STARTUP ECOSYSTEM PRELIMINARY REPORT

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT - CASE STUDIES
MIPLAN SOLUTIONS
SENTIENT COMPUTING
KMPG Energise Accelerator Winner
UNEARTHED RESOURCE ACCELERATOR
1st resources accelerator in Australia
$10M+
Operating cost savings
MiPlan Solutions is a Perth based startup founded
in 2010 providing business intelligence tools aimed
at creating cost savings and process improvements
for the mining industry. MiPlan’s product suite
is designed to simplify daily data entry and
management tasks via a common tablet platform
with user-friendly, interactive interfaces for fieldbased
and operator tasks which are traditionally
recorded on paper. It enables real-time remote and
on site data capture and access to live data across
multiple systems from a single location. The data
is then enriched and presented to decision-makers
for action. MiPlan has 15+ clients, including two
of Australia’s largest mine contractors, with 200+
daily users across its 150+ projects.
TRACK’EM
2015 WA Innovator of the Year
Founded in 2006 in Perth by CEO Kashif
Saleem, Track’em is a tracking system that
allows companies to track assets in realtime
using a combination of GPS, RFID and
Barcoding technology and view their on Google
Maps. The system is adaptable