Macquarie Incubator welcomes new startups of 2022 including gene therapy for motor neuron disease

The most inclusive startup incubator in Australia, Macquarie University Incubator, has announced its second cohort of 2022, which includes gene therapy for motor neuron disease, fintech’s tackling property literacy and conflict-of-interest management software. 

The Incubator welcomes 14 new startups and scaleups to its line-up – interestingly they are seeing a rise in scaleups joining the incubator – and startups that are now scaling from previous cohorts which will remain within the incubator community. 

Despite a tougher year in the startup sector, experiencing a cooling investment market, in contrast, Incubator’s new cohort announcement comes off the back of its 2021 report card as well as their 2022 mid-year data, highlighting a successful start to 2022 and promising signs for the year ahead. 

Macquarie Incubator startups attracted over $44m in external funding in 2021, already making over $2.7 million in revenue this year alone and with the new cohort, have delivered 205 jobs into the market, contributing towards Australia’s transformation into an innovation economy. 

The unique mix of intrapreneurs, commercialising academics, early-stage startups and scaleup companies in the Incubator’s final cohort of 2022 will take part in an intensive program delivered by a network of industry experts, designed to drive the development of sustainable, scalable and investable companies. This broad-church approach is unique in the Australian innovation marketplace. 

The deliberate mix of startups, scaleups and researchers that will call the purpose-built Macquarie Incubator building home during their commercialisation journey include:

• Research commercialisation spin-offs:

  • Celosia Therapeutics, a revolutionary gene therapy treatment for motor neuron disease, Alzheimer’s and childhood epilepsy.

  • Attest, a conflict-of-interest management solution to help organisations to identify, appraise and manage conflicts by guiding users through a step-by-step reasoning process.

  • Electronic Field Notebooks - provides research-focused field data capture and management solutions for individuals, teams, and enterprises.

• Fintech companies including Sharer which aims to revolutionise the way listed shares are transferred and gifted in Australia, as well as Investocate, which provides young Australians with the foundations of investment, property, and financial literacy.

• The return of MQ Incubator Alumni WornUP – a circular economy scaleup who is also collaborating with CSIRO Melbourne that is focused on up-cycle non-wearable uniforms and production offcuts, turning them into next generation products.

In total, Incubator has now supported 89 companies since it opened its doors in 2017, with 11 startups graduating in 2022 so far.

Melissa Ryan, Macquarie University Incubator, Director Incubation & Entrepreneurship said: 

“Our Incubator is a thriving hub for founders, budding entrepreneurs, innovators, students, and researchers exploring, developing, and launching their ideas, with limitless potential for real-world impact. We’re so thrilled that our deeply collaborative and inclusive offering is continuing to stimulate high interest with those who dare to make a difference through innovation and action via the startup journey. “ 

“Despite the market challenges our sector is facing globally, we know that Sydney’s close-knit but fast-growing startup community is in good stead to navigate the challenges and our Incubator’s continual strong growth and engagement demonstrate this.” 

“In fact, there is an emerging movement in Australia towards an innovation economy valuing ideas as the new ‘resource boom’, we believe the key to unlocking innovation is via entrepreneurial pathways. We’re proud to a part of this transformation with our diverse line up of startups and scaleups. 

About the program:

The Startup Educate program takes startups on a practical and applied-learning journey focused on the knowledge areas business founders need to know to build sustainable, high-growth organisations, including:

• Value proposition, lean business model and customer-centric business design tools such as design thinking.

• marketing and communications

• digital and sales strategy development and selling techniques

• corporate governance and structuring

• intellectual property management and legal for startups

• investment

The program now includes programming specifically targeted to scaling company needs. Developing founders’ capabilities in areas that become critical as a company starts to scale. 

About Macquarie Incubator’s Cohort 2022

Attest

Conflicts of interest are an inevitable feature of organisational and professional life and need to be appropriately managed.

Many organisations have policies and processes in place for identifying and managing conflicts of interest, but cases of undeclared or inadequately managed conflicts of interest continue to arise. This creates problems including loss of public trust, ethical violations, and threats to an organisations' 'bottom line.'

Attest offers a novel means for individuals and organisations to identify, appraise and manage conflicts of interest by guiding users through a step-by-step reasoning process.

Following this process enables individuals and organisations to overcome barriers to effective conflict of interest management, fulfil their obligations and maintain trust. 

Celosia Therapeutics

A new spin-off company of MQ University.

Celosia Therapeutics will be a privately held pre-clinical stage gene therapy company, developing solutions for neurodegenerative diseases that have limited alternative therapeutic options.

Celosia aims to address unmet therapeutic needs in neurodegenerative diseases. 

Centre for Armed Violence Reduction

The Centre for Armed Violence Reduction (Centre for AVR) researches, develops and promotes platforms necessary to enable AVR, especially in fragile, conflict and violence affected countries.

