Trans-Tasman Innovation & Growth Awards: Winners
2022 Winners
Inhibit Coatings
LOCATION: NEW ZEALAND
Microbial contamination is a deadly issue. Inhibit Coatings is on mission to save lives by preventing the spread of dangerous pathogens in hygienic environments.
Our team of highly qualified scientists and engineers develop next-generation antimicrobial systems, providing effective, long-lasting, cost-effective, and sustainable solutions that work to safeguard people in our communities and the environments they live in.
Inhibit Coatings produces highly effective antimicrobial surface coatings with activity that lasts the lifetime of the coating. These coatings work to inhibit the growth of microbial contamination and outbreaks in facilities with high hygiene and sanitisation requirements such as food and beverage, healthcare, and transport. Inhibit Coatings works with end-users and suppliers to develop antimicrobial coatings for a range of applications including flooring, walls, textiles, and filters.
oVRcome
LOCATION: NEW ZEALAND
The oVRcome product was born because 80% of people struggling with anxiety disorders don't get treated. This is known as “the treatment gap”.The treatment gap exists because treatment for anxiety disorders is:
- Expensive
- Hard to access due to location (i.e. living in a rural area without therapists)
- There's a stigma attached to having mental health issues (especially for men)
- There's a global shortage of psychologists due to demand exceeding supply
oVRcome is a smartphone app that uses virtual reality to help people overcome specific anxiety disorders such as phobias and social anxiety, in the privacy and comfort of their own home. Developed by a team of clinical psychologists and engineers, oVRcome provides treatment for children and adults with anxiety disorders. Our first clinical trial with the University of Otago, shows that we can achieve the same results as going to a psychologist, but at a fraction of the cost. We have users in 17 different countries around the world, and a road map that includes programmes for Substance Abuse, Depression, Eating Disorders and Substance Abuse all using virtual reality as a core part of the treatment.
Pleasant State
LOCATION: AUSTRALIA
Pleasant State is working towards a sparkling clean world that’s free of toxic cleaning chemicals and single-use plastics. We’ve developed Australia’s first just-add-water cleaning bars. Think Berocca but for cleaning!
Everyday cleaning sprays are made up of 97% water so we’ve taken the 3% active ingredients and formulated effective, plant-based concentrated cleaning bars. All you need to do is add the water to create a multi-purpose, bathroom and glass cleaning spray!
Simply fill your glass bottle with water, drop in the bar, wait for it to dissolve and then get cleaning!
Developed in Australia by our internationally recognised formulation chemist, and tried and tested against the best household brands. We’re making home care a form of self care with our beautiful, effective, healthy and zero-waste products.
Australia’s only Certified B Corp cleaning brand. We’re a female-owned Australian start-up that’s looking to change the game by focusing on a bigger purpose, not just profit. We’ve helped over 15,000 homes across Australia and New Zealand switch to our better for you products, stopped over 80,000 plastic bottles from being produced and we’ve donated over $38,000 to aligned charities.
Seer Data & Analytics
LOCATION: AUSTRALIA
Seer Data & Analytics is a scale-up technology company turning data into action for people creating a better world. We are creating a global business that allows a broad range of people and organisations to use data to solve significant social problems and lead to better outcomes in their communities.
Our mission is to make data accessible, usable, and shareable for people of all backgrounds. Our vision is to be the world’s problem-solving platform for local communities.
The Seer Data Platform is a self-service data platform providing the discovery, exploration, and analysis of Domain Data Products within a Data Mesh architecture, and helping organisations build and share data assets for better decision making.
Seer hosts a catalog of Open Data alongside customers’ private data, and data products generated by Seer. Users are assisted in generating their own data products by our self-service data collection and ingestion tools, and in discovery of insights by our AI-assisted querying and Smart Insight features. Users collaborate on analyses and share their discoveries in Data Spaces.
Our unique value proposition is to provide data access and sharing for local intelligence and problem solving for people of all skillsets.
2022 Finalists
Bitwise Agronomy
LOCATION: AUSTRALIA, INDUSTRY: AGRICULTURE
Modern farms are complex and sometimes distributed, it’s impossible to have eyes on your crop at all times. Growers need reliable, accurate and consistent data to help manage variability and forecasting. At Bitwise Agronomy, our GreenView agritech helps vineyards and berry farms “know what they’re going to grow” by using cutting edge AI technology. We’ve taught our GreenView system to see like humans - but more accurately, more consistently and at a super human speed. Growers use simple off-the-shelf GoPro cameras attached to existing farm machinery, and capture video footage when out performing jobs like mulching, mowing or spraying. Our GreenView system then takes this footage and crunches the numbers into interactive dashboards and maps. The result is actionable insights - so growers know they’re doing the right jobs, at the right time, and in the right areas.
