An aerospace engineer walks into a NICU and doesn't leave the same person. On this episode of big bets & bad calls, Clint and Andrew sit down with Alex Newton, co-founder and CEO of Navi Medical Technologies, whose company has spent seven years building a device to solve a problem most people never knew existed: confirming catheter placement in critically ill newborns without repeat X-rays and dangerous delays.

Alex brought the actual device into the studio. We talk about the bet of leaving a stable aerospace career for a pre-revenue medtech startup, what it takes to raise hardware funding in Australia, and how Navi landed an FDA Breakthrough Device designation along the way.

50,000 researchers. 400,000 downloads. Used in COVID vaccine validation, Great Barrier Reef science, cancer treatment development, and CRISPR research. And it nearly collapsed because there was no money to maintain it. Mixomics co-founders Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Mike Rennie sit down with Clint and Andrew to talk about building a global scientific standard on no budget, the big bet of going from academic project to real company, and why their biggest bad call was letting other people's doubt become their own.

Rob de Burgh Day has been an electrician, a talent agent, a venue owner, and the guy running a call centre out of Cambodia. So yeah — the Brightspace story didn't start in a boardroom.

In this episode, Rob walks us through a winding founder journey that pivoted hard when COVID wiped out a million dollars of equipment sitting in boxes. Out of that chaos came a genuinely interesting idea: a live digital twin for buildings — tracking people, air quality, temperature and energy use in real time, so that the whole place runs smarter.

Today Brightspace is installing at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, working with major asset owners across Singapore and Malaysia, and chasing Changi Airport as the crown jewel.

We get into the real stuff: what it actually costs to build hardware (and why you probably shouldn't), the hidden nightmare of integrating into buildings that have been patched together for 80 years, raising money when the tank is empty, and why consistent investment agreements will save you thousands in legal fees — eventually.

Rob's also one of the more privacy-conscious founders we've had on — he's literally built hardware limitations into his product so it can't identify individuals. In a world where 40% of his clients would happily go further, that's a genuine values call.

Good stories, hard lessons, and one very memorable charity bike ride that landed his first client.

Sheree Andersen didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She grew up on a Tasmanian farm, spent two decades in corporate HR, and stumbled into startups when she fell in love with building something from nothing.

In this episode, Sheree — Co-Founder of Trove, the platform supercharging how brands manage corporate gifting at scale — walks us through the bets that defined her journey: leaving a working business behind to build something entirely new, sending co-founder Johnny to Singapore without a single local contact, and deliberately targeting Asia's gifting culture before anyone told them to.

She also gets honest about the bad calls: building before validating, hiring before the business was ready, and chasing big partnership opportunities that quietly went nowhere.

We get into AI, team culture, the female founder funding gap, and why saying no is sometimes the most powerful thing you can do.

Warm, candid, and full of hard-won wisdom.

Two electrochemists. One $1.50 hack. A diagnostic platform that could go anywhere.

Prof. Conor Hogan published a breakthrough mobile diagnostics idea in 2011 without patenting it. Someone called him an idiot. He never forgot it.

Years later, he did it right — secured the patent, landed a multinational licensing deal, spent five years developing a smartphone-based wine sulphite test. Then the company walked away. The IP came back to La Trobe. What felt like a gut punch turned out to be a free shot on goal.

That's when Dr. Saimon Silva showed up — a Brazilian electrochemist with the manufacturing instincts Conor didn't know he was missing. Together they founded Eolas DX, built on a simple insight: the audio codec in every smartphone can do the same work as a $20,000 lab instrument, for $1.50.

Wine testing first. Heavy metals, roadside drug tests, and disease biomarkers next. The mission: accurate diagnostics, everywhere, for anyone.

What if the problem with healthcare isn't the doctors — it's the whole system they're trapped in?

This week, Clint and Andrew sit down with Dr Farhad Goodarzy and Sadaf Tamizkar, co-founders of a healthcare startup that's quietly rewriting the rules on how Australians access primary care. And they're doing it in a way that's as practical as it is ambitious.

It started with a simple observation: international students were showing up sick — not because they didn't have insurance, but because they didn't understand how to use it. From that seed grew something much bigger: a model that brings GPs into workplaces, surfaces silent cardiovascular risks before they become crises, and builds the kind of connected wellness network that GPs actually want to be part of.

Oh — and they're about to flip the name. By the time you're listening to this, the rebrand is done. But the vision? That hasn't changed one bit.

In this episode:

• The pivot from international students to manufacturing workplaces — and why 6–10% of workers were walking around with serious undiagnosed heart conditions
• Why selling software to GP clinics doesn't work — and why owning the clinics does
• The "Project X" vision: AI-powered wellness insights, a network of GP practices, and telehealth — all talking to each other
• Australia's looming GP shortage (11,000+ by 2031) and how smarter data could stretch every 15-minute consult further

Bad Calls will have to wait — these two are moving too fast to make many yet. We'll have them back.

James Smith had 150 students, five English classes, and a standing Sunday appointment with a pile of marking that never got smaller.

So at 25, with barely two paying customers — both friends of friends — he quit his job and bet everything on fixing a problem he knew better than anyone.

That was two and a half years ago. Today, Mark My Words is an AI-powered writing assessment platform in schools across Australia and New Zealand, with 200 new schools onboarded in the first five weeks of this year alone — and conversations underway in the US and UK.

In this episode, James walks us through the quit-your-job moment, the $80 wake-up call that shaped his entire tech architecture, and the scrappy $9.99 pricing hack that cracked open the school market from the bottom up.

Megan Coomer and Michael Stumpf are the co-founders of Cell Bauhaus — a startup building software that simulates biology on a computer before anyone sets foot in a lab. Think 10x faster, 10x cheaper biotech innovation. We dig into how a published research paper caught the attention of the Gates Foundation, what it's like to wake up to $3.1M in your bank account, and why they believe they're sitting on a $79B market with no real incumbent. Two brilliant scientists, one civilisation-scale bet.

We sat down with Samar Mcheileh and Roo Harris, two of the three co-founders of Scale Investors to talk about being Australia’s First Women-Led VC Fund backing Women-Led Startups.

Founded in 2013 as a gender-lens syndicate, Scale Investors launched its debut venture capital fund in 2025.The fund is backed by the Forrests’ Minderoo Foundation, the family of the late, iconic, female entrepreneur, Carla Zampatti, as well as the Thickins Family Office, founded by Celina Thickins and her husband, Joel Thickins, the head of private equity firm TPG Asia. They have raised over $30 million to date for early-stage, women-led ventures and have already made their first investment through the fund.

What if you could inhale your vaccine instead of bracing for a needle? We sat down with Dr. Anushi Rajapaksa, founder of Misti, who's on a mission to change the way biological medicines — including vaccines — get into your body. No needle. No clinic. Just a smart inhaler that uses sound waves, from the comfort of your own home