photo shoot with professional surfers in Maroubra

and Bondi

And we have sales reps in Bondi and California also so far lined up for the initial order.

So we are looking for investors investment partners and also opening a kickstarter campaign

for pre-sales to get our

initial big stock order in.

So we want to change surfing to be finally more eco-friendly

and more colourful. So thank you very much for listening.

Amazing, well done Marc.

Now if you follow Alan on Instagram, you know that he lives in the beaches.

Is this something that is attractive to you? Do you have a question for Marc?

Thank you Emma and Marc, yes I do already follow BlackGoat, which is on instagram and

I’m looking forward to backing you in a Kickstarter campaign.

But could you tell us is there something particular about the limestone source neoprene

that allows you to be more colorful than the other wetsuit manufacturers, or are they just

lacking a sense of imagination?

Um, that’s not limestone particular. So technically you can print on

normal oil based neoprene as well. It's kind of sublimation so it's printed on top of it

and therefore it's not limestone specific.

Why the other black wetsuits are black is mainly,

we believe and we’ve asked around for years, is because it's way cheaper. Oil is already

black and

they can do it. They show it with female wetsuits. There are several girl wetsuits that have

print on them.

But so far it's not limestone. Limestone is just for the superior technology. The designs

are for both.

All right. Well done. Look forward to backing on Kickstarter, man. Thank you so much. Amazing.

Thanks Marc.

Can't wait to be able to buy some of your wetsuits. Great job.

Okay, so that wraps up the most sustainable category. We have one pitching category remaining

tonight.

So this represents the startups that are maybe a little bit further along in their journey

and are developing some more traction in their market.

There's a range of startups here

from fintech through to disability tech

and IoT, but we are kicking things off with the very talented Sharon from Asendium.

Hi, I'm Sharon from Asendium. We help reduce the compliance burden for financial planners

by up to 90 percent.

My co-founders and I started Asendium as a way to automate the internal compliance process

for our own financial planning practice.

We used to spend more than 40 hours per week on repetitive and manual advice

documentation that's been designed to safeguard the licensee from compliance risks, but it

doesn't enhance the client experience.

Now financial planners must complete these five legally required advice documents to

deliver advice and as you can see,

the statement advice and file notes are two of the biggest pain points.

We have launched with the file notes as there is no one on the market who is solving this

problem.

But we also offer the terms of engagement and fact fine as well.

Now due to the recent regulatory reforms, advice documentation is getting worse.

And what this means for planners, is they're unable to see more clients. They must increase

their advice fees to remain profitable.

And advice will only be for the wealthy despite two million Australians who have unmet financial

advice needs.

So compared to our competitors,

our customisation costs are inexpensive as we're able to efficiently adapt to individual

processes.

And while our competitors have achieved some degree of time reduction,

they only automate the financial information.

What they don't automate is the reasonings, rationales and disclosures which is why they're

unable to achieve the level of efficiency that Asendium has.

So,

What do we solve? Well, we automate the non-impactful parts of a document, reducing the time to

generate from two hours to 10 minutes,

and our solution is simple. The planner scopes the document by ticking the relevant areas

of advice discussed with the client.

They input the client conversations into the text box to personalise the document

And once they hit generate, they receive a comprehensive document in their inbox for

them to upload to their CRM.

We are 100 customisable.

Each interface can be uniquely designed for each user. The output reflects the mannerisms

of each user and we sit alongside existing CRMs.

So meet Sam a current Asendium user. He's saving over

225 000 worth of his time and has achieved a 92 time savings. We have done this with

over

35 businesses so far.

We're a web-based SaaS business. We offer monthly and annual subscriptions with customisation

available.

We're currently targeting planners in Australia, US, UK and Canada.

Our go-to-market is relationship-led acquisition, strategic partnerships and PR and media exposure.

And since covid, we've seen an increase in the demand for Asendium, demonstrating that

we are a pandemic-proof business.

With our current trajectory, we aim to reach 80 million by 2025.

And we're currently working on a proof of concept for our 15-minute statement advice

for one fund manager and one licensee.

And we're also working on connectivity between documents which will lead to faster generation

times.

And we're asking for introductions to licensees who may be interested in Asendium. Thank you.

Amazing.

Alex or Kim, do you have a question for Sharon?

Yeah, hi.

This looks fantastic. You mentioned that you've already got some customers on board.

Can you talk about how many customers you've got and where you hope to be saying the next

12 months?

Yep. So, we're currently mandated with three licensees and we have 35 practices that are

made up of IFAs and,

IFAs and align planners.

We are targeting, over the next 12 months,

licensees that are sized 1 to 50, as they make up 95 percent of the market, and we're

also

hoping to get revenue from the overseas planners by the end of the year. Fantastic. Thank you.

Amazing. So impressive. Well done Sharon.

If you also wanted to learn a few things from her, she and co-founder Scott, just last week

shared some of their insights from their business in a lightning talk.

We called it the one dollar marketing budget, but we were wrong because it really is a zero

dollar marketing budget.

So if you want to learn a bit more about them, you can see that at the festival.

But we are moving on now to another incredible startup. Please welcome to the stage Vincent

from Compass IoT.

How's everyone doing?

Good. Good to hear.

Right. So hey guys

My name is Vincent and I'm from Compass IoT.

If you've ever driven around the road,

you might have come across these rubber strips, or you might have seen workers all inside

manually counting the cars.

That's how the majority of our traffic data is collected for city planning.

In fact, we've been collecting data in exactly the same way for nearly a century.

But as Murray said, it's 2020 and we don't have time for that anymore.

So our cities are expanding and our urban populations are growing.

Do you really think that at this day and age this is still an adequate measure of collecting

traffic data, especially as it's still hardware?

The problem with city planners is that they spend a lot of money to understand how we

move around. It's a hardware problem

that's outdated, time consuming and incredibly expensive and who am I talking about when

it comes to city planners?

We've got councils, government bodies, transport bodies and even consultants, and on the note

of consultants,

it costs them six thousand dollars to analyse the traffic flows for a single intersection.

For that single intersection, it also takes up to four weeks to get the results back.

But what if it could turn that six thousand dollar problem, that four week problem

into a four-second problem?

Compass is building a digital transport management platform by utilizing 700 000 connected vehicles

on the road from 64 different car

manufacturers. Compass is reconceptualising

and reimagining how we're collecting this traffic data by replacing the expensive hardware

with a software-based solution. And the value for city planners?

Is that they get traffic data for any road in Australia, for any time period instantly.

There's two ways in how people use our data.

Reliability and acceptability and I'm proud to say that our speed data has been independently

verified by consultants to be 97 to

100 percent accurate against traditional methods.

When it comes to scalability, it's a two-way relationship.

We want to focus on improving our product offering and our accuracy. In turn our partners

provide us with

feedback and insight. And our partners become ahead of the market through efficiency,

accuracy and cost that allow them to win infrastructure contracts.

