The Winter ’25 cohort is full of founders chasing the edge of what’s possible and dragging the future closer.
A future where period poverty is a thing of the past. Where anyone can service a machine like an expert. Where AI doesn’t just answer questions, but books your Uber, edits your work and fills a hospital shift.
From AI-native workplaces to at-home cervical screening kits, super-intelligent healthcare agents to haptic gloves that make VR touchable, this cohort is solving problems you didn’t know could be fixed, and tackling challenges most shy away from.
They’ve trained as surgeons. Taught university at 15. Demoed their hardware at Open Sauce. Sold companies. And started over.
They’re reinventing how we hire, how we heal, how we feel, and how we play. They’ve launched products in weeks, signed customers in days, and raised capital to power their missions before most of us have had our morning coffee.
This cohort spans industries, cities, and lived experience, but what unites them is urgency. They’re not waiting to be told what’s possible. They’re building it.
Care GP
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Building the AI infrastructure for Healthcare provider admin
Care GP founder Melvin Chen
Admin is eating healthcare alive – a third of all healthcare costs are paperwork, not patient care. That’s $1.3 trillion annually in the US alone.
Care GP is eliminating that burden with integrated AI agents that automate provider admin, starting with document processing, billing, and patient communications.
Their vision? Enabling the first generation of super-intelligent healthcare providers.
Led by Melvin Chen (ex-VP at Latch, 3× founder, Forbes 30 Under 30), Ethan Atkins (ex-Fleek, YC W22), and Andy Bui (built and scaled AI products to $10K MRR in 2 months), this team blends product, operations, and engineering excellence.
In just 3.5 months, Care GP has hit $200K ARR, commercialised 1 agent, and is seeing 50% WoW usage growth, with three more agents in the pipeline.
Founders: Melvin Chen, Ethan Atkins & Andy Bui
Ninja AI
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Ninja gives anyone the power to equip AI agents with connected apps.
Ninja AI founder Marcus Schappi
AI assistants can think and talk, but they can’t take real-world action (like booking an Uber) because they lack access to apps and data. As a result, everyday tasks like booking rides or sending emails still rely on custom code and fragile integrations.
Ninja solves that by making it easy to build, host, and share tools that AI agents can use. It’s like an App Store, but for AI agents to get things done.
The vision? Ninja becomes the default way AI agents interact with the world. Just like APIs helped build the internet, Ninja will power what AI agents do.
Founder Marcus Schappi has built and sold multiple companies, and specialises in connecting AI to real-world tools.
In just six weeks, he launched three platform versions, built a fully serverless system, attracted over 700 users, and has more than 50 MCP tools already in the ecosystem, proving strong demand from SaaS teams and AI builders.
Founder: Marcus Schappi
Medlo
Melbourne, Vic
One-liner: Medlo & Doccy solves healthcare access with AI-powered staffing and hybrid care delivery.
Medlo founders Louis Sisk & Jordi Hermoso
Doctors want flexibility. Patients want faster care. But the system is broken – there’s no easy way for doctors to find roles, get verified, or deliver care online and offline.
Medlo is fixing that. It connects doctors with short- and long-term roles while handling credentialing and onboarding. Doccy then enables those doctors to provide digital care to patients, creating an end-to-end hybrid care platform.
Their vision? To become the first AI hybrid healthcare delivery platform.
Louis has spent 8 years working as a doctor in General Surgery & Emergency. Jordi is a technical co-founder with deep startup experience, including building cyber and marketplace platforms.
Since launching in November 2024, Medlo has onboarded 310 doctors, partnered with 80 hospitals, and is processing over 20,000 hospital shifts.
Founders: Louis J Sisk & Jordi Hermoso
Matchbox
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Startup recruitment platform to de-risk hiring and fill critical roles faster.
The Matchbox team: Nick Glynn, Holly Sanders & Jack Harber
70% of startups fail due to bad hiring. Founders often lack the time, networks, and experience to get hiring right, whilst traditional recruiters are expensive, misaligned, or just not a fit.
Matchbox solves this with a smarter, founder-first approach. It uses AI to deeply understand a startup’s hiring needs, then connects them with a curated network of domain-expert recruiters and talent communities. The incentive structure is flipped by rewarding their network solely for the most important thing: finding the perfect candidate.
The vision: make hiring human-first and AI-powered, so founders can scale confidently, without compromise.
