2020 has brought with it unprecedented times. For the team at SBE Australia, it's also brought an incredible group of inspiring female founders who make up the cohort for the 2020 SBE by Springboard Enterprises Tech Program.
The team this year hail from all over Australia, working across a range of industries. From virtual courtrooms, to electric car charging enablement, the technologies these women have created are needed now more than ever. We are so excited to help accelerate the opportunity for them.
The program would usually kick off with a week long face-to-face Bootcamp, although due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have re-envisioned how to deliver a jam-packed program virtually.
The program will now run over a 12 week time frame, with a virtual boot camp, virtual workshops and virtual advisory sessions. We are excited that the adapted program has allowed for an even greater depth of global mentors and experts to be involved.
We are so thrilled to announce the cohort of 9 incredible women with enormous opportunity.
Suzanne Dodds, Founder of Complete Home Filtration
Suzanne Dodds has over 19 years’ experience in developing and successfully implementing business strategies resulting in profitable business ventures not only in Australia but also in South Korea and Spain. Now, as the Founder of Environmental Water Solutions t/a Complete Home Filtration, Suzanne has spent the last 24 months launching the business in WA. Since launch, Suzanne has been successful in becoming the second WA start up to secure venture capital from RAC’s Better Labs also won an Accelerating Commercialisation grant for her new invention. Suzanne is passionate about water and helping people access the best quality water throughout their homes. Suzanne started her first business at 24 and has 13 years experience in water filtration, founding Call a Cooler in 2007 and exiting this water cooler rental business in 2017. She has a Bachelor of Science in Economics with minor honours in Business Economics and an MBA which she completed intensively at UWS in 2015. Her experience to date has spanned the Sales & Marketing, Water, Energy, Telecommunications and Banking & Finance industries.
Complete Home Filtration provides Australians with innovative solutions to access unlimited, clean, freshly filtered water throughout the whole home, so the benefits are not just limited to drinking clean and safe water.
Jacqui Nelson, founder of Dekko Secure
Following a successful career in the finance industry and on the trading floors in Australia and London, Jacqui Nelson transitioned across to the Tech Industry in late 2016. As the co-founder and CEO of Dekko Secure, a secure communication and collaboration platform, Jacqui leads the organisation as it reforms the secure workflow space by bringing technologies that are secure by design to the marketplace. Jacqui has a proven track record in building organisations and remains a Non-Executive Director of Paper Scissors Rock Pty a successful promotional agency that she founded in 1998. Jacqui has a passion for technologies that are used for good and a drive and desire to build and grow a successful led start up.
Dekko Secure is an innovative, intuitive and comprehensive application that addresses the most pressing problems confronting both individuals and organisations, small and large. We focus on replacing high-risk electronic exchanges like email, or revolutionising workflows that have remained manual due to security and regulatory constraints.
Carola Jonas, founder of Everty
Carola Jonas is the CEO and Founder of Everty, a software company for electric car charging. Carola is also a board member of the Electric Vehicle Council Australia and has worked in CleanTech for many years including for global brands like Enphase Energy where she brought solar inverters, batteries and home energy management software to market.
Everty provides a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform to companies installing Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. The software allows EV charging station operators to monitor, manage and monetise their charging infrastructure assets and provides an interface to EV drivers for the use of chargers.
Felicity Hamilton, founder of OneVault
Felicity Hamilton is Co-founder and CEO of OneVault. After working in pharmacy, patient safety and quality, clinical governance and accreditation management for over 20 years’, Felicity understands the challenges healthcare face from the ward to the board and how increasing resources is not the answer. It’s about creating a robust clinical governance framework where technology can do the heavy lifting and labourious task of accreditation preparation. Felicity is the author of Accreditation Ready for Aged Care Professionals and her expert opinion and technology platform has been featured in the Australian Ageing Agenda Magazine, Silver and Wise Podcast and she has been a regular commentator on 5BBA FM community radio.
Felicity holds qualifications in Pharmacy Tech, Teaching Dance B.A.T.D. and is an MBA candidate in Healthcare Governance and Leadership.
OneVault solved the problem of healthcare using a myriad of mismatched systems to manage clinical governance and months of labour to prepare for accreditation by bringing all the tools healthcare need onto one integrated online platform that keeps our clients ready for accreditation 24/7.