Bitwise Agronomy was established as a global company, and built to scale in the backend. By focussing on software as a service, and not hardware we have quickly grown from our first site in 2020 to now having 100 sites located all around the world.
Bookbot
LOCATION: AUSTRALIA
At Bookbot, we believe that literacy is fundamental to our social and personal development. Our mission is to support children across the globe to embrace reading and engage with books in new ways – not just to improve their literacy and communication skills, but also to create a happy and successful life.
We have developed this app to address some of the key barriers to children's literacy learning through a variety of tools. The Bookbot library has the largest selection of phonics books in the market to ensure we can support children of all reading levels to start and enjoy reading. The Bookbot app uses speech recognition technology to provide guidance to children as they are reading aloud and keeps a track record of their reading fluency and progress, which is then shown in the teachers progress tracking app. To make this app accessible to all children, we use machine learning technology to compress and store thousands of books and audiobooks to accommodate low-technology devices with limited connectivity.
Cogo
LOCATION: NEW ZEALAND
Cogo is an impact-led fintech whose carbon tracking API and consumer App enables users and businesses world-wide to measure, reduce and compensate for their impact on people and planet.
The company’s API enables banks and other corporations to integrate carbon and sustainability data into their customer experiences - for example by providing bank customers their carbon footprint within the bank's own mobile app. Cogo supports behaviour change (reduction) through its world-leading ‘ethical nudge framework’; and offers users the ability to offset (compensate) the balance of their impact via carbon credits.
In addition, powered by open banking technology, the company’s app (currently in the UK) enables users to make easy, positive changes to their spending and lifestyle to help lower their carbon footprint. Our pioneering technology and data helps people better understand the effects of their daily decisions and helps them take climate action. We support and encourage people on their journey to becoming more conscious consumers.
The company believes in a new ‘impact economy’ where all businesses are a force for good.
Hectre
Location: New Zealand
Hectre’s leading-edge technology supports one of the most challenging industries in the world - fruit growing.
The Hectre app enables growers to digitize their orchards, saving them time and money, reducing their reliance on hard to source labour, minimising fruit wastage and supporting them to build sustainable businesses.
Our world-leading computer vision fruit sizing tech is transforming how packhouses gain size data. With Hectre, packhouses can increase their sample sizes by up to 4,000% in seconds, straight off an iPad. The data that Hectre delivers helps packhouses to reduce costs, improve their packout and secure optimal sales orders.
We’re passionate about clever simplicity - delivering awesome tech with user simplicity at the forefront. In the last 12 months we’ve delivered 143 enhancements to our customers and sized more than 20 million pieces of fruit.
Hectre is now in use in 12 countries and our US market share has more than doubled in the past year, as has our team. The culture we’re creating at Hectre means our people want do the best for our customers and for each other. With this kind of culture, amazing things happen.
And now we’re scaling up to meet even greater global demand…
HowToo Pty Limited
Location: Australia
HowToo is a cloud-based digital learning solution, that gives everyone the power to create and share knowledge with beautiful courses using the best learning frameworks, helping organisations unlock the expertise of their workforce like never before.
Today’s workplaces are changing at an accelerated pace and the need to reskill, upskill and gain new knowledge is not a once-in-a-lifetime activity; it’s continual, and it needs to fit into the flow of work.
HowToo radically cuts the costs and time to deliver training by putting the power to create and edit into the hands of teams. HowToo lets organisations of every size create training courses that affect real change in their workforces. By building learning intelligence into every step of the creation process, HowToo ensures that every learning experience hits the mark for learner engagement and knowledge retention.
Since launching in 2020 HowToo has seen 100% year-on-year revenue growth and rapid growth in user and customer numbers with more than 13,000 users on our platform and customers; including; KPMG, Government regulators, Hubspot, Transurban, Public Service Commission, Tennis Australia, Transurban University of Sydney, UTS, Monash, Toll and AISNSW
UPowr Pty Ltd
Location: Australia
UPowr is a distributed, clean energy marketplace that can be offered as a D2C solution or an embedded B2B2C marketplace. UPowr's turnkey service, from renewable energy system design to physical installation, makes it easy for consumers and corporate partners to participate in the transition to a sustainable and clean energy future. UPowr's digital-first platform provides the end-to-end trust consumers, and corporates require for such a critical purchasing decision. The platform offers solar, battery and electric vehicle charging products and installation services.
What makes UPowr different is that we have considered problems throughout the entire value chain, starting with the end customer. For our customers, we solve for trust and information asymmetry. Simply put, how do they know they are getting a good deal. For our installation partners, we want to solve work volume and back-office overheads to make their businesses more profitable. For our B2B customers, we want to solve for access and participation in the renewable energy market, visibility over jobs in their ecosystem and the quality of work.