An AVR platform makes it possible to meet arms, ammunition and explosive control standards as well as prevent, track, and respond to armed incidents involving violence, trafficking or illicit possession. As an international non-profit group, we partner with government agencies around the world, UN and multilateral bodies, and technical organisations such as MAG International and Beyond Essential Systems.

The main platform solution being developed by the Centre for AVR is ArmsTracker. It is being installed and used in a growing number of countries, initially in Africa and island states. ArmsTracker fills the most common gaps in national control systems, including record-keeping, stockpile management, tracing, reporting, identification, and interagency cooperation. It helps countries reduce gun-related crime, trafficking, injury, and death and reduce the risk of armed conflict. 

Chaos 1

Defence and security Innovation eXecution* company.

Chaos1 provides end-to-end innovation management software and professional services to accelerate positive disruption and outcome-driven innovation. Their purpose is to be no better friend in empowering those solving our toughest national security challenges. 

Electronic Field Notebooks

Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd provides research-focused field data capture and management solutions for individuals, teams, and enterprises.

Our software, FieldMark, provides a flexible on- or off-line platform for field research, supporting digital data capture and management in diverse situations that enables researchers to improve quality and efficiency of research, and organisations to meet compliance requirements and manage data assets. 

Investocate

Investocate is creating an experience to develop an individual voice, strategic thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.

Investocate aims to provide young Australians with the foundations of Investment, Property and Financial literacy.

They believe understanding both will allow for a positive impact on the wellbeing of individuals, their families and communities and improve their overall quality of life. Investocate has taken on this responsibility of providing free, impartial information, tools, and resources to assist Australians with long-term behavioural change in this space.

The initiative is focused on Educating, Informing and Supporting millennials/Gen-Zs in making better-informed decisions in the property market (as a feature of Occubuy) as well as increasing financial literacy. 

inclood

inclood is the world’s first NEXP (Network Exchange Platform) solving the great B2B system disconnection problem.

It creates a network of all your people where you can freely and easily exchange and organise data and ideas and provides a platform that integrates all your systems and processes in a way that systems actually ‘talk to one another’.

inclood connects anything, anyone, anywhere at any time. Businesses, customers, workers, community groups, and government departments can all benefit from inclood – it means nothing, and no-one falls between the gaps. It is where everything comes together to make work and life easier. 

Latent Knowledge

Latent Knowledge builds software products leveraging natural language processing and data visualisation techniques.

Our flagship product, LitView, is a research performance platform for matching ideas, not just finding the top result with a classic search engine. We use document embeddings, multi-domain search, and an interactive 3-D visualization to help users navigate dense text-based data, in contrast to Google which provides a single search bar and static ranked list. 

Let Sleep Happen

Let Sleep Happen Pty Ltd is a sleep-specialist clinical and health psychology group, offering accessible sleep health education and coaching for individuals and corporations.

We are focused on preventing insomnia & circadian sleep-wake disorders with easy-to-access sleep education and online coaching, and offering widescale evidence-based sleep training programs for health and education professionals 

Manager 365

An integrated, custom-designed & cost-effective software solution for your rental business. Our software covers custom features such as online onboarding, integrated web booking, recurring invoices, direct debit and card payment option, toll management, mobile apps for managers and drivers, cloud-based, trackers from $139 with monthly Data SIM Cost of $, e-sign and alerts. 

Sharer

Sharer is a new fintech start-up aiming to revolutionize the way that listed shares are transferred and gifted in Australia. Sharer will offer Australia’s first platform designed to allow users to send, receive, invest and monitor their shareholdings offering an elegant solution to the current process which is expensive, time consuming and complex. 

Studynix

STUDYNIX's mission is to provide a high-fidelity online education platform and create opportunities for less privileged students to get educated. STUDYNIX believes that everyone should have the opportunity to learn and get educated irrespective of their financial, cultural, or demographic background.

They leverage technology at scale to bring down the cost of education and connect students directly with teachers rather than institutions monopolising the education sector.

STUDYNIX provides the platform for teachers to host their course content delivered as video on demand and educate students via interactive live classes. 

Wippli

Wippli engages suppliers and clients to initiate, produce and deliver digital work from anywhere.

Wippli is a B2B online Smart Workflow Platform for clients, suppliers and teams to engage in digital work, anywhere.

Wippli packages workflows into effortless, out-of-the-box lean processes/bundles adapted to various industries for digital professionals to engage in digital tasks easily, from start to end.

Inspired by The Future of Work, The Gig Economy and +20 years of client/supplier interactions, Wippli's strives to be the place to be when producing great things, the global standard for smart workflows. 

WornUp Worn Up creates new generation composites from textile and plastic waste. As the first operational textile upcycling business in Australia Worn Up is powered by optimism that we can achieve zero textiles in landfill by 2030. Focused on collecting uniforms Worn Up has a client list including IKEA, Coca Cola EuroPacfic, Sydney Airports, Primary Connect and many others who are pioneer partners with Worn Up to repurpose. their uniforms into new end-products.