We chat with Matt Vitale, Founder and CEO of Birchal — Australia's largest Crowd-Sourced Funding (CSF) platform. We talk about WA being one of their leading markets and what makes a strong CSF campaign. This episode is an insightful listen for anybody who's considering raising capital through a CSF campaign or just interested in the story of Birchal. Startup West is recorded at Riff Studios in beautiful downtown Perth, Western Australia; produced by Startup News, and brought to you thanks to s...
Jun 13, 2024•44 min
On this episode, we're joined by Sean Williams, founder of AutogenAI. We talk about the world of generative AI and how he's using it to help companies write better proposals, faster. Sean is a serial entrepreneur and exited his previous company, Corndel Ltd, in November 2020 in a reported £40m+ sale. After a two week holiday, Sean founded AutogenAI which now operates with offices in UK, US, and Australia. He was in Perth for a few days so we thought we'd have a conversation with him to dive into...
May 12, 2024•57 min
For the final episode of 2023, Startup West recorded a founders' panel in front of a live audience of more than 400 at Freo Startup Fest, which is part of the annual West Tech Fest, Australia's longest-running tech festival. Host Charlie Gunningham chats with Dr Julia Reisser (Uluu), Amy Carter-James (Raaise) and Jonathan Lilley (Electro Ventures). Each company is heavily involved in developing and funding cleaner, climate-friendly products. Having raised $8.6M, Uluu is commercialising the produ...
Dec 13, 2023•27 min
Danelle Cross (Curtin Uni) and Chris Tan (Spacecubed) talk with Dan Dawson, founder and director of edtech startup Paperly. Originally from New Zealand, Dan saw the need to reduce paper-based bureaucratic systems in schools. Coding 7 hours a night while holding down a full-time job, he was selected to join the Plus Eight Tech Accelerator in Perth in 2022. This year, the newly established early-stage VC fund Purpose Ventures invested in the business, and his goal is to get Paperly into 10,000 sch...
Nov 22, 2023•37 min
We talk with Jemma Iles, who has been working in, and promoting, innovation across various industries including local and state government for the past 20 years. Jemma is also one of the people bringing the new ‘Australian Innovation Management Institute’ (AIMI) to Australia. How can governments and corporates best innovate? What can they learn from startups? How can governments and corporates best assist startups and the local innovation ecosystem? “I’d love to see more public sector officers i...
Nov 08, 2023•32 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with Intan Oldakowska, co-founder and CEO of medtech startup Earflo. She and her team are developing a non-invasive device that drains middle ear fluid in children with chronic ear infections, avoiding developmental delay and the need for surgery. From an idea first borne over at Stanford University, California, the company was recently awarded $500,000 in WA government funding, which will help them commercialise their solution over the next few yea...
Oct 25, 2023•31 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with serial app entrepreneur, award-winning founder and all-round nice guy Stuart Kidd. When one startup is not enough, how about four or five? Originally from the UK, Stuart arrived in Australia aged 10, then went back to work there after school, developing his eye for design, tech and online businesses. Back in Perth, he set up Apps People, an app development business, and has launched multiple app businesses over the past few years. Last year, he...
Oct 11, 2023•28 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with Simon Anderson, CEO and founder of Notis (student engagement platform for schools) and Swayz (prompts friends and family to share video content for you). With Notis, established in 2013 in Perth, Simon has raised US$1M over 10 years and is aiming to have a thousand US schools on board in 2023. Simon raised his first $5K thanks to Curtin Accelerate in Perth, then US$350K in an angel round, sold up everything in Australia, moved to Canada, while ...
Sep 20, 2023•22 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with the CEO of tech recruiting firm Valrose and co-Chair of Women in Tech WA (WiTWA), Tina Ambrose. Growing up in west London, she took on various jobs, found herself homeless at one stage, then later made “the best decision in [her] life” to move to Perth, Western Australia. Working in recruitment, she devised and then set up her own company, and also champions women in technology through her work with WiTWA. “ If I knew then what I know now, woul...
Sep 06, 2023•31 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with Ingrid Rodriguez, founder of Eikonic, a dental hygiene product looking to help a billion mouths over the next ten years. Born in Chile, and growing up in Perth, Ingrid studied oral hygiene and after years of practice, saw a need to develop a revolutionary product that would assist the 3 billion people that suffer from one type of oral disease or another. “ Do whatever it takes to be you own best friend. That was another great piece of advice, a...