We came to market in March and in between the months of May and August alone,

we saw an increase in revenues of over a hundred and ten thousand dollars and a net profit

of ninety seven thousand.

Few notable users include Transport for New South Wales, and the ACT Government Transport

Canberra.

We're also a rapidly expanding team. We've nearly tripled in size in just six months

trying to accommodate for the growing demand from city planners.

Let's talk about the future for a moment. We want to build an industry reputation becoming

a global standard in the near future.

We're going to invest in our algorithms to make more accurate, develop our safety mapping

tool by using our speed data

and applying it in a safety context scaling nationally mid-2021 from Victoria and Queensland.

And by the end of 2022,

we want to scale globally from areas such as New Zealand.

And I want you to think back on a six thousand dollar four week problem.

If we're able to turn that into a sixty dollar four second problem with Compass,

don't you think it's time to improve city planning through better data? Thank you.

So good. Amazing. Let's throw to the judges now. Do we have a question from our esteemed

panel? Kim, please.

I’m very happy to see that you're working with Transport for New South Wales

because this is obviously a huge issue for government in terms of our future infrastructure

planning and everything that we do.

So in terms of working with

government and other customers, how do you work with them? How would we engage you?

I know you've got the revenue in there, but just understanding that commercial model.

Our business model, we have three different things. There are two parts for that

We have first off, we used to be a quarterly subscription.

Now we moved that to a monthly subscription to improve cashflow and flexibility.

And the second part is that we're a SaaS business, so software as a service.

So the platform itself is the SaaS business. We've got education and training.

So we provide consistent support and training for all our clients. We also have the query

fee.

So as the as you saw with the platform video,

you select the A and the B. So that query fee varies about seven to thirteen dollars

compared to the traditional method hardware,

which is about, say about 450 dollars

for that average, just one road.

Yeah

Perfect, well done. Thanks Vincent.

I don't know about you. I don't want it to end but we've only got three startups left

to pitch.

Let's move into the world of agritech and welcome Jason from Dynamic Grain Solutions.

So, my name is Jason. I'm the founder of Dynamic Grain Solutions.

I'm here to tell you today about how we're revolutionising

not just the Australian but the global grains industry by democratising automation for your

average grower and handler.

But first, some background.

The Australian grains industry accounted for 13 billion dollars of exports in 2017 to 18

This is 21 percent of Australia's gross value of farm production.

However in the same period, the average Australian grain farmer increased their debt by over

14 percent.

This is bad for Australia, but globally we have a much bigger problem.

Over

33 percent of the world's grain, one-third is lost in post-harvest operations. Still,

humans rely on grain for over half of their food energy. We're losing about a trillion

dollars over a year. So it's a big problem.

Now, farmers have traditionally relied on toxic fumigants to manage their grain in post-harvest

operations.

This has led, to what we call the self-catalytic problem.

We need chemicals and fumigants to kill the bugs. The bugs are breeding resistance and

that's causing us to fumigate more using the same chemicals.

So,

it's actually an easy fix.

There's a solution out there to reduce the losses on a plant to below one percent.

And it's just the new technologies to automate and monitor and control. We could be saving

730 metric tons just by improving the technology we use on plan. That's where DGS comes in.

We've designed a retrofittable

controller that

enables farmers, growers and handlers to monitor and control their grain.

Our platform is an asset and a tool in the way that isolates the functions of sensing

and control, allowing anyone to quickly and easily

automate their plan without the need of an engineer, salesperson or electrician.

In doing this, we've been able to remove the reliance on fumigants, reduce global spoilage

and empower growers and handlers.

So,

in collaboration with our industry partners,

we've been able to develop a product and get it out to some public sites for testing. After

doing this, we're looking now to

expand our offering to a public,

expand to a public offering and eventually we plan to move to overseas governments as

well as working with local governments.

So,

our utilisation of the innovations in mechatronics has allowed us to

provide outstanding value to the customer at a very low price and consistently, we've

been able to outperform our competition in this way.

I started DGS on the back of three years experience in the IoT sector and two years developing

grain, storage and handling sites for industry.

So DGS is looking for clients and capital. We've completed live testing.

We've produced our product and now we're looking to accelerate our path to market. Thank you.

Well done, Jason. Amazing.

Love it.

All right.

Who is up?

Alan, Alex, looking at you. The A's. Go for it, Alan. Jason, I have a two-part question.

So there could be one at every pitch event. The first part of the question is, what are

you sensing?

Is it temperature or is it humidity? Temperature, humidity and absolutely anything else. Our

first product that's produced at the moment

senses temperature and humidity and actuates

up to 30 amps of

on and off anything, really. So, our product at the moment is an aeration controller and

sensor

but we actually offer gas sensors and

actuation of any grain plant on site. So sensing and actuation of absolutely anything on plan.

I'm going to

squeeze in my second part of this question. How do I install something that presumably

needs power and connection to the internet without an electrician?

Yep. So what we have is a controller node, a sensor node and an actor node.

Your controller is plugged into the power supply that you use just the same as it would

be,

sorry, just the same as it would be plugging into

a smart light in your house.

You could unplug your lamp, plug in a power point and plug the

smart switch into the wall, and that would do the sensing. It's connected to the internet

via sim card,

remote connection.

So we can use a

standard GSM, 3g or 4g depending on reception in the area.

We haven't had any issues with connectivities or anything like that. We're getting the wrap.

Thank you very much. Great pitch.

Perfect. Now in the spirit of always-be-closing, would you spin around for us?

Oh and QR code. If anyone wants to scan the QR code, go for it. Well done, Jason.

One thing I love about UTS Startups is the diversity of all of the ventures that are

started and continuing.

And one thing we do well and have a lot of, is marketplaces. But this is a really impressive

one. Ben, from Gecko.

G'day, my name's Ben Kennedy, and I'm the Founder and CEO of Gecko.

Gecko is a rental marketplace that helps people hire hard-to-get event items easily to create

unforgettable experiences. Now. I want to introduce you to Gecko's first ever customer,

Josh.

Josh needed speakers for his 21st birthday. He went online and everything was too expensive.

And anything that was within his budget, didn't have a delivery option or wasn't close to

where he lived.

Finally, he didn't trust using Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace as he felt the people

that were on these sites were super shady.

So, I introduced him to Louie. Louie is a trusted DJ who I've known for years

and he lives in the exact same suburb as Josh does.

The two met up and Josh ended up having the best night of his life.

Gecko helps people make extra cash off event items gathering dust in their home. Just like

we did for Louie.

We have everything you need on one simple and easy to use platform and

we help people hire hard-to-get items easily to create unforgettable experiences

just like we did for Josh. The community to community lending economy will be worth 92

billion dollars globally by 2025.

Our serviceable available market is worth 1.14 billion dollars and our serviceable obtainable

market is 101 million dollars.

