Joining us for E142 are Katie Heathcote, Associate Director Technology – Export Services for Investment NSW and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, CEO and Founder of Fintech company Cape. 

Just last month (June) Innovation Bay spent 3 days and 3 nights in Noosa, Queensland with over 100 of the country’s leading VCs for our VC community Aurora’s annual cornerstone event, Venture Downunder (VDU). After a learning day full to the brim with panels, discussions, keynotes and serendipitous conversations, we took the opportunity to sit down with three of the most illustrious and active VCs in the ecosystem right now to take a snapshot in time of the current state of affairs of our industry and to catch their thoughts, concerns and what they’re most excited about right now.

Dr Julio Ribeiro is the Co-Founder and CEO of Inventia Life Science, a deeptech, biotechnology company. Inventia build instruments for the 3D printing of biomaterials (literal living human cells) to print 3D structures or models of tumors with an ultimate aim to accelerate the drug discovery process and speed up medical research.

IT’S OUR BIRTHDAY! Today, Innovation Bay’s Open The Pod Bay Doors turns 5! To celebrate, we’ve taken it way back to our very first guest. Daniel Petre is the Godfather of the ecosystem and has arguably been around longer and had more success than anyone else in the sector. In 2014, Daniel founded Airtree alongside Craig Blair but a year ago, made the move out of VC and into the philanthropy space.

Anthony Zaccaria is the Co-Founder of Linktree which is essentially a category creator for link in bio tools and a one-stop place to house entire online link ecosystems. In just 6 years, Linktree has gathered a massive global following with a user base of 24 million people – or the population of Australia (!!) – generating 1.2 billion Linktree visits per month. Earlier this year, Linktree reached unicorn status, with a $1.3 billion USD valuation following a $110 million USD raise.

Darren Miller is the CEO of Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) – whose purpose it is to support the transition to net zero emissions by accelerating the pace of pre-commercial innovation.

Dale Brett is the Co-Founder & CEO at Fl0 – a low code platform for software engineers. Founded just a year ago (in 2021), Fl0 raised $11.5 million in its seed round with funding from the likes of Blackbird, Skip Capital and Jelix. Fl0’s vision is to empower software developers and engineers to be 20 times faster and more efficient. 

Laura is the CEO and Founder of SafeStack Academy, a community-centric online education platform on a mission to give software developers, analysts and architects all of the skills they need to build secure internet software.

Allegra Spender, currently running as an independent candidate for the Senate seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s east, is daughter to Italian immigrant parents – her father a barrister, politician and diplomat, her mother a renowned Australian fashion designer, the late Carla Zampatti.

For the past 14 years, Tech23 has showcased and amplified the emerging deeptech talent coming out of Australia that have the potential to create new industries and smarter solutions. Tech23 is a national forum whereby 23 early stage companies are chosen to tell their story and speak about their innovation on stage to an audience of industry leaders, investors, potential enterprise customers and other up and coming founders.

Duncan Anderson, along with his two friends Jeremy Cox and Ben Sze, is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of EdTech company Edrolo. After some time working at Google, Duncan and his two business partners met while working at Goulburn and Sacs some 10 years ago.

Ben Thompson is the Founder and CEO of Employment Hero. The company is Australia’s newest unicorn, recently announcing a funding round of $181 million, valuing the firm at $1.25 billion. Ben grew up in Frenchs Forrest in Sydney and finished his schooling in Armidale, rural NSW.