Introducing 2022’s top innovators: Seabin, Reejig, BindiMaps are hiring the jobs of the future

A fresh crop of founders and future makers are shaping Australia’s economy. Here are five of the most unique.

Seabin CEO and co-founder Pete Ceglinski. Picture: AAP/Image Matthew Vasilescu

Amid the ongoing market carnage, new opportunities are opening up for the next generation of tech companies, and their investors. Start-up success stories Snapchat, Airbnb, WhatsApp and Uber were all created during the global financial crisis – ‘recession babies’, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel calls them – and this downturn is already providing similar fertile ground for new innovation.

Despite the widespread uncertainty there’s strong reason for optimism – a record number of start-ups were created during the pandemic, while tech is becoming an even stronger driver of our economy than it was already.

CEO of Snap Inc. Evan Spiegel presents at the livestreamed Snap Partner Summit 2022 on April 28, 2022. Picture: Snap, Inc./Getty Images for Snap, Inc.

Last year our team at The Australian and Vogue Australia produced the inaugural edition of The List: Australia’s Top 100 Innovators, celebrating the entrepreneurs, founders and companies building our future.

This year, our team along with our expert panellists including Atlassian work futurist Dom Price, Culture Amp CEO Didier Elzinga, Robyn Denholm, Julie Bishop and Engineers Australia chief engineer Jane MacMaster and more have uncovered the top Australians helping drive the nation forward, across new categories including crypto, Web3 and quantum computing.

Here are five of the most unique innovators to make our 2022 list and you can see the full list here.

Jacquie Garrett
Co-founder and chief executive, GGWP Academy

GGWP Academy describes itself as “your gaming career spawn point” and is an e-learning and marketplace platform, assisting countless gamers and content creators in building up their careers and their online presence. The company‘s platform, which is built by gamers for gamers, provides online courses to help users form communities, build their online profiles and increase engagement.

Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski
Co-founders, Seabin Project

Seabin Project founders Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski had first-hand experience of plastic pollution while travelling the world as surfers and boatbuilders. The pair‘s ultimate goal is to “have pollution-free oceans for our future generations”. To get there, their company is building rubbish bins in the water – seabins – that collect trash, oil, fuel and detergents. The company now has seabins in more than 50 countries that have captured more than three million kilograms of rubbish that would have otherwise polluted our seas and oceans.

Anna Wright, Mladen Jovanovic, Tony Burrett
Founders, BindiMaps

It was her own retinal condition and experiences with eye surgery that led former accountant and business school lecturer Anna Wright to dwell on the possibility of improved accessibility for the vision impaired.

Sarah Savage with Rachael Leahcar using the BindiMaps app.Picture: Mike Burton/AAP

Wright used a SheStarts grant to found technology start-up BindiMaps with Mladen Jovanovic in 2017, offering navigation in indoor spaces not serviced by traditional GPS. The app locates users inside complicated spaces such as universities, office buildings and shopping centres, using audio to describe the surroundings and calculating the best path to reach their destination.

Peter Toth, Gavin Conibeer and Babett Volgyesi
Co-founders, Extraterrestrial Power

Extraterrestrial Power ultimately wants to see energy-intensive industries such as data centres shift off the Earth and into the solar system, therefore contributing to the greening of the planet. But central to such a vision is the availability of clean and sustainable power on the Moon. The company is busy delivering on its mission of producing mass-manufacturable, radiation-tolerant, silicon solar cells for 10 times cheaper than current space solar cells, manufacturing them robotically in situ. “After supporting space and Lunar missions with our advanced silicon solar cells, we are aiming to produce electricity on the Moon from locally sourced ingredients,” the company’s co-founders say.

Siobhan Savage
Co-founder and chief executive, Reejig

Reejig CEO Siobhan Savage, CTO Mike Reed and chief data scientist Dr Shujia Zhang. Source: Supplied.

Sydney start-up Reejig has developed what it says is the world’s first independently audited ethical talent AI, created in partnership with the University of Technology Sydney. The AI-driven HR platform ensures biases are significantly reduced from the recruitment and talent-management process. Reejig, which is chaired by former Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer and led by CEO and co-founder Savage, gives management an overview of the skills base within a company’s workforce. Clients includes Woolworths, John Holland and KPMG. It gives managers a big-picture sense of their employees’ skills and can predict any crucial gaps. Reejig recently raised $21 million through a funding round led by Skip Capital’s Kim Jackson and her husband, Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar, AirTree Ventures, Greta Bradman, and Culture Amp’s Didier Elzinga. Airtree says Reejig is one of the fastest-growing companies in its portfolio.