Startup success stories

Compass IoT

Compass IoT received a Minimum Viable Product grant to develop their Integrated Transport Management System for use by traffic engineers, consultants, councils and state governments to understand how traffic moves. They bring together data feeds from connected vehicles alongside journey planning data in order to give real-time visualisation of traffic, as well as powerful insights on transport demand, mobility and usage. An independent traffic assessment has confirmed that Compass’ bus and car speed counts are accurate within a 99-100% range!

Compass has taken full advantage of the entrepreneurial education available to them from their alma maters. They are alumni of UTS Startups, and of both the University of Sydney’s INCUBATE and Genesis programs.

When COVID struck, it became unviable to do traffic surveys with a team on the ground. No cars on the road meant no traffic to monitor and report on using traditional methods. Transport for NSW, Canberra Council, NK Traffic and other government agencies, councils and consultants turned to Compass to be able to continue their operations. Compass allowed them to draw on data collected from the last useable period before COVID in November to continue transport planning and management.

Compass was able to look to the past, to provide insights into the present and as they continue to grow, they will provide insights to shape transport systems into the future.

Diffuse

Newcastle based Diffuse Energy received a Minimum Viable Product grant to help build the world’s most powerful small wind turbine. When the sun doesn’t shine and solar doesn’t work, the wind can still blow through Diffuse’s Hyland 920 generator and provide renewable energy to power NSW’s energy future.

The technology was spun out of the founders’ research at the University of Newcastle and received further support from the Boosting Business Innovation Partner the Integrated Innovation Network (I2N) as well as from the CSIRO ON Program.

Diffuse’s turbines powered critical voice and data services for NSW Police, Rural Fire Services, State Emergency Services and NSW Health during the catastrophic bushfires that ravaged the state in late 2019.

These turbines will work alongside solar panels to power remote telecommunications infrastructure in hard-to-service locations, converting them from diesel power to renewable energy

Coviu

Building Partnerships recipient Coviu is helping speech pathology patients find their voice virtually across NSW, and soon, across the world.

Coviu is a CSIRO spin-out and startup selling its web-based video consultation software solutions to the Australian healthcare market.

Many Australians, from those living in rural and remote areas to residents of aged care facilities, have difficulties accessing speech pathology services in their local area. Until now, no technology existed to deliver speech pathology assessments via video to the same level, with the same results, as in person assessments.

Coviu received the Building Partnerships grant to collaborate with Pearson Australia Group and speech pathologists from the Children’s Hospital at Westmead to create fairer access to speech pathology services through a custom solution based on Coviu’s platform. They are running a trial linking patients and speech pathologists across city and country NSW. The strong results to date have attracted keen interest from speech pathologists across Australia and from the US and Europe, many of whom are keen to get their hands on the Coviu technology.

Aside from ensuring access to key speech pathology services, Coviu has played a major role in supporting doctors to deliver telemedicine appointments across Australia at enormous scale in response to COVID. On the day in mid-March that the Federal Government announced Telemedicine would be fully supported by Medicare, Coviu was supporting 400 appointments a day. Within a few short weeks doctors and health providers across Australia were using on Coviu to support up to 25,000 appointments a day to patients in need of medical attention under lockdown.

When doctors called, Coviu answered.

ME3D

Me3D is an all-Australian 3D-Printing software developer and hardware manufacturer based in North Wollongong with the vision to provide highly accessible, educational 3D printing technology, materials and skills to kids and young adults across Australia and beyond.

The team is located at the iAccelerate Startup Incubator at the University of Wollongong Innovation Campus.

They received the Building Partnerships grant to pilot their BuildBee solution with the University Makerspace as well as several schools, providing them with software, printers and educational material.

BuildBee is a cloud-based operating system for any desktop 3D printer that lets you print from any device; from an iPad, computer, phone or tablet, based off your 3D designs from applications like TinkerCAD.

Not only are Me3D supporting the future of STEM education and the 3D printer industry, when COVID struck they quickly pivoted to using their 3D printers to produce face masks for the local health district.