We are a team of 23 and are growing fast.
WE Accounting & Business Services Limited
LOCATION: NEW ZEALAND
WE Accounting was born ten years ago, when a husband with extensive accounting experience and a wife with a finance background decided to combine their talents and set up their own business.
While Wyndi and Eli Tagi started out just ‘doing people’s books’ a decade later they are also coaching small businesses, providing accounting and virtual CFO services, sitting on multiple Governance boards, rolling out financial literacy packages to communities in need and doing everything they can towards their higher purpose – to improve the statistics of Māori and Pacifica people.
WE has a strong belief in understanding people’s entire lives before trying to help them grow their business. They strive to understand people’s ‘why’ so they can help them increase their profit without it taking a toll on the other personal values they hold dear.
WE have been a catalyst for change, not only by providing a different type of service to clients, but by being leaders in diversity and acting as role models for young people in their communities.
Beliefs of manaakitanga and hauora run through everything we do, and we firmly believe you can run a business and still be a fully-participating member of your aiga or whanau.
2019 Winners
Kazia Therapeutics
LOCATION: SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Kazia Therapeutics is a new breed of biotechs. In 2017, well established biotech Novogen adopted the name Kazia to reflect a new operating model that’s focused on becoming a more innovative, product-focused and agile company. They made a conscious effort to focus on the things they do best—structuring and managing the approvals during the trial stage of drug development and then partner with major pharmaceuticals to bring their drugs to market.
In a short time, Kazia has made significant progress in the clinical testing of drugs like GDC-0084. GDC-0084 is optimised to treat glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and most aggressive form of primary brain cancer in adults. The drug is on course to commence phase III clinical testing next year, the final phase before commercialisation.
Kazia acknowledges the benefits of networks, interrelationships and collaborations in their industry. They seek out the very best people in the field because patients need new treatment for cancer and no individual or single company has all the tools to answer that need. Kazia can count the likes of US National Cancer Institute, University of Newcastle, American Association for Cancer Research, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, St. Jude Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School as collaborators.
Robotics Plus Ltd
LOCATION: TAURANGA, NEW ZEALAND
Robotic Plus Limited (RPL) was established with a simple goal in mind, improving the quality, productivity and sustainability of the horticultural supply chain. By focusing their R&D efforts on automation, vision, robotics and AI, the Tauranga-based company is addressing one of horticulture’s most significant challenges—labour supply.
What makes RPL stand out is its ability to collaborate with industry players like universities, government agencies, VCs and multinationals. These strategic partnerships have helped RPL expedite development to commercialisation and be a major industry disruptor. RPL’s technology includes autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) that harvest and pollinate orchards, robotic fruit packing technologies that meet the demands of the modern packhouse and robotic logging truck scalers to give a faster, safer and more accurate measure of logs on the trucks and trailers.
As a Māori business, RPL is actively helping lift Māori capacity in the innovation space. RPL has partnered with interested Māori iwis to increase the number of Māori engineers, and they actively share their insights with Māori teams throughout Government agencies.
Tectonus
LOCATION: AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
Tectonus is a New Zealand-based engineering company that’s shaking up the seismic engineering space. Through collaborative efforts from researchers specialising in structural resilience, Tectonus designed a system that allows a building to withstand a major earthquake and its aftershocks, without any repairs needed afterward.
The Resilient Slip Friction Joint (RSFJ) is a damper that uses patented grooves and profiles supplemented with disc springs to deliver both damping and self-centring capabilities. Thanks to their innovative RSFJ solution, Tectonus has received interest from the wider engineering community of New Zealand, a land known to be vulnerable to earthquakes. It has established partnerships with the likes of Dunning Thornton Limited, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the University of Auckland.
Tectonus successfully delivered its first project, fitting the new Nelson Airport Terminal with RSFJ and has more installations in New Zealand and overseas in the pipeline, we expect to see Tectonus continue to impress on an even bigger stage.
Whispli
LOCATION: SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Whispli was born from its co-founder and CEO’s own experience as a whistleblower. Sylvain Mansotte uncovered a $20 million fraud just months into his job at a large Australian-based construction company. He saw first-hand how difficult it was for colleagues to speak-up and how organisations were not enabling their best asset, their people, to safely report misconduct and wrongdoing.
Whispli is a secure and anonymous two-way communication solution used for serious matters like corporate whistleblowing, and the reporting of harassment and bullying. What’s unique about Whispli is that it has expanded its platform to allow users to have “Trusted Conversions” on topics less stressful than pure whistleblowing but stressful enough that they won’t talk openly about it.