Aug 16, 2023•22 min
Australia’s number 1 startup podcast (1) talks with two of Veintech's co-founders, Nick Buckley and Nik Bappoo, who with a team of 10 are developing a handheld unit that visualises veins to make cannulation (drawing blood) easier. It’s a disturbing fact that the standard ‘miss rate’ for cannulations is around 40%, incredibly high. Once you miss twice, you have to call for help. Set up in 2020, the medtech company closed a seed round last year, won an Accelerating Commercialisation grant, and is ...
Aug 02, 2023•48 min
Australia's number 1 startup podcast (1) breezes into episode 101, with Rob Kelly, managing director of Agora Livestock, a price discovery marketplace for sheep, cattle and goats. Growing up on the family farm in Kojonup, in the Great Southern, 250 kilometres south from Perth, Rob was into maths and science at school, and studied ag science at university. After a decade in grains trading, he saw that banks had no efficient, real-time way of valuing livestock, which spawned the idea behind Agora....
Jul 19, 2023•31 min
For our 100th episode, a real treat: we speak with the inspirational Professor Fiona Wood AM, who with research partner Marie Stoner invented spray-on skin, ‘ReCell’, made famous after the Bali Bombings, for which she was made Australian of the Year in 2005. Growing up in the north of England, the daughter of a fifth-generation coalminer, the self-confessed “sporty nerd” moved to London to study medicine. Emigrating to Western Australia in the '80s, she became the state's first female plastic su...
Jul 05, 2023•48 min
Australia's number 1 startup podcast (1) welcomes well-known co-host of the Mix 94.5 Brekky Radio Show ('Pete, Matt and Kymba'), and, now startup founder and Plus Eight graduate Pete Curulli. A mad-keen gamer, and co-host of popular podcast for gamers, Game on Aus, he is developing a platform for independent gaming developers, Three Little Pixels, which he plans to launch later this year. Passing through the Plus Eight tech accelerator last year, Pete has been bootstrapping the development of th...
Jun 21, 2023•39 min
Australia's number 1 startup podcast talks with former Western Australian of the Year, Bourby Webster, founder of the Perth Symphony Orchestra, who recently stepped away from the CEO role, after 13 years. Growing up in the English countryside, she was exposed to orchestral music from a young age, played viola, and went to Oxford University, where she also got into rowing as a coxswain. Moving to Perth, she did an MBA, worked for an engineering firm, and wondered why there was only one symphony o...
Jun 07, 2023•38 min
We talk with Joanna Morris, co-founder and CEO of Matilda, a digital platform that informs, connects and assists patients of endometriosis, a painful chronic condition that afflicts 1 in 9 Australian women. A pelvic physio by background, she and her business partner Kevin started the business to improve the lives of the 190 million people around the world that suffer from the affliction. Passing through Perth BioDesign and Curtin Accelerate programs, the business has been bootstrapped and now ha...
May 17, 2023•23 min
Chris and Steve talk with Dr Mehdi Ravanbakhsh, co-founder of two AI startups – the 7-year-old data analytics and AI company MapIzy and the brand-new cryptocurrency platform, CryptoCrispy. Originally from Iran, with a PhD from the Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany, and 20 years’ experience as an academic, Mehdi moved to Melbourne for his postdoc, then to Perth as an associate professor at the University of Western Australia. Fascinated by the power of AI, he quit his job to set up MapIzy in...
May 03, 2023•35 min
Danelle and Chris talk with the founder of social impact startup Donut Waste, Sharka Hornakova. Born in Prague, Czech Republic, she arrived in Perth 13 years ago, and discovered “all the beautiful, happy, no worries people.” Having worked in magazines and digital media, she saw an opportunity to recycle coffee ground waste into new products, such as donut-shaped soaps, skin cream and even beer. A graduate of the Curtin Ignition program in 2021, Sharka is also a yoga teacher, and works various jo...
Apr 19, 2023•21 min
Danelle and Chris talk with Nic Terpkos, co-founder and CEO of seasonal jobs site, Waytree. Set up five years ago, the fledgling business had to weave around the COVID pandemic to provide a service to seasonal farmers where back packing part time workers were very thin on the ground. Starting out as an engineer, Nic worked part-time on the startup until he and his two friends and co-founders (James Dernie and Harry Lowther) could quit work and go full-time. Established in Western Australia, the ...
Apr 05, 2023•25 min
Chris and Steve talk with Esther Oh, founder and CEO of health tech and AI-vision startup Agili8. Born in Singapore, and a top student at school, Esther was the only female software engineer at her consulting company. She moved to Perth in 2009 on a skilled migrant visa, as she wanted to raise her kids in WA. Agili8 was then set up after her son lost his eyesight. “The same thing with X-Ray vision. I actually see that this is the future of work. It is something we will definitely be living with,...