Our competition sucks. Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree are not secure and they don't

facilitate hiring.

Party hire and DJ warehouse are very hard to use websites that are incredibly expensive.

We're that sweet spot in the middle.

We take sixteen point five percent from the lender and five to ten percent from the borrower.

We also have delivery fees that are able to scale through using Zoom2u.

Currently, we're piggybacking off successful marketplaces with high liquidity. For every

one dollar that we put into this we get three dollars back.

We focus on customer success to generate referrals. We make sure that each listing that's on our

platform

has the best chance of getting hired out and finally we know where our customers are looking

for us. They're on Google.

So we're putting a lot of time and effort into search engine optimisation.

We've got 1000 users today and almost two and a half thousand listings. We've made

189 sales, and that's not even the exciting part.

We're growing 10 percent week on week since May 2020,

which is five percent more than what Y Combinator asks from their startups in their world famous

accelerator.

You have myself, a UTS Hustler of the Year award winner.

So

you know, I’ll work hard. You have Alan Ng, who has a successful exit under his belt

and

Lal Birch and I don't even need to tell you how amazing this pitch deck looks.

We're raising 700 thousand dollars

but we're not looking for just anyone. We're looking for experienced investors that have

worked with companies that have been growing 10 percent week on week.

We need your advice on the next stage of our entrepreneurial journey.

So if this is you, or someone you know, please feel free to “geck” in touch. Thanks.

Nice one, Ben. Love it. Love the energy as well.

You pretty much covered everything but judges, do we have a question?

Well done Ben, and you're definitely in line for a hustle award again this year. Well done.

Mate,

can you tell us a bit about how you arrived?

You know, the first time I saw you pitch this idea,

it was renting everything that anybody might have anywhere in the world to anybody who

might want it.

How did you settle on this particular vertical category? What made it more attractive than

the others you looked at? Yeah, really great question.

So one thing that's really driven us

has been that customers drive, I guess every decision that we make. So one thing that I

sort of noticed when I first started,

was, it was actually within that context of going over to Falls Festival and needing,

you know tents speakers,

DJ decks and all those sorts of things. And as we sort of got along

and developed, we realised 85 percent of our sales were actually in the event industry.

So we sort of, you know, put our startup hats on and we thought, you know

it would be really good to have a real laser focus on these sorts of, on this problem to

solve.

So yeah, definitely the customers.

Well done, mate. A great deck and you backed it up as well. Thank you. Cheers, thank you.

Well done, Ben.

The entrepreneurial force is strong with this one.

We have our lucky last pitcher pitching live tonight. If you are looking for a startup

to support

that makes real world impact and tangible difference in the lives of young people,

look no further than Nitin from Maslow.

Hi, I'm Nitin and I'm the Clinical Lead at Maslow.

We make it easy for people with paralysis to manage their care and rehab from where

it matters most, at home.

Now before I can explain why we started Maslow, I'll introduce you to my friend, Kevin.

In 2011, Kevin was riding his bike. He hit his head and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

He lost use of his hands and his legs

becoming a quadriplegic, and spent the next six months in rehab learning everything he

needed to know to manage his condition.

And when he returned home, he forgot everything.

The challenges that he faced when he returned home,

was that there was no clinician by his bedside educating him and his family on how to best

support him around his condition.

His carers weren't trained on how to support someone with a chronic condition

and he had difficulty educating those carers on how to best support him.

And he’d waste time and money traveling to specialist appointments that have basic

health queries answered.

We learned that this was a shared experience among young people with paralysis.

With 60 percent of people remitting back into the hospital system with avoidable complications

within their first year.

Cameron is one of 45 000 people living with paralysis specifically from a traumatic injury.

And the readmission and care costs are costing our healthcare system

11.5 billion dollars.

So in response to this,

we created a team of clinicians, engineers, designers and people with the lived experience,

as well as support from a few

organisations to address the challenges faced by young people with paralysis.

And from here we created Maslow. Maslow is a voice-enabled mobile application to support

care and rehab from home.

Download Maslow from the App Store, connect with your therapist and carers, and users

can

Independently manage their care and rehab from where it matters most, at home.

Maslow is a game changer from the status quo.

Instead of not knowing how to manage your health at home,

Maslow allows users to have access to guided care and rehab content created by your therapist.

Instead of having difficulty educating large care teams,

Maslow allows users to independently coordinate and educate those carers in one place.

Instead of wasting time traveling to a specialist appointment to have specialists answer basic

health queries, communicate directly from home with your specialist.

Maslow is charged as an annual subscription and our users have successfully been able

to subsidise under their NDIS budget.

Which means it's 300 dollars to the NDIS and zero dollars to the user.

Going forward, we've partnered with Making Strides, who's one of the most prominent neuro

clinics globally

and we've given them remote capabilities to support people with paralysis to manage their

care and rehab from home.

Making Strides is uniquely positioned between New South Wales and Queensland

and a lot of their patients have been locked out because of the covid restrictions.

We're providing them with remote capabilities to continue to support these patients in the

home.

Our ask is this, if you have connections within the HCF Foundation or Bupa Foundation who

will focus on supporting people with complex care needs,

reach out and have a chat to us.

On top of that, we're about to hit a thousand followers on Instagram. So pull out your phones

please, give us some support @maslowforpeople

so we can support people living with paralysis not just to survive, but thrive at the top

of Maslow's pyramid. Thank you.

Well done Nitin.

Get those phones out follow them on Instagram. Do them a solid.

If it's okay, I might not throw to you Alan because I know you mentored them in Remarkable.

He would drill me.

What about Alex or Kim to wrap up the last of the questions from the judges?

Hey

I guess I'm just really inspired by this and I kind of see your product offering as really

remarkable.

If you could kind of expand your product offering, where do you think you could go with this?

When you mean expand, you mean beyond spinal cord injury? Yeah.

Okay,

so currently, our deep research has been around specifically spinal cord injury

and it was better to start with one group versus say 10, 20 different neurological conditions.

Currently on the platform,

we have people with spinal cord injury, quadriplegic, paraplegic, spina bifida, cerebral palsy

and clinicians are already saying that they want to use the platform for brain injury

and

MS. So,

paralysis, the challenges faced by people living with paralysis,

they are going to be the same in the care and rehab space our deep knowledge has been

around spinal cord injury

but we're already seeing people with other neurological conditions starting to access

the platform.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks. Nitin. Well done.

That's it. Those are all of the pitches we have tonight. I know. Emma, that's not it.

We have actually got one more pitch. All right, that sounds exciting. Did I miss something?

Well maybe or I just wrote a really complex run sheet. I'm not sure.

But this is a good one. Okay. So a lot of people sort of see UTS Startups

right and they see us and they see all the startups and things but do you make money?

