Alex Moss, Chris Jeffery, Greg Jardine lead the way
Three Brisbane entrepreneurs are making their presence felt in medicine and mining.
Hi-tech safety gear, micro surgical tools and potent natural painkillers are just three of the projects emerging from Brisbane’s spirited startup sector.
Alex Moss
Founder of Canaria
When Alex Moss announced to a big-time investor in 2017 that she wanted to revolutionise the way underground miners were kept safe at work, the advice he gave was unequivocal. “He said to us: ‘Look, if you’re serious about mining, there is only one place in the world you need to go’,” the designer, then based in London, says of the meeting in Las Vegas. “This is the only location in the world where mining technology is taken seriously and there is actual real progress and breakthroughs are being made.”
Three years on, Moss is partnering with the resources sector to help equip miners with a wearable device that monitors the signs of fatigue that typically precede a workplace catastrophe.
The Canaria device hooks over a miner’s ear and tracks the wearer’s heart rate, respiration, blood-oxygen saturation, temperature and ambient gas. Should the worker’s condition deteriorate, worker and manager are alerted to the risk.
Moss says two-thirds of industrial accidents are caused by cognitive fatigue, which her device could detect with 99.5 per cent accuracy. “Not only are we detecting – all this information is being streamed into our artificial intelligence system,” she says. “If you can identify a pattern, your machine learning can then work out what they know the next pattern is going to be.”
The startup was backed by Unearthed, an Australian startup accelerator, after an earlier version designed for astronauts was awarded “best use of hardware” at NASA’s Global Space Apps Challenge in 2016.
Moss’s workspace on Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, is emblematic of Brisbane’s transformation since Queensland’s “moonlight state” era when it hosted a series of notorious brothels, strip clubs and watering holes. Today it hosts the 460sqm Arc Hardware Accelerator – a co-working space for tech-focused startups decked out with 3D printers, laser-cutters, power tools and computer workstations.
A former fashion model, Moss is acutely aware of her personal brand, mixing haute couture and coalmining at her Instagram account, alexsorinamoss. Amid interest from the oil and gas industry as well as mining, she is working on incorporating a heatstroke monitor into the device.
“We’re uncertain what the next problem will be, but we’re keeping our ear out,” she says. “We go through what the biggest problems are to anyone working in resources which are life-threatening, and we want to eliminate each of those one by one with new versions of our equipment.”
Moss says it was the right call to leave London: “Brisbane has a global reputation in the technology sector for being one of the breakthrough hubs for resource sector technology.”
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Chris Jeffery
Surgeon, CEO, Field Orthopaedics
The Brisbane River is well known for its floods but ambitious entrepreneurs such as Chris Jeffery reckon the river city is building a reputation for breeding startup “swamp monsters”. Jeffery’s company, Field Orthopaedics, is touted as an emerging leader in the field of medical devices and in January staged a world-first operation in Brisbane using the world’s smallest available orthopaedic screw.
The micro-screw is one of a slew of inventions spearheaded by the 31-year-old doctor, an electrical engineer who retrained as a surgeon after serving as an army captain in Afghanistan and Iraq. These days he works directly with his fellow surgeons to troubleshoot their stickiest problems.
Jeffery says the small-pond atmosphere of Brisbane has helped encourage greater collaboration between new companies, in sharp contrast to the feisty rivalries that drive startup cultures elsewhere.
“You can very quickly, if you have the right culture and the right values, become a big fish,” he says.
“It’s very supportive and we don’t have the international competition at the early phases as you would if you were in Silicon Valley. You can become a bit of a swamp monster and then when you, a year or two years later, step out onto the global stage, you’ve already had all this progress that you can reach into your back pocket – you’ve got surgical backing, you’ve got market validation, you’ve got capital. You can now start to play a much more mature business game.”
Jeffery’s cannulated screws, which measure 1.5mm and 2mm across, won approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration last year and are being assessed by regulators in Australia and Europe.
January’s operation by hand surgeon Greg Couzens was performed with permission from regulators on a young patient with a complex finger fracture which resulted from a sports injury.
Although Field Orthopaedics’ private equity comes from Sydney, being based in Brisbane keeps the company’s overheads lower and helps build strong academic ties with innovators in the city’s universities.
“You have to also pay acknowledgment to the amazing work of the Advance Queensland program,” Jeffery says. “We’ve won some Ignite grants, and the federal government is fantastic. I think everyone has the right priorities in Australia when it comes to supporting small, innovative businesses.”
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Greg Jardine
Dr Red Nutraceuticals
From his modest vineyard in Brisbane’s outer-western suburbs, biochemist Greg Jardine is trying to brew the world’s most potent natural painkiller. The Adelaide-born entrepreneur’s obsession is polyphenols – pain-dulling micronutrients – and he is pioneering new ways to extract the biggest bang out of plants such as French oak and green tea.
After trials showed some of his concoctions rivalling aspirin and ibuprofen, Jardine is turning to older and rarer plants such as the purple loosestrife now growing at his vineyard at Jollys Lookout.
“We’re after the world’s most powerful medicine,” he says. “It looks like it’s going to be around this purple loosestrife. It’s a plant nobody’s heard of, it’s a native plant of Australia and a few other parts of the world, and she works like a dandy when we put it through this ageing process.”
Two-thirds of Australians use complementary medicines, underwriting a $3.5 billion domestic industry. The export potential would be many times greater.
Being based in Brisbane has been a mixed blessing for Jardine’s company, Dr Red Nutraceuticals, which launched in 2003 and pre-dates the city’s startup boom. In its early days, the company benefited from the kind of media profile that follows being one of the few startups in the state capital.
Jardine recalls being invited to appear in a parochial Nine Network special showcasing Queensland “icons” in the early 2000s. “Had that been NSW or Victoria, that wouldn’t have been the case. Nowadays we’re worthy of Australian and international respect, but at the time we were just Brisbane-based and convenient to the local media, I think,” he says.
More recently, the company has benefited from Queensland Labor’s push to support startups, winning a $99,500 grant under the Palaszczuk government’s Advance Queensland subsidies scheme to pursue research with Nerada, a green tea grower in the state’s far north.
There have been some drawbacks, however.
“The negatives are that we’ve suffered from the floods and other things. Having half the town under water, we’ve suffered,” Jardine says, adding his business was once without power for two weeks.
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