Mar 22, 2023•25 min
Steve and Chris talk with Tim Jones, Managing Director of cyber security startup Hyprfire. Starting out as a lawyer, he moved into technology law, worked in Sydney, and then moved back to WA to work on various startups in the ASX and private space. He did some advisory work, helped fund tech startups and worked for a time at HealthEngine. Spun out of Curtin University, Hyprfire has raised some significant capital as well as an Accelerating Commercialisation grant, offering network threat prevent...
Mar 08, 2023•30 min
Danelle and Brodie talk with the recently crowned WA Innovator of the Year, Kate Lewkowski, co-founder and CEO of medtech startup Neurotologix. Her company is developing a remote patient monitoring device for dizziness and vertigo, which afflicts 2.9 million Australians, prompting over 350,000 medical appointments. An audiologist with over 20 years of clinical and epidemiological research experience, Kate holds degrees in computer science, mathematics and public health, and is determined to manu...
Feb 22, 2023•34 min
A fantastic start for 2023 and our 5th season: Danelle and Brodie interview the Minister for Innovation and the Digital Economy, Hon Stephen Dawson MLC. Growing up in Ireland, the eldest of four children, he moved to Australia in his teens with his family, and became involved in student politics. His father had been active in the union movement. Starting out as a drama teacher, Stephen Dawson became a Labor member of the upper house of Western Australian government in 2013 becoming a cabinet min...
Feb 08, 2023•24 min
For the final episode of the 4th season of Startup West and 2022: a founders' panel recorded in front of a live audience in Fremantle as part of this year's Freo Startup Fest. Charlie Gunningham chats with Dan Nembhard (Wolfit Box founder), Holly Bridgwater, (Humyn.ai founder) and Kevin Mitchem (Co-Architecture co-founder). The session was titled ‘Pets, Property and AI’ for reasons that become clear in the discussion. Hear from 3 founders who have each launched (or re-launched) their startups in...
Dec 21, 2022•30 min
Danelle and Chris talk with Stephen Cornish, founder and managing director of Pentanet, a Perth-based internet provider providing super-fast speeds for homes and businesses. A keen gamer, Stephen set up his first tower for himself so he could enjoy faster internet to play League of Legends. Years later, the company now owns the largest private fixed network in Perth, has listed on the ASX (‘5GG’), and even owns a professional League of Legends team. “If you have an idea, you really have nothing ...
Dec 07, 2022•43 min
Chris Tan makes his debut on Startup West as co-host, with Danelle, and they talk with John Barrington AM, co-founder and managing director of Artrya, an ASX-listed (‘AYA’) AI-driven healthcare tech company that is looking to tackle the global problem of heart disease. Every 13 minutes, an Australian dies of a heart attack. 9 million die every year around the world. The company was set up in 2018, has since raised $60 million in various rounds, including an ASX listing in November 2021 where $40...
Nov 24, 2022•34 min
Danelle and Steve talk with Tim Hyde, co-founder and CEO of SWAN (‘scheduling water and nutrients’) Systems, a cloud-based platform that allows irrigators to make the most out of every drop of water and fertiliser. Former Carnarvon table grape and banana farmer Tim got together with co-founders Ivor Gaylard and Rod Campbell seven years ago to create a scalable software solution from their existing consulting business. The business won Startup of the Year in 2018 and Best Agtech Business in 2020,...
Nov 02, 2022•19 min
Brodie and Steve talk with Erin Clark, co-founder of Dark Stry (which is short for ‘Dark Story’), an app that features various immersive walking tours of Perth, including one recognising early female entrepreneurs. Originally from country Victoria, the former journalist moved to Western Australia 10 years ago with her husband, on what was supposed to be a two-year sojourn, and has fallen in love with WA. One night, after a couple of bottles of Prossecco, she had the idea. Four weeks later, she h...
Oct 19, 2022•26 min
Brodie and Steve talk with Kylie Dillon, co-founder and CEO of Realtime Conveyancer, a three-year-old proptech startup that is streamlining the real estate legal purchase process “from contract to keys”. With 19 years’ experience in conveyancing, she felt that the whole industry needed saving with technology, and sought out to develop it herself. As is often the case, the original quotation for development ended up being about a third of the eventual cost. “I am really privileged that I come acr...
Oct 05, 2022•28 min
Danelle and Steve talk with Eliza Carbines, Founding Director of Tender Relief, who has built a tech platform to help businesses apply for tenders. Eliza has tackled a problem she saw across her client base, the tricky world of project tendering. Hear how she built Tender Relief from Karratha (in far north Western Australia), the challenges overcome and the progress to date. “If you're in that startup world, or if you’re thinking of getting into it, I would suggest you hook onto something there ...
Sep 21, 2022•24 min