Do you think they do? That’s a good question

so

A fair number. Um, we're not really going to give out all of the details right now,

but a fair number of our startups have

impressive revenue, um

But one startup in particular has had an incredibly good year, even though it's 2020 even though

it's COVID,

Clipboard

Have absolutely nailed

2020 with an incredible year in terms of investment and revenue so I think we need Sam up on stage.

Get up here Sam.

Who is going to present

And I've also got to say Sam is an incredible, uh, it’s RUOK? Day today

He's incredible ambassador for RUOK? and he's been doing a lot in our startup community

as well

So, please welcome Sam again as he presents Clipboard!

All right, so for your final magic award that nobody was expecting.

Hi

I'm Sam from Clipboard and we help schools run great extracurricular programs.

When I was growing up I participated in a lot of activities oUTSide the classroom from

basketball rugby to debating.

I'm confident

that if it weren't for the life lessons that these activities taught me

I wouldn't be where I am today.

During university my co-founder Ed Colyer and I started coaching basketball at our old

high school,

And when we were coaching we saw that schools were struggling with three critical problems.

They weren't always upholding the duty of care to the students, particularly around

attendance tracking.

They were wasting hours upon hours of time each week on admin work.

And frankly the communication and updates with the student and parents was really poor.

So that's why we created Clipboard.

We are

pioneering a new category in the k-12 edtech sector. The

EMS, the

extracurricular management system.

Clipboard helps schools manage all of their extracurricular data and processes.

From

communicating updates and schedules to the students and parents.

To allowing the marking of attendance, the reporting of incidents

And the scheduling of music lessons and things like sports fixtures as well.

We currently have over 25 paying customers and these are some of Australia's leading

schools

Such as Barker college in New South Wales, Lauriston Girls School in Victoria and Pembroke

School

In South Australia.

Our business model is that our pricing ranges anywhere between

three thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars per annum and our average contract

value is about twelve k.

We're really proud to have gone through the Muru-D and the Startmate accelerators and

have just raised an

$830 000 seed-round led by Jelix Ventures. We're going to be using this funding to continue

accelerating the team

And growing into international markets such as New Zealand and asian international schools

where we've had early interest.

The EMS market represents over 80,000 private and international schools globally

and millions more public schools.

And the estimated global market size is two billion dollars per annum.

So, how can you help? Well we would love intros

I'm sure lots of you have been to school. If you're a parent at an independent school

in Australia or if you have connections

In New Zealand or South-east Asia, we would love introductions.

Our vision is to help

Schools, is to provide students with the life lessons and opportunities that great extracurricular

activities provide.

I'm Sam from Clipboard and we help schools run great extracurricular programs.

Okay, so it's been a big year for you,

so can you sort of tell us in terms of the effects of COVID on what you guys have been

doing what you've

Been building are there any sort of things that jump out?

Yeah, well, we got off to a pretty good start. So we closed the funding round just before

COVID which was

extremely beneficial for us.

Obviously COVID wasn't great for us initially. There was a period of about three months where

schools globally didn't run any activities.

You know for the first time ever they were outlawed. Um, so that wasn't great for an

extracurricular activities platform.

But now they're coming back and they're coming back in a really strong way. And what's really

interesting is that we've positioned ourselves as

the enabler for schools to run safe activities. So we have a lot of inbound leads now coming

in across the country

from schools that

Are now realising that hey our processes of paper-based attendance tracking just don't

cut it in 2020

And we need instant contact tracing and we need a record of all this data in one place.

Incredible!

Congratulations for winning high attraction award

so what we're going to have to do because we can't give you the actual award

You've got to pick up one of these aggressive looking spikes and take it home. Awesome.

Thank you so much Sam, appreciate it

Fantastic.

So

We've had a lot of you guys participate online and I think we'll click through

Thank you so much, participate online, the last few days in our people's choice award.

So who's voted here?

Probably a bunch of you at home. All the zoomers are like, yeah, that's me

and a lot of you have sort of seen our video pitches and a whole heap of startups have

been putting time and effort into

Recording their pitches for you guys. You can actually see those right now if you head

to

startupsfestival.uts.edu.au but one startup out of, I think we had over a thousand votes

right Kat? I'm gonna say

Do we have a number? I feel like it was north of a thousand

918. We had

970 or 18, votes, coming in for people's choice

but there can only be one winner and i'm really excited because the winner is

Caelus!

Shivangi why don't you come up on stage?

I've got to say I appreciate all of you being like super distanced and clapping and like

getting into this because it's like yeah

It's um, I feel like we should all just kind of be in a mosh pit at this point.

but yeah, grab one of your aggressive looking awards, so

What do you think? It was about Caelus that made you guys the people's choice?

I think Amir, my co-founder, had this great idea of actually pitching an elevator pitch

in an elevator. So that made it really interesting.

He even made the background music or the elevator music that usually happens and

It was really fantastic and we had a bloopers that we released as well.

We should probably make that public as well because it's quite funny watching us, the

elevator close on us.

So how far into this startup are you guys, how long has it been around?

Hasn't been around for long since um Amir pitched it to me

around April, so it hasn't been that long and COVID has definitely stopped us a little

bit along the way but we're definitely

Want to continue the momentum.

For something that started in April, I think you guys are doing incredible and thank you

for the user generated content

We appreciate it and if you get onto our UTS Startups Facebook, you'll see it.

So, why don't you jump on there and let's all thank Shivangi for your incredible work

with Caelus and well done!

Thank you so much.

We've got to scramble, we don't have much time left and I'm hoping that the judges have

been punching in

their decisions because we want to know, which startups tonight have shone

For you guys and are gonna take home a spiky award

But in my mind so many of them have just inspired me so much

and I just wanted to take sort of ten seconds here to say that whoever you are in this room,

you could be an entrepreneur that leverages the benefit of UTS Startups.

We are a program that is here at UTS for UTS students. But the truth is, so many UTS students

join forces.

This is the coolest thing, they join forces with people from Sydney University from UNSW

from not a university, all over the place, to build what they're building and it's so

inspiring to see and so if you consider yourself

someone with a bit of an entrepreneurial spark

maybe an idea or something like that. We would love to hear from you.

I would love to hear from you because i'm that guy that reads all the emails and gets

really excited.

But the truth is there is so much possibility in the world of entrepreneurship and again,

if you haven't got a sense of that from the pitches that we've seen tonight, um,

Then I don't think you were listening because there were so many ideas that I just thought

were so creative

and so incredible and you know, that could be

Easily one of you as well. So again, thank you so much for making the time to be here,

braving it out in the Sydney weather.

For everyone at home who's cooking pumpkin soup and watching, we appreciate you as well.

And so

Tonight I'm getting a little nod,

Murray,

Emma are we getting nods or keep talkings?

Keep talkings great. That's my specialty.

And so,

another thing that we were supposed to tell you about tonight as well, and we haven't

yet.