Led by Holly (formerly at LinkedIn, with a background in startups and tech recruitment), second-time founders Jack (Vyro) and Nick (Quickapay), the team brings 40+ years of experience across hiring, sales, strategy, ops, and tech—and they’ve felt the pain of hiring gone wrong firsthand.
Founders: Holly Sanders, Jack Harber & Nick Glynn
Promosync
Adelaide, SA
One-liner: Automating retail promotions for FMCG brands to maximise their ROI.
Promosync founders Henry Choo & Divyanshu Chauhan
Behind every yellow ticket promotion we see on supermarket shelves every day, lies a broken system.
FMCG brands are still manually analysing and running multi-million-dollar retail promotions using clunky spreadsheets, wasting time, causing costly errors, and missing opportunities to maximise ROI.
Promosync maximises ROI for FMCG brands by analysing data and automating manual processes to create optimal retail promotions.
The vision for Promosync is to unlock real-time optimisation for retail promotions. Similar to Google Ads for digital advertising.
Henry and Div are the perfect team to solve this long-standing global problem.
Henry is an industry expert, having previously led multi-million-dollar retail promotion operations across companies such as P&G and Nestle. Div is a seasoned tech founder who has successfully built and scaled multiple businesses, including Chefadora, Indebted and Shippit.
Founders: Divyanshu Chauhan & Henry Choo
Integuide
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: AI to guide technicians through maintenance & servicing tasks.
Integuide founders Slava Chalnev & Hunter Jay
Senior technicians take years to develop their expertise; learning which sounds matter, which shortcuts work, and how to handle edge cases that aren’t in any manual. But they can only be in one place at a time, and when they retire, that knowledge walks out the door.
Integuide captures how the best technicians actually work via body-cam recordings, and then uses AI to transform that expertise into accessible knowledge for junior staff to do the same complex tasks. Every insight, technique, and hard-won lesson becomes institutional memory, searchable and citable, complete with verification against existing documentation and known best practices.
Our goal is to enable any technician to perform at a senior level by giving them AI-powered access to an organisation’s collective expertise, dramatically accelerating the path from novice to expert.
Hunter previously built fruit-picking robots with Ripe Robotics. Slava is an AI safety researcher known for his work in mechanistic interpretability. Together, they’re turning tacit knowledge into scalable intelligence for industrial teams.
Founders: Hunter Jay & Slava Chalnev
Luck
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Luck kills copy-pasting into chatbots with an AI workspace that edits, writes, and thinks with you – inside your tools.
Luck founder William Kirkwood
Today’s AI tools for work are fragmented. Right now, using AI means copy-pasting between your doc and a chatbot. It can talk about your work, but can’t do it because it can’t edit directly, lacks full context, and you never see exactly what changed.
Luck replaces this messy copy-pasting with an Accept/Reject workflow in an AI workspace that edits, writes, and thinks with you directly inside the tools you already use. Luck has full context across your work, and you see every change highlighted and can granularly accept, reject or refine.
The vision? One AI-native workspace that connects every tool and every AI Model – so your work lives in one place and your AI truly understands it.
Luck is led by William Kirkwood, a seasoned Founder and self-taught Engineer. His experience as a Product Manager at Seed, Series A, and Series C start-ups, and in a large enterprise has given him deep insight into knowledge-worker workflows.
Founder: William Kirkwood
On The House
Brisbane, QLD
One-liner: World’s first free period products, funded by ads, not women.
On the House founder Remy Tucker
On The House is tackling a national crisis: in 2025, over 3 in 5 Australian women are using makeshift solutions for period products due to a lack of access.
On The House installs digital vending machines in public and commercial bathrooms that provide free, organic period products, funded entirely by brands looking to advertise to their female target audience.
The vision is bold: from 2 in 3, to 0 in 3 women experiencing period poverty by 2035.
Founder Remy Tucker brings a mix of frontline women’s healthcare insight and commercial experience, from training as a student midwife, building consumer engagement through large-scale events for LVMH, and launching go-to-market strategies for startups across social media and brand.
Founder: Remy Tucker
Rave
Melbourne, Vic
One-liner: Discovering and sharing recommendations with people who get your taste.
Rave founder Steph Brook
The best recommendations come from people who truly get you, but there’s no simple way to swap them. We’re stuck in group chats, Notes apps, or influencer feeds that miss the mark.
Enter Rave. Add your favourite recommendations to your Rave profile – films, skincare essentials, and must-visit spots. Others can explore your recommendations, and you’ll see theirs in return.
Rave is where people discover what to watch, eat, buy, and try, based on recommendations from those who truly share their taste. Rave will power everything from what you pack for a trip to how you find your next signature scent, turning everyday recs into trusted discovery.
