With just a few weeks to go until InnovationACT kicks off, we thought we'd catch up with some of the program's successful alumni. We asked them what they enjoyed most and where their journey has taken them since.
Tell Us a Bit About Yourself, and How You Ended Up Participating in InnovationACT?
I’m Dex, I’m 23, and I studied philosophy and economics at ANU from 2021. Early in my degree I attended a startup talk hosted at Airtree, a Sydney-based venture capital firm, where a founder who had recently exited an ecommerce company made a simple argument: young university students are smart, have little to lose, and should try startups for the agency and skill-building alone. That talk gave me the impetus I had been missing. Not long after, I spotted an InnovationACT ad on a screen at the ANU Research School of Social Sciences and signed up, seeing it as a structured way to get started.
Talk Us Through Your Startup, What Does It Do, and Where Are You Currently in Your Journey?
My cofounder Oli and I entered CBRIN with our original idea, Bardar: a real-time map of live music venues and nightclubs in Sydney showing how busy they were and what events were on. We came second in the pitch competition, but judge Fiona Hindmarsch of Significant Ventures approached us afterward and became one of our earliest investors.
Bardar ultimately didn’t scale. The consumer app space for nightlife discovery had been tried many times without a breakout, so we pivoted toward selling software to businesses using data gathered through the app. After several product iterations, including a MarTech tool for analyzing social media behavior to generate marketing insights, we were accepted into Startmate, widely considered Australia’s most prestigious accelerator. Startmate invests $120k and runs a 12-week program based in Sydney and Melbourne. We used the program to interview large numbers of customers and rebuild our product from the ground up, which led to Draper.
Draper builds autonomous businesses that can run themselves, covering everything from marketing and finance to app development. The target user is someone in a job with a startup idea but without the time, energy, or resources to begin. The core differentiator is helping founders validate the right idea before building: analyzing consumer demand and pain points so they don’t fall in love with the wrong thing. I see this as a gap in tools like Lovable or Claude, which let you build freely but don’t ask whether there’s a real market for what you’re making.
Our founding team is myself (CPO and COO), Oliver Bagin (CTO, technical lead from day one), and Benjamin Abbatangelo, an ex-journalist with experience at Seek and Airtasker, who now runs investor relations and CEO-type functions. We are based in Sydney, having spent three months working out of Singapore after being given office space by the National University of Singapore as part of their innovation program.
What Kind of Progress Did You Make with IACT?
I found IACT genuinely valuable for surfacing what I call “unknown unknowns”: the things founders don’t even know they need to think about, like validating customer demand, understanding cap tables, or setting up an option scheme. My first introduction to the concierge method, delivering a product as a service to learn about user needs before committing to building it, came through IACT. The pitch preparation component was also formative, giving me early practice articulating the idea clearly under pressure.
According to You, What Aspect of Participating in IACT Should Participants Look Forward to Most?
The final pitch. Being a founder means constantly selling: to clients, investors, and even friends and family. Getting early reps pitching in front of a crowd, under pressure, and taking questions is practice that’s hard to replicate elsewhere and prepares founders for the reality of always having to be on.
What Questions Related to Entrepreneurship and Building a Startup Did You Have Answered at the Workshop?
Three things stood out for me: the concierge method, pitch preparation and deck-crafting, and the experience of hearing other founders present and receive feedback. That last one was particularly valuable. Sitting in a room where other teams pitch and get critiqued reveals thinking traps you might never notice in your own work, as well as strengths and perspectives you hadn’t considered. Everyone falls into different traps and has different strong points, and the workshop environment surfaces both in a way that’s hard to replicate outside that setting.
(If You Were a Winner) What Did You Do with the Prize Money?
Bardar came was one the runner ups. While we didn't win prize money at IACT, one of the judges’ funds, Significant Ventures, invested off the back of the pitch. I estimate that between $20,000 and $40,000 of our early angel round came from CBRIN’s First Wednesday Connect events and the final pitch night combined. All of that early capital went into development and marketing for Bardar. Critically, it also gave Oli and me the confidence to defer university and go full-time on the startup, something that wouldn’t have been possible without it.
