Ten female-led startups have been named founders in the SheStarts program, selected from more than 400 applicants.
Named at a function at UTS last night, each of the businesses will receive $100,000 in pre-seed funding, access to corporates for customer distribution, a network of global investors, and will participate in a BlueChilli accelerator program.
The group’s been described as “bold and ambitious” with “great ideas for high impact, global businesses”.
See the ten start-ups below and learn what they’ll build in 2017, bios as provided by SheStarts.
Anna Wrightm, AudiBle
A platform offering navigation and information systems for the visually impaired, and beyond.
About Anna:
Anna Wright is a Chartered Accountant, who specialises in Business Development and Business Analysis. In this role she has helped a wide range of businesses, many from startup and one through to IPO. She also holds a PhD and lectures in Business Analysis and Valuation, and conducts research into models for the valuation of unique assets.
Carla Harris, Longevity
Longevity is an app that helps you save a little extra for retirement every time you spend. Longevity links your everyday transaction accounts to your superannuation account so that every time you spend, a small percentage of this spend goes into Super, adding up over time.
About Carla & the Longevity team:
Carla is a bit of chameleon, forever learning and adapting. Having recently graduated from her MBA at the University of Sydney, she started her career as an environmental scientist, with a PhD in plant ecology. Somehow, academic research led to her current role as an Executive Manager for the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Together with her incredible co-founders with professional backgrounds in, computer programming and development, data and research, and engineering, the team’s skills are on point to excel in a startup environment.
Lauren Meyer & Madeline Green, Shark Share Global
A platform available for research scientists to share already collected tissue samples with each other.
About Lauren & Madi:
Lauren Meyer & Madeline (Madi) Green are both ambitious, young marine biologists who share an innate curiosity for marine creatures, and are both fascinated by sharks in particular. Both hailing from small country towns hours from the nearest ocean, many thought they were mad to pursue careers in marine biology. Their hard work and dedication led them to North Queensland to complete bachelors in Marine Biology with Honours, studying their favourite animals, sharks. Now, as PhD students, they live under the water and in the lab, working to uncover the secrets of these enigmatic creatures. But during this time Lauren and Madi noticed there was no tool to connect with other researchers and determine who was collecting what samples. The solution is a simple database – working as a global, digital library, connecting researchers through a platform to share samples.
Xiao Han Drummond, Refni
Refni is a discovery engine that enables you to see the world as someone else, in order to help diversify your thinking.
About Xiao Han:
Xiao Han is the founder and CEO of Refni. Her work centres on creating connected and immersive experiences that truly enrich people’s lives. Prior to Refni, Xiao Han held various marketing roles (media and finance), including leading communications programmes for major projects at GE.
Georgina Bird, Honey
Honey is a community finance tool for women – harnessing collaboration to help women achieve their goals!
About Georgina:
Starting out working in the non-profit and social enterprise space, Georgina has a passion for using creativity and innovation to solve big human challenges. Honey is Georgina’s opportunity to leverage technology to empower women to engage with their financial future – to build their capacity to live the lives that they choose.
Financial freedom is one of those things that impacts everything – life, love, career, family, security. The knowledge and ability to achieve one’s own financial freedom should be accessible to every woman on the planet. It’s a big vision, but much like achieving your financial goals, the sooner you start the better – Georgina believes that it’s about time we got started!
Naomi Stuart, FarmPay
FarmPay is a secure online platform that enables real time payment for on-farm grain sales.
About Naomi
Forging a successful career as a business professional in regional NSW, Naomi Stuart understands the power of connections. Playing a pivotal role in her local Women in Business group, Naomi gets a real kick out of empowering women to achieve success, and believes that regional women are limited only by their networks and the power of their imaginations.From a farming family, Naomi knows better than most the importance of innovation in agriculture and sees the significant role technology will play in the sector’s evolution. Together with husband, Luke, Naomi is raising three gorgeous children – Heidi, Poppy and Max.
Alex Armitage, Habot
Habot’s vision is to improve the quality of life of many children on the autism spectrum and their families by leveraging wearable technology to enhance their ability to complete routines on-time and organise themselves independently.
About Alex & the Habot team:
Alex has an extensive projects and services delivery history in software solutions for Industry. Her significant consulting experience has made her adept at understanding underlying customer needs, developing fit-for-purpose solutions and delivering successful projects and outcomes. With personal knowledge of the challenges an ASD affected family faces, Alex is well placed to apply her knowledge, skills and life experience to this challenge.
Alex’s teammate Michelle began working life as a clinician and has built a career working in and consulting to the health industry in a variety of strategic and advisory roles. Michelle’s extensive network and vast industry knowledge enables the team to garner the expertise and support of a range of health professionals and educators to ensure they are creating a support tool that genuinely assists early intervention and integration programs. In this way they can be confident that Habot is contributing to better outcomes for these beautifully unique individuals.
Alex & Michelle are passionate about better utilising technology to make a positive social impact across the community. They’re enthusiastic and committed to making this idea a reality!
Claire Jenkins, Vetchat
Vetchat is telehealth for pets, providing professional veterinary consultations online from wherever you are.
About Claire & the Vetchat team:
Dr Claire Jenkins is the Co-founder of Vetchat. She is a veterinarian with over 12 years’ experience in Australia as well as the UK, and is a member of the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientists. Claire is also a mum to two kids and a gorgeous kelpie, and is a pet lover passionate about improving pet care and health.Co-founder Matt Hall has an extensive background in digital strategy, e-commerce and product development working for some of Australia’s leading brands such as Coles, Priceline and Lion. Matt has also worked with a number of startups, the biggest one being Perform Media, which is based in the UK. Matt has an 11-year-old schnauzer called Ruby.
Emma Poposka Kardaleva, Brontech
Brontech is building the My Bron platform that aims to redefine the entire economics of data as we know it, by translating data to actual digital currency that people can spend to purchase products and services.
About Emma
Emma Poposka Kardaleva has been in tech since forever. Emma learned to code in high school, fell in love with it, continued with her computer science studies in uni and then decided to make a career in software. Now wearing her CEO hat, Emma is trying to think about software from a business perspective, analyse how people use it, what they don’t like and where Brontech, as a company, can actually make a difference. Emma has an awesome team and a rockstar CTO, people that are translating Brontech’s bold vision into code and turning it into an awesome product.
MediText brings all medical team communication in one central place, offering real-time messaging and integration-friendly platform for optimal team collaboration.
About the MediText team:
Krupa, Kruti & Vikram are the three founders of MediText. They have come together to reinvent communication in healthcare and improve not only a medical professional’s life but also the patient and patient families’ lives. Krupa and her sister Kruti have been in and out of the healthcare system for several years when caring for their father who was extremely ill for a very long time. Day in and day out, they had to deal with the cardiology, vascular, renal, infectious disease and palliative care teams and every interaction felt like no one was on the same page, making their family’s journey very emotional and frustrating. Vikram, being a Colorectal Surgeon, equally is frustrated at work having to deal with inefficient communication platforms. The MediText team believes the health industry may not need a SnapChat for Doctors but with the fragmented use of pagers, phone calls, SMS and emails there’s a need for an easy to use tool that integrates all these methods.