Just kept this up my sleeve,

the startups festival is something we started this year for the first time because really

COVID meant that we couldn't do a lot on campus, we wanted to,

And it's great that we're having tonight's event here.

But we wanted a chance for all of our startups to actually get a chance

To meet you guys and to meet people that they've never met before. To find supporters, to find

connections. So if you jump on

startupsfestival.uts.edu.au

You'll be able to connect with a whole heap of our startups

You can offer support, you can buy their products, purchase their products when we launch the

marketplace. You can see their video pitches-

Back Local is a good one if you haven't clicked on there yet. That's just a little one on

the side.

But there are plenty of good startups on there that really would benefit from your support

so, please take the time to do that. It's happening all September and Emma is coming

on stage.

That's why he's our Inspiration Manager. Thanks Dave!

It's like the Oscars, I might pop the

awards, winners on this beautiful UTS lectern

but we've got a few people, not just a few, quite a lot of people to thank actually.

We

really rely on the support of the ecosystem at large and we have so many sponsors who

want to support our startups

With over $112,000 worth of prizes for our community.

So,

If we can get their beautiful, beautiful logos up on stage so we can really all show them

some love.

You can head to the program

startupsawards.uts.edu.au to see the full suite of prizes.

Of course, we need to thank our major sponsor, Deep Green Biotech Hub. We have Antler, AWS

Cicada Innovations, Cost Smart, Energy Lab, Fishburners, Fullstack Advisory, Haymarket

HQ,

Hubspot for Startups. Ah, there's so many, let me take another breath.

LegalVision, Microsoft for Startups, Mr. T Studio- where we have our beautiful UTS Startups

tees made.

Protospace, of course who made these beautiful, Dave said aggressive, but I think they're

beautiful trophies.

PWC Emerging Companies, Remarkable,

Site Kite, Skalata Ventures,

Spruson & Ferguson, Square Peg Capital and YLab. So a very big thank you to all of our

sponsors.

Now are we ready for some more winners?

If it's okay Attila, would you mind joining me on stage please? And Murray?

We have to do a very awkward socially distanced photo for all of the winners. So

If one of you could join me over here, please.

And Attila, would you mind joining us over here.

What a world we're living in! And the winners,

don't forget when you come up grab one of the beautiful

Protospace trophies and find a spot in the middle and we have a beautiful triangle.

So we're going to kick off with most sustainable, Alex if you wouldn't mind joining us on stage

quickly

Perfect so

Because Alex is managing Deep Green Biotech Hub, who is sponsoring the most sustainable

award,

we thought it might be nice if she announces the winner so you can open that up and let

us know who wins

best UTS startup most sustainable.

So it's with absolute great pleasure that the UTS Deep Green Biotech Hub is sponsoring

the UTS Startup Awards tonight.

Honestly.

it's a bigger pleasure for us just to be a part of this ecosystem and it's so amazing

to have the support.

But also amazing to have the support to be able to drive an algae bio-economy in New

South Wales.

We're supported by New South Wales Treasury through the Boosting

Business Innovation Program but we're also really driving this amazing innovation that's

coming out of UTS,

to help make New South Wales a bit more sustainable and to assist with the green recovery.

So it's really amazing that we're able to present the most sustainable award tonight

and

The award goes to ALGATEX.

Right to the middle.

Do we have, how do you feel- how do you feel Nick?

Congratulations, I'm over the moon at the moment. Just to just want to quickly thank

you, to Alex and the Green Light

I also want to thank my co-founders: Isabel

Toasa, Samantha Roberts and also Rachel Yamamoto. You guys are awesome and thank you for putting

up with me.

Thank you!

Well done Nick. Thank you so much. We'll pose for a quick photo.

Maybe we can photoshop us a bit closer together in future, so i'll run the gauntlet. Thanks

Nick. Well done. Thank you so much Alex.

Okay

What is up next?

Application of research.

The winner is:

The Change Hub, come on Lydia.

Grab your choice of trophy and join us on stage.

How does it feel?

Congratulations. Thank you. It feels really good. It's been such a long journey, and I

just want to thank my family.

It was really hard

going through a phd, doing a startup and having two kids along the way!

So I really want to thank my husband and my family for their constant support. It's long

hours and it's not

fun sometimes when you can't go home in time for the kids bedtime, so thank you so much

for this opportunity,

I really appreciate it. Well done Lydia. Thank you so much!

Very relatable. I saw a lot of nods in the audience and i'm sure a lot of people at home

can relate to that.

Very very well

done.

Okay

We have best UTS Startup social impact category.

This one was very, very close. These scores were incredibly close, but there can only

be one winner

And that is Arula.

The amazing Steph, she really does demonstrate resilience every day.

We love seeing her at UTS Startups at 608 Harris.

In the middle,

anyone to thank,

what have we got to say? Just everyone here- everyone's amazing and my family. Yeah and

world peace!

Love it, world peace. Well done Steph.

Perfect, thanks so much. Gosh, I just can't believe how amazing all of these pitches are.

There can only be one winner but we are proud of every single one of our startups in the

community. Don't ever forget that.

Now this was our elevator pitches. Remember? The ideas stage.

The winner is medEQ.

Phoebe Butler.

Thank you. Incredible work.

Tell us what's going through your head! Um to be honest, I'm quite surprised. So just

thanks so much.

Working on this alongside a medical science degree is interesting but i'm really enjoying

it and especially being a part of the community

It's amazing. Thank you.

A little birdie told me you went on a ski trip lately and you might have injured your

hip- you're back on stage pitching,

Back at it. I broke my hip snowboarding five weeks ago, so

Cheering. I'm back walking so we love it.

Cheers to that. Well done Phoebe.

Two more awards left which doesn't quite make sense maths wise. I think someone hasn't gotten

their trophy, but we'll get them to you.

So we have the established category.

Well, this one's very exciting and i'm told another extraordinarily close

category and in fact

the semi-final stage was so close that we went from three final finalists that we had

originally anticipated to five because it was just so close.

The winner, for Best UTS Startup: Established

is Maslow.

It might take him a while, Nitin’s seat you can't see is all the way at the back of

the great hall.

So we'll give him a chance to jog up on stage.

Such a great team.

Don't forget your trophy Nitin.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Do you have anything, anyone to thank? Anything you'd

like to say last words?

Look, we've had a lot of support especially across the city- Remarkable, CSIRO,

Optus.

But honestly UTS Startups.

Love all of the organisations that have supported us so far, but the birthplace of Maslow was

UTS Startups. It's amazing.

I'm an occupational therapist by trade. I've worked in acute hospitals, rehab hospitals

under the NDIS

and normally a project like this would come out of like a clinical

institution or an academic place like UTS or University of Sydney and then a startup

has entered like

a clinic like making strides.

That's amazing. So thanks again for supporting us and thanks for the award. Thanks for being

part of the community Nitin-

well done.