By expanding the spectrum of topics users can engage with, it encourages users to use Whispli more frequently, building trust in the platform and in turn making them more likely to use Whispli to report more serious matters when the time comes. Whispli’s clients saw an average of three to four times more reports/ conversation than previously.
The ultimate goal for Whispli is to build a platform that enables a whistleblowing network, where users can reach out to any organisation to report wrongdoing.
2019 Finalists
AdAlta
Location: Sydney, Australia
AdAlta is a biotech company developing a promising new class of protein therapeutics, known as i-bodies. I-bodies have the potential to treat today's most challenging medical conditions.
An i-body is a unique human protein that combines the advantages of small molecules (for stability) and antibodies (with a high affinity and specificity for treating certain illnesses) in one powerful treatment. The i-body has a unique long loop that can bind to a diverse range of targets meaning that it has wide applicability across many diseases. AdAlta's leading i-body candidate, AD-214 is seen as having the capabilities to treat Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and other fibrotic diseases.
The rapid progression of products like AD-214 is due to AdAlta's ability to collaborate with a significant number of local and international groups. In the past financial year, AdAlta managed six domestic and 18 international collaborations keeping it on track to commence human clinical trials.
Avertana
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Avertana is revolutionising the way we think about carbon waste. The Auckland-based company has developed a process that converts industrial waste streams into raw materials used to manufacture everyday products while leaving no residual waste.
Seeing the large stockpiles of waste slag in the Glenbrook mills, co-founders Sean Molloy, James Obern and Sherif Ibrahim began turning their attention to finding a way to convert this waste into products. Focusing on the slag's high titanium content, Avertana repurposes conventional process equipment and uses carbon-free inorganic chemistry to turn waste into valuable raw materials like Titanium dioxide (TiO2), Gypsum, Alum and Magnesium Sulphate, products used in paint manufacture, water purification, building materials, papermaking and fertiliser.
Its cost-effective solution has resulted in a technology partnership with a South African-based steel company and compelling project opportunities in China, Malaysia, Brazil, South Korea, Canada, Japan and India. Avertana has also engaged with the likes of Callaghan Innovation, Victoria University, University of Auckland, AUT and the University of Queensland to extend its platform to other large-volume industrial waste streams.
Avertana's business model is making the manufacturing supply chain more sustainable and less harmful.
Farmbot
Location: Sydney, Australia
Farmbot is the brainchild of its Founder and COO, Craig Hendricks. Craig was a city-based software developer with a small farm, who wanted to keep an eye on his cattle, water and fences while he was at his day job in Sydney.
He started by developing a range of primitive remote monitoring devices to help turn his pumps on and off remotely, check his water levels, electric fences, temperature and soil moisture. Today, Farmbot has over 1600 state-of-the-art Internet of Things (IoT) devices running on properties.
Farmbot's success is due to strategic collaboration with technology providers like Definium Technologies of Tasmania, and with satellite communications partners like Pivotel. Understanding the power of a strong network, Farmbot has developed strong relationships with influential organisations like the Meat & Livestock Association and Ruralco.
Farmbot's range of connected devices includes rain gauges, water pressure, water flow, water quality, bore monitoring and electric fence monitoring. Farmbot is setting itself apart with pragmatic solutions giving farmers greater security and peace of mind.
The Pure Food Co
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
The Pure Food Co started when co-founder Sam Bridgewater watched a family member's illness make it impossible for him to eat. This experience kickstarted a journey to uncover how other people with such challenges coped.
Its research found many people, especially older people, were not getting the nutrition that they needed. The Pure Food Co wants to showcase the true value of food by creating delicious meals that help people thrive when they are at their most vulnerable.
By collaborating with groups with expertise in food science, data analytics and process engineering, The Pure Food Co is developing food formulations that demonstrate health benefits like decreased weight loss, reduced falls, fewer hospital stays and less fatigue.
The Pure Food Co is providing fortified foods directly to 90 percent of hospitals and 25 percent of retirement homes throughout New Zealand. It is also establishing its presence in Australia.
RedEye App
LOCATION: BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
The idea for RedEye began when co-founders Wayne Gerard and Randall Makin couldn't find the correct engineering data to complete work on a mine site. Realising this was a problem frustrating engineers worldwide, they created the first fully cloud-based engineering management solution for asset owners and their service providers.
RedEye is an Engineering Drawing and Data Management Solution that helps clients improve the way they upload, work with, share, mark-up, approve and manage engineering drawings and data across the asset lifecycle. Its innovative platform has helped global resources companies gain more control and visibility over their engineering data and drawings to improve safety and productivity.
In addition to having a solid client base in mining, RedEye has expanded to water and power utilities with projects in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.