Laura Keily, founder of Immediation Pty Ltd
A thought leader on improving access to justice using technology, Laura Keily is a barrister, specialising in complex commercial litigation. Prior to joining the Bar, Laura was a corporate lawyer with over 13 years’ experience in top tier firms, including in London's Magic Circle. She has advised listed, public and large private companies, government and not-for-profits, delivering high value and high-risk transactions (e.g. at Slaughter and May, London, she was the lead Senior Associate on the global sale of hotels by Hilton Hotels International to Hilton USA, (£3bn). Laura has three first class degrees (BSC (chemistry), LLB(Hons) and Masters of Commercial Law), and is a qualified company director and arbitrator. Laura was shortlisted in the Women-in-Law Awards for 'Innovator of the Year' in 2019, ‘Barrister of the Year’ in 2016/2017 and Women’s Agenda, Leadership Awards in 2016.
Immediation Pty Ltd is a World-first comprehensive online dispute resolution platform, empowering business, consumers and families to resolving disputes more efficiently.
Meggie Palmer, founder of PepTalkHer
Meggie Palmer is a former foreign correspondent turned entrepreneur and spent 15 years as a journalist for BBC World, CNBC, Channel 7, 10 & SBS Dateline. Her films have won New York Festival TV & Film Awards, UN Media Awards, a Walkley Award & she has been nominated for a Logie. In 2016 she travelled to Damascus for a World Exclusive interview with President Assad. Before founding PepTalkHer, she was VP Business Development the Financial Times working with brands like Barclays & IBM to create high impact content for Davos for C-Suite Executives. Her first business was Sliding Door Media, which started as a side hustle & grew to a global media consulting & media training business for brands including UNICEF & Contiki. She lectures at Columbia University & Barnard College. Non Executive Director of Cromwell College, Women in tech org Elevacao & NGO Burn Bright. Her experience of inequality led her to found PepTalkHer in 2016.
On a mission to close the gender pay gap, PepTalkHer supports Fortune 500 companies to recruit and retain professional women.
Fleur Johnston, founder of PeopleBench Pty Ltd
Fleur Johnston BA(Pysch), CAHRI, GAICD is an entrepreneur, change agent and social impact fanatic. With a background in workplace psychology, Fleur spent nearly 20 years in a range of strategic HR and major projects roles, leading large multi-agency change projects, primarily in government organisations. Professionally, Fleur has always been fascinated with whole-of-enterprise interventions intended to maximise impact in the community. In 2012, Fleur co-founded a successful management consulting practice, serving the Education, Health, Community Services, Aged Care & Public Administration sectors. Specialising in organisational strategy, restructures/re-design and behaviour change, she founded PeopleBench in 2017. She is a Certified member of the Australian Human Resources Institute and a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
PeopleBench is a workforce research & analytics company driving transformation in the K/P-12 Education sector. We provide real evidence for educators to inform and defend school workforce strategy and decision making.
Lucy Cooke, founder of SpaceDraft
Lucy Cooke is a Behavioural Scientist from Western Australia with a decade of experience in creative logistics. She was a child actress with imaginary friends before studying Behavioural Science. Her ability to hustle and bridge the communication gap between creatives and technologists led her to work in Hollywood on film sets directly for Vince Vaughn, Mel Gibson and Alex Proyas to name a few. While working on Game of Thrones in Los Angeles five years ago...Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality was blowing up. After producing a couple of XR experiences herself she realised that there was no cheap, fast and dirty way for people to communicate their imaginations and what was in their head. Lucy believes that the future of machine learning and AI's success depends on people’s ability to accurately express, document and archive their ideas for space and time via SpaceDraft.
SpaceDraft builds and sells dynamic, easy to use visual logistics software. It is a SaaS platform designed to assist anyone who needs to communicate plans that require spatial organisation of people and assets in a particular venue or space over a period of time.
Pia Lee, founder of Squadify
Pia Lee is an advocate for creating measurable and sustainable business impact for our broad range of global clients in both the private and public sectors. Pia’s experience and expertise spans over thirty years of educating others. She began her career teaching children, before following them to maturity and focusing on adult education and development. Pia has more than 15 years’ experience of coaching and consulting to CEOs and executives in industries such as finance, asset management, healthcare, technology, and professional services.
Pia completed her Masters of Organisational Coaching at the University of Sydney. She is the joint author of 'Keep Calm and Carry on Leading' and is qualified in a number of psychometric tools and assessments. A passionate thought-leader, she regularly speaks to large audiences on leadership with a narrative, storytelling style.
Squadify is a software platform for any team, anywhere and anyone who supports them. It wll continuously pinpoint conditions in the team to focus on in order to improve performance.