Lucky, lucky last. So last year was the first time we added this award category

and we didn't want it to just be based on a pitch. We wanted it to

Recognise a startup that sort of does it all. They have demonstrated traction, they actually

get stuff done,

they have contributed really strongly to the UTS Startups community giving back through

just connecting people to their networks through holding lunch and learns.

Just anything they can do to be part of the community. If it's okay, I might

change the plan and get Murray to announce it. Let's get you a microphone Murray from

the incredible Bianca.

I think it makes sense for Murray to announce this one.

If that's okay with everyone.

Uh you remember what happened last time?

We'll give you another chance Murray- does everyone remember last year? All right. So

the winner for Startup of the Year 2020 is...

This, at the bottom?

It is Clipboard,

Thank you Murray, just a quick shout out to Chris Hind in the back corner- our Head of

Operations and Mr

Ed Colyer, my co-founder and Head of Product. Um, sorry Sam, we'll get you to sorry five

metres. Cool.

Perfect.

Um, yeah, I was just saying it's definitely not the Sam show- Ed does a lot of the work

um, as our Head of Product and Chris is a big part of the team and obviously

the rest of our team as well.

So i'm super proud of everybody and what they've done to contribute to the community and also

to develop a product that our customers love.

We're really lucky to have you.

Clipboard was actually one of the first startups to join UTS Startups. A lot of people think

we are quite old as a

community, as a program. We've actually just celebrated our second birthday and Clipboard

joined in- I think it was August of 2018.

One of the first startups, has gone on to be in multiple accelerator programs,

raised investment, but it's not always about that stuff.

There's the small wins that we need to celebrate as well and that can be as simple as inspiring

someone else to

see what's possible and he does that by speaking at workshops,

presentations, just by being an all-round legend. We need more legends in our community.

Well done Sam- any last comments?

What's the piece of advice you would give to someone who is sort of teetering on the

edge

Of becoming an entrepreneur or starting a startup. What's one little piece of advice

you could give? I think the advice i'd give, so I started Clipboard

with Ed. I would have been start of second year of uni, and I’dstarted a few different

startup ideas before that.

And the advice i'd give is that if you're in uni

Oftentimes you have the luxury to just give it a go and you're doing uni anyway. So

between uni and maybe a part-time job you actually have the ability to fail and nothing

really bad's gonna happen. So I think

that is one of the most liberating factors of starting a business when you're in university

and with the UTS Startups program.

Like I can firmly say that we wouldn't be where we are today if it weren't for UTS Startups.

There's just no way.

So I think having that support and also having the flexibility of being a uni student, when

you can bring those two factors together

That's a really enabling thing.

So just give it a go and if you're at UTS lean into all this support because we certainly

wouldn't be here without it.

Thanks, Sam. That's so sweet. Another big round of applause for Clipboard: Startup of

the Year

Thank you very much Attila and Murray, thank you.

All right, Dave it's over. I know it's not over yet sad. I reckon we need Ariel on stage,

where's he going.

Oh, you're right there. Thanks, mate. Sorry to work you so hard. I reckon we need a selfie

Emma.

Um, are you guys up for it? Everyone on zoom?

We need you up, in front of the couch, on your feet, pumpkin soup away!

Any award winners don't run with those awards just stand up gently. And everyone else, if

we could just stand up together

right now and make sure we imprint this digitally. We won't copy it too many times Fasade.

and

Get in a selfie.

Hands up or do something weird on the count of three, two, one- UTS Startups!

It wasn't good enough, okay, three, two, one- UTS Startups.

Amazing, thank you. Thank you. Sorry about that, that just happened

Geez my jeans are tight. You can be seated for 30 more seconds if you like.

Emma i'm pretty sure we've got important things to announce and i've forgotten them all but

I'll start with

startupsfestival.uts.edu.au- you won't find steak knives

But you will find a startup pitch from heaps of startups that are doing incredible things.

We have the startups showcase, we have the startups marketplace.

Monday 9am, get on there.

And you could buy an Espresso Display.

You could whole bunch of things, you could sign up for, you could create a listing on

Gecko even.

Which I have done. No one's hired my leaf blower, but that's cool. I put a dress on

Gecko. Yeah, very good.

And so much more to do there.

We'd love your support in that way. And also with the UTS Startups Festival. We have got

some lightning talks and workshops that are happening

all month in September,

like...

Uh, we actually have how not to green wash your startup. If you're inspired by the most

sustainable category our very own, Dr.

Alex Thompson is going to share how NOT to greenwash your startup and i'm looking forward

to it.

We have lightning talks around startups and research, we have

some really interesting stuff coming up with a collaboration between UNSW,

Sydney University, Macquarie University and UTS. Around how universities are driving entrepreneurship

which would be really cool, and heaps of other stuff.

So we'd love to see there. Even if you're on a zoom we still feel your presence.

And, we just want to say a huge thank you for being part of the third UTS Startups Awards.

Thank you so much, give yourselves a round of applause.

Any final advice Emma to anyone who's on the edge of their seat about to join UTS Startups?

I think

the best thing I heard was

What does it take to become an entrepreneur? You just need to decide to be one.

It's as simple as that, and then to join UTS startups as I said before

All you need is an idea and some ambition and we'll help you with the rest.

We have an amazing community of how many is it now Dave?

Three hundred and ...

Lots, 370, because we take applications every single day. That's why.

374 I believe it is today. I haven't checked Airtable. We were busy preparing for the awards.

Over 750

Members, so if you are thinking about it

And you don't quite have someone in your network that sort of

Understands what you're feeling come and join us. Come and join our crew because you'll

have an instant group of people just like you.

Beautiful and with that

Farewell. Thank you everyone who’s zoomed in and watched us on Ausbiz. We appreciate

you. We appreciate everyone in this room.

Go start a startup. Thank you. Good night

Thanks!

 

 

Awards categories 2020

Best UTS Startup (application of research)

UTS is committed to practical innovation and to the development of impact- driven research that benefits industry and the broader community. The work of these startups has leveraged such research to build businesses which are driving change in the world around us.

The Greenlight Healthcare Research logo shows a traffic light with the green "go" colour on, and the text "Greenlight Healthcare Research" in green underneath.

 

Greenlight Healthcare Research (runner up)

Greenlight Healthcare Research is dedicated to address inequality in maternity care through locally relevant, quality evidence to improve maternity outcomes in disadvantaged populations.

Team members: Deborah Sims (Health), Sacha Kendall Jamieson (Health) and Sarah Ticehurst

The Change Hub

 

The Change Hub (winner)

The Change Hub is an interactive digital platform that allows individuals, teams and organisations to navigate the chaos of change. 

Team members: Lydia Moussa (Health)

Best UTS Startup (social impact)

As an institution for public good, UTS is committed to driving social change within and beyond campus. Startups in this category are committed to building a for-purpose startup that benefits people and communities. 