Founded by Steph, a former Atlassian engineer, Rave already has early traction. She launched her MVP focused on podcast recommendations and attracted 10,000 users in just three months. Now she’s scaling Rave beyond podcasts, building it into a discovery platform for everything you love.
Founder: Steph Brook
June Health
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Australia’s first at-home STI and cervical screening kits for women and people with a cervix.
June founder Grace Toombs
Only 62% of eligible women are getting cervical screening. STI rates, like syphilis, are skyrocketing, yet less than half of Gen Z women regularly see a GP, often due to shame or stigma.
June Health is changing that. It offers self-collection kits for STI and cervical screening, shipped straight to your door. Swabs take just five minutes to complete and are analysed by NATA-accredited labs—all from the privacy and comfort of home.
The vision? To become the global home for women’s sexual and reproductive health supporting her from first bleed to final period, from pain to prevention, every step of the way.
Founded by a proud First Nations woman, ex-med student, public health researcher, and endometriosis patient, June Health blends personal insight with clinical rigour.
Since launching in March 2025, June has secured Australia’s largest pathology provider, gained paying customers in every state and territory, and achieved 5 earned media features all without spending a cent on ads.
Founder: Grace Toombs
Leakster
Brisbane, Qld
One-liner: Leakster detects and pinpoints water pipeline leaks by listening to the water network in real time.
Leakster founder Sara Richardson
Australia loses 269 billion litres of clean drinking water each year before it even reaches customers. That’s thousands of litres every second, leaking from underground pipes and costing utility time and customers money.
Leakster is changing this. Using acoustic sensors and AI-powered software, it detects, locates, and tracks leaks in real time, reducing water loss and saving maintenance teams hours of investigation.
The vision? Replace reactive water maintenance with smart, real-time monitoring across global pipe networks.
Founder Sara Richardson spent 15 years as a utility economist, hearing about this problem daily, while living through a Queensland drought so severe, her town had water trucked in. Now she’s building the solution she always wished existed.
Founder: Sara Richardson,
On Zero
Sydney, NSW
One-liner: Building affordable and open haptic gloves for virtual reality.
On-zero founders Freesia Gaul and Sean Coulon-Clark
Most people using virtual reality only get a headset. That’s because the extra gear, like gloves that let you “feel” things, is expensive and complicated to use. As a result, VR hasn’t changed much for everyday users in nearly a decade.
On Zero is fixing this. They’re building affordable, customisable gloves that help you touch, grab, and interact inside virtual worlds, making VR more real and more fun for everyone.
The big idea? Let anyone fully step into virtual reality, not just see it, but feel it too.
Founder Freesia Gaul started building these gloves while studying quantum engineering. She first learned to code using headsets as a 10-year-old, and is making her younger self’s dream equipment.
“The only limit this industry should have is imagination,” she insists.
She’s won awards from MIT, taught university-level classes since she was 15, and co-founded ACES, one of Australia’s fastest-growing hardware communities, all before 20. Her co-founder, Sean Coulon-Clark, studied mechatronics and has worked alongside her on hardware projects ever since.
Their first tester, a software engineer at Roblox, was shocked:
“Woah, I’m feeling something! What!?”
Since launch, they have demoed their gloves at Open Sauce to overwhelmingly positive feedback, and are aiming to showcase them at SXSW and CES next.
Founder: Freesia Gaul, Sean Coulon-Clark
HeySTU
Melbourne, Vic
One-liner: STU is a personal desk companion robot that helps people with ADHD stay focused, organised, and on track.
The HeySTU team: Ikya Thearam, William Cerdelli & Matteo Beretta
In a world full of distractions, people with ADHD often struggle with focus, task management, and burnout. It’s not just frustrating, it’s costly. ADHD is linked to higher rates of job loss, mental health issues, and productivity loss, with global economic costs in the billions.
STU is a friendly, conversational desk robot designed to support people with ADHD. It helps users break down their thoughts, plan their day, study more effectively, and stay on top of tasks, like a helpful teammate that sits beside you.
The team behind STU has both lived experience with ADHD and deep technical expertise in machine learning. Together, they’re building tools that genuinely understand how neurodiverse brains work.
In just 4 days, STU’s early test launch grew to 150 users, with over 1,000 people now on the waitlist. The first prototype was built in just two weeks, and pilot partnerships are already underway.
Founders: Ikya Thearam, Matteo Beretta & William Cerdelli
