2025 Cohort Wraps Up for Innovation Victoria's University Innovation Platform Fellowship

"The problem that I am most passionate to solve is the mental health crisis, which feels like a big problem. Through the fellowship, we spoke to a lot of people about the challenges they face when coping with their mental health. Through these conversations, we narrowed down the problem and shifted our focus to the early intervention and prevention phase, focusing on promoting mental health and wellbeing literacy to school children instead. If we stop the problem from happening, or equip young people with tools to help cope with them, wouldn't that be better."

"The past year really taught me to have a thick skin, both with dealing with rejections and for putting myself out there and ask for help. I think my confidence as a founder and entrepreneur definitely increased in some ways. I am very much an external validations person, so when people tell me that they believe in what I'm doing or when I win pitch competitions ;), that really gives my confidence a boost. But at the same time, I also learned that there are so many things that I do not know, and so many things that I am not good at, but that encourages me because it is pushing me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to learn new things, and I like learning :)"

"One of the grant applications I worked really hard on and was really counting on got rejected. When I got the email, I was at the coworking space with my team, and I felt really sad to be sharing the news with them. But I think both me and my team are now the wallowing types, and also mostly because we still have a lot of work that we need to do that day. So we had a break for lunch, went and got bubble tea, then went back to work. We also scheduled a meeting with the grants body to get feedback. It is so rare for grants to give feedback, so we really appreciated it, at the end of the day it was a mismatch between our project and what they typically fund, even though on paper we fit their criteria. I learned that I need to find grants, investors, and believers who understand and believe in what we are trying to achieve."

"We did a few public playtesting sessions at AVCON, a games convention in Adelaide and ACMI, and we were able to engage with young people and their parents. Parents told us it's good that we are teaching mental health topics through a game in a light-touch and engaging way. When we invited one of the kids to our upcoming game co-design workshops, she got really excited and showed us some of her own artworks and stories. It's really encouraging, because it showed us that young people are so creative and have so much agency. They want to be involved in co-designing a game that can help them and their peers."
 

"I think working with young people, co-designing the game really excites me, because they are so full of hope and excitement. In another game design workshop, I was helping a 10-year-old boy design his own game, just seeing the pure joy on his face. It reminded me of when I was 12 (I told him I'm a late bloomer) and the excitement that I had when I coded my first games (I used html to make a choose your own adventure), and seeing code become something interactive, it felt like magic. So yeah, that's what excites me about the next chapter of Mental Jam, helping other kids discover magic ;)"

"Our biggest challenge was identifying where our optical-imaging technology could deliver the greatest clinical and commercial value. That led us to establish Titch Technologies, with a clear first mission: addressing the need for better visibility inside the cochlea during implant surgery. Our focus is now generating compelling preclinical evidence and developing micro-vision systems that meet surgeons’ practical needs."

"I’m most proud of establishing Titch with early investor backing and complementary technical and commercial leadership. It gave us the foundation to translate our research into a product addressing a significant surgical challenge. Our ambition extends beyond one device: we are building a miniature-vision platform with potential across procedures where size limits what surgeons can see."

"I’ve learned that exceptional technology is the starting point, not the business case. Successful commercialisation requires a clear customer need, a product that fits clinical workflows and a credible path to scalable manufacturing. We now prioritise milestones that demonstrate practical value, reduce adoption risk and strengthen the investment case, rather than technical performance alone."

"The most valuable lesson was learning to challenge the business case as rigorously as the science. The Fellowship supported my transition from researcher to founder, helping me recognise the importance of staying ambitious about the technology while being disciplined about its first market. That perspective was fundamental to shaping Titch’s commercial direction.  A particularly valuable experience was interviewing leading cochlear-implant experts across the UK, US and Australia. Their insights helped us better understand the unmet need for surgical visibility and shape Titch’s development around surgeons’ priorities."

"Our defining milestone is demonstrating in a preclinical study that Titch’s micro-vision system provides useful real-time visual guidance during cochlear-implant surgery, supported by surgeon feedback. Achieving this would move us beyond technical promise towards evidence of surgical value, reinforcing the foundation for our next investment round and future industry partnerships."

"The most significant shift has been moving DeepDerm from a research project to a working device in the hands of clinicians. Over the past year we pivoted twice before landing on the final design of a single handheld unit with our AI model running inference directly on the device. Each of those pieces existed in some form in the research and ideation phase. Getting them to run together repeatably in something a clinician can actually hold and use inside a normal consultation is a completely different problem, and that is the one we solved this year. We also completed CSIRO ON Accelerate during the Fellowship period, which helped as much for building team culture as it did for the technology. The breakthrough was less a single moment than the point where DeepDerm stopped being a research setup and started becoming a clinical product."

"Early on we assumed the hardest problem was detection accuracy. What we learnt is that the real barrier to adoption is operational rather than technical. For us it sits precisely in primary care where GPs are the first and often only point of assessment and where dermoscopy expertise is not evenly distributed. That reframed what we were building. We drifted in our design approach to fit inside a standard consultation rather than a specialist referral pathway. Regional and remote clinics cannot depend on reliable connectivity, and patient skin images should not have to leave the room, so our model is capable of running entirely on-device. Feedback has also changed the hardware itself, including the optical path and the way DermScan contacts the skin, where clinical usability and signal quality pull against each other in ways only practitioners could have shown us."

"It helped us bridge the valley of death by funding the part of deep tech that grants tend not to reach. Research funding supports discovery and investigation. It does not easily cover building the multiple prototype units you need to get to an MVP or paying engineers to work on hardware that will not produce a paper, or the unglamorous work of standing up a company at all: accounting, administration and governance. None of that is optional and none of it is fundable through a research grant. The Fellowship covered exactly that, and it did so at a stage where the alternative would have been raising equity before we had the evidence to raise it well. That timing mattered. Being in the inaugural cohort has also opened doors that early-stage founders do not usually get access to in Victoria, and it gave DeepDerm institutional credibility at a point when we were still largely a research story."

"Learning that the hardest constraints are rarely technical. As a researcher, you are rewarded for novelty. In a medical company, you are rewarded for repeatability and for evidence someone else can audit. The single biggest recalibration was realising that ethics approval and regulatory classification sit on the critical path, not at the end of it, and that a fantastic model is worth very little without the quality processes wrapped around it. Governance has been the other learning curve, which is why I am working through the AICD course. And there is a quieter version of this too. I hold an academic appointment and run a company, and I have spent the year getting comfortable belonging to both, and neither."

"Spend the Fellowship on whatever takes the longest in calendar time, not on whatever is most interesting technically. For us that was IP and regulatory groundwork which cannot be compressed by working harder, unlike engineering. Start those conversations in month one. The second thing is to be specific with Innovation Victoria about what you actually need. The Fellowship is the beginning of a relationship (not a transaction) and the team behind it can help with far more than the capital if you tell them plainly where you are stuck."