 

The Arlula logo has pink text saying "Arlula" in the shape of a heart rate line.

 

Arula (winner)

Arula believes no woman should fear life after breast cancer. Our mission is to help women who have undergone mastectomies by creating 3D printing breast protheses.

Team members: Stephanie Weiss (FEIT)

Orange and blue connecting lines and dots

 

aXonplay (runner up)

aXonPlay creates engaging learning gamification video games that target social resilience for people with the Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Team members: Sinay Salomon (Science), Zoe Rowen (FASS), Dav Thomas, Sophia Lucas, Farrah Nouri and Nikolai Goundry

The Nestwell logo has a dark blue background and has an orange owl head displayed above "Nestwell" in light orange text. Under "Nestwell" it says "A multi-sided platform for crisis accommodation" in white text.

 

Nestwell (runner up)

Nestwell takes holiday rentals and makes them available for emergency accommodation. Like Airbnb, but for organisations working with those needing immediate housing.

Team members: Dr Linda Leung (Business), Viveka Weiley (FEIT), Rodney Berry (FEIT) and Mel Rumble (TDI)

Best UTS Startup (ideas stage)

These startups are being recognised at the beginning of their journey in exploring and developing solutions which we believe will make significant impact. For most, this represents their first time pitching their startup to an audience.

Caelus Intelligence Logo

Caelus Intelligence (runner up)

Caelus Intelligence is an app for industries to gain data insights from recent satellite imagery in a few taps, through our specialised automated machine learning.

Team members: Amir Tukic (FEIT) and Shivangi Singh (Business)

The medEQ logo has "medEQ" in black text. The "Q" looks is depicted as two chat bubbles.

 

medEQ (winner)

medEQ is an online platform that positively influences the doctor-patient relationship by building trustful communication and in-clinic emotional intelligence.

Team members: Phoebe Butler (Science, Business)

The PsycTools logo shows a green graphic of the outline of a head with a gear in it with the text "PSYCTOOLS" in green and blue.

 
PsycTools (runner up)

PsycTools is an online two-sided platform that monitors client's progression of post-psychology tasks set by psychologists, assisting psychologists to make more informed decisions. 

Team members: Adam Clark (FEIT) and Ayman Taoube

Stack Creative Logo

 

Stack Creative Works (runner up)

Stack Creative Works is an agile animation studio developing a high-tech, low-budget production pipeline to deliver a new kind of interactive media: the first 'choose-OUR-own-adventure'.

Team members: Conor Stack (DAB)

Power

 

YPower (runner up)

YPower is a youth-run and delivered mentoring advocacy service. We are a group of remarkable women focused on solutions to filling key mentoring and skill gaps.

Team members: Vanessa Song (Business), Ashley Robinson, Kate Melville, Nevena Apostoloska

Best UTS Startup (most sustainable) 

A new category for 2020, supported by UTS Deep Green Biotech Hub. These startups have indicated a commitment to environmental sustainability, incorporating sustainable practices and/or building sustainability into their business model.

 

The ALGATEX logo has "ALGATEX_" written in black text on a green background

 

ALGATEX (winner)

ALGATEX's biosolution frees heavy metals from textile wastewater by using all-natural algal pigments that are biodegradable, cost effective, less water reliant, and great for the planet!

Team members: Nick Dominique-Bouvat (TDI), Samantha Roberts (DAB) and Isabel Toasa (Science)

 

 

Fasade

 

Fasade (runner up)

Data is the new plastic. Fasade tackles this emerging issue by providing digital citizens with the right tools to recycle the data.

Team members: Pavel Stanek (Business), Ankit Jagannath (FEIT, Business)

 

 

The UCarryit logo has white text over a dark purple ground with the text "UCarryit" in large font and "Educational Algae Kits" in smaller font to the right hand side.

UCarryit (runner up)

In conversation with high school students, UCarryit co-created fun, educational algae kits that empower curious citizen scientists to learn STEM in ways they find fun and interesting.

Team members: Charles Yuncken (DAB, FTDI), Maddy Satterthwaite, Camille Hansen (FEIT, FTDI), Kate Shorter, Thomas Dolahenty (Science, FTDI), Kyra Blake (Business, FTDI)

 

The Blackgoat logo has an image of a black goat on a surfboard on top of "BLACKGOAT" in black text.
Blackgoat (runner up)

BlackGoat produces sustainable Design Wetsuits using limestone neoprene.

Team members: Marc Bohmann (Business)

 

Best UTS Startup (established)

This category recognises the startups that have seen their ideas through to execution and are finding traction in their market. 

Asendium: as simple as tick, edit, generate

 

Asendium (runner up)

Designed for the financial planning industry, Asendium is an automated compliance document generation system that reduces the time to generate documents by up to 90 per cent. 

Team members: Sharon Lee (Business), Scott Miller, William Kim

 

 

CompassIOT

 

Compass IoT (runner up)

Compass IoT is a digital transport management platform with the purpose to replace expensive hardware, providing traffic data for any road in Australia, for any time period, instantly. 

Team members: Angus McDonald, Emily Bobis, Ben Hinchley, David Lee, Harrison Khannah, Vincent Guan (Business, TDI), Devin Lee, Tian Luong

 

Dynamic Grain Solutions

 

Dynamic Grain Solutions (runner up)

Dynamic Grain Solutions is democratising automation for the grains industry by delivering the latest innovations in mechatronics. 

Team members: Jason Al Haddad (FEIT)

The Gecko logo has a graphic of a blue, purple and pink gecko lizard above black text that says "Gecko."

Gecko (runner up)

Gecko is a secure, easy-to-use rental marketplace that helps people make extra cash from event items that are gathering dust in their home, and helps people hire hard-to-get event items easily to create unforgettable experiences.

Team members: Benjamin Kennedy (Business, TDI), Alan Ng (FEIT) and Lal Birch (DAB)

 

 

The Maslow logo features a graphic of a green triangle with "MASLOW" in black text underneath.

 

Maslow (winner)

Maslow is a voice-enabled rehabilitation assistant for young people living with paralysis. Maslow's inclusive design equips users with tools to independently structure their personal and rehabilitation schedule, measure their rehabilitation habits, and access guided health education to better understand and manage their condition. 

Team members: Andrew Akib (TDI), Ilya Thai (FEIT), Nitin Fernandez, Esther Cha (TDI), Joseph Ocampo, Steven Ralph and Nick Kunz

Best UTS Startup (high traction)

This category recognises a startup that has demonstrated high traction through investment and revenue in 2020.

Winner: Clipboard
Clipboard helps students, parents and staff have a seamless extracurricular experience by providing a single platform for all activities outside the classroom.

Community Morale Award

This category recognises the exceptional and selfless contribution to the community, exemplifying the startup spirit and a sense of give-back.

Winner: Newtown Blessing Box
Sitting happily on the corner of Bedford and Station Streets in Newtown, the Newtown Blessing Box is the brainchild of two UTS Startups community members and their housemate who wanted to feed the community in need during the pandemic.

People's Choice Award

The public voted for the best 60-second elevator pitch in the digital Startups Showcase at UTS Startups Festival. For the first time, all participating startups had the opportunity to be part of this People's Choice category, not just the finalists.

Winner: Caelus Intelligence
Caelus Intelligence is an app for industries to gain data insights from recent satellite imagery in a few taps, through specialised automated machine learning.

Most Inspiring Award

This category recognises the resilience and creativity of our startups, combined with finding an opportunity to contribute to post-COVID economic recovery. 

Winner: Espresso Displays
Recognised for their resilience, creativity, and contribution to post-COVID economic recovery, Espresso Displays has raised $650k on Kickstarter and Indigogo combined allowing them to create the world’s thinnest portable display that turns your laptop or phone into a portable workspace! Talk about dream working from home setup… 

UTS Startup of the Year

The UTS Startup of the Year recognises a well-rounded startup team that gives back to the UTS Startups community by inspiring and supporting others, has displayed determination through action on their startup, and has demonstrated traction through customers, investors and accelerator programs.

Winner: Clipboard
Clipboard's easy way of navigating extracurricular activities helps parents, staff and students say goodbye to poor communication and hours lost trying to manage activities each week. But their impact doesn't stop there, co-founders Sam and Ed continually give back to the UTS Startups community - and have done since they joined us as one of our first startups! 

startup community
three people smiling at camera
people mingling

Prizes

A suite of prizes valued at over $112,000, plus money-can’t-buy experiences were awarded to the category winners of the 2020 UTS Startups Awards.

2020 Prize pool

  • $4,000 cash supported by UTS Deep Green Biotech Hub
  • 10 x additional $5,000 AWS credits 
  • $27,831 worth of HubSpot software
  • A series of collaboration sessions valued at up to $15,000 to put your startup’s financial house in order and develop the materials to be investor-ready, from PwC Emerging Companies
  • A provisional patent application from Spruson & Ferguson (valued at approx. $5,000)
  • A 12-month tax compliance & bookkeeping support from Fullstack Advisory (valued at $3,500)
  • An annual LVConnect package from LegalVision (valued at $2,388) 
  •  3 x Site Starter website packages via Site Kite including strategy and brand session, done-for-you WordPress setup, customised strategic blueprint, coming soon page, 30-min training, on-page writing prompts, 30-min Zoom for final questions/design tweaks, and 30-day Member Library access (valued at $660 each). Plus, 3 x $100 Site Kite vouchers.
  • 10 x three-month memberships to the Fishburners Founders Hub. Empowering Founders for success with everything you need to start and scale a startup in one place (valued at $1470 total)
  • A Startup t-shirt package by Mr T Studio (valued at $484)
  • 3 x $100 gift certificates to redeem on marketing material such as print, apparel and branded products at CostSmart
  • A collective investment Q&A workshop for all winning teams from Square Peg Capital
  • A direct entry into the final stage of Antler’s selection process for their next cohort - join the fast track to investment, mentorship, and a global network to accelerate the growth of your next venture.
  • A one-on-one B2B mentoring session with Microsoft for Startups, plus entry for one team into the Microsoft for Startups program (sales, marketing, and technical support with a dedicated account manager)
  • A 90-minute one-on-one coaching session on 'how to market to diverse audiences and create social change', plus membership to YLab’s immersive online “Design the future” content.
  • A business coaching session with EnergyLab’s Chief Entrepreneur, plus a three-month virtual co-working membership
  • A 60-minute startup coaching session with one of the Remarkable team
  • A 60-minute mentorship session on breaking into Asian markets with Jason Yat-sen Li, Chairman of Vantage Group Asia, from Haymarket HQ
  • A personalised immersion tour of Cicada Innovations
  • A communal Q&A for all winners on “Demystifying product-market fit” with Skalata Ventures
  • Trophies 3D printed by UTS Protospace

Thank you to all of our sponsors for their continued support of our startups.

 

Sponsors

The support of our community is critical to the success of our startups. Thank you to all of our sponsors for their contribution to helping build Australia's future startup economy. 

Awards Sponsors 2020

Deep Green Biotech Hub logo

  

Antler logo
AWS logo
Cicada logo
Cost $mart
Energy Lab
Fishburners Founders Hub logo
Fullstack Advisory logo
Haymarket HQ logo
Hubspot for Startups

 

Legalvision logo

 

Microsoft for Startups
Mr T Studio

 

Protospace logo
PwC logo
Remarkable logo

 

Site kite

 

Skalata
Spruson & Ferguson logo
Square Peg logo
YLab logo
 


2020 Judges

Thank you to our panel of judges for supporting our startups and providing invaluable feedback in the semifinal and final rounds of judging.

Meet our judges

 

Martin Bliemel

David Bond

Mark Cason

Kim Curtain

Brendan Elliott

Lucas Hakewill

Murray Hurps

Tyler Key

Samantha Khoury

Dilek Kozanoglu

Alan Jones

Margaret Maile Petty

David O'Connor

Krithika Randhawa

Ann Schoefer

Jochen Schweitzer

Helen Spiropoulos

Alex Thomson

Mentors

We are incredibly grateful for the support of our mentors, who have share their experience, expertise, advice and connections with our startups in check-ins. Thank you to all of our 2020 mentors.

Meet our mentors

Catherine Alcock, Senior Accountant, The Startup Shop

Fiona Anson, Enterprise Learning Lead, UTS and co-founder and Advisor for The Jobs Agenda.

Jeff Beazley, Growth Marketing Specialist, BCG Digital Ventures

Madeleine Boothe, Commercial Lawyer, MistryFallahi Lawyers & Business

Chris Borrett, Director, BCG Digital Ventures

Mark Cason, co-founder, Ozeano Vision

Adeline Chu, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Remarkable and Principal, Global Entrepreneur Xchange

Peter Davison, Investor

Noga Edelstein, Non Executive Director, SBE Australia

Catherine Eibner, Startup Business Development Manager, Australia and New Zealand, Amazon Web Services

Adam Hardy, Senior Growth Architect, BCG Digital Ventures

Murray Hurps, Director of Entrepreneurship, UTS

Joanne Jacobs, Co-CEO Disruptors Co

Mick Liubinskas, Partner and Product Director, BCG Digital Ventures

Alfred Lo, Partner at Startmate, Early-stage Tech Advisor & Investor, Venture Capital

Alex Logan, Product Lead, BCG Digital Ventures

David O'Connor, Chief Information Officer, UTS

Amit Shah, Founder, The Startup Shop

Bosco Tan, Growth Lead, Zip Co.

Carl Young, Analytics and AI Designer, UTS

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Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal People of the Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now stand. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands. 

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15 Broadway, Ultimo, NSW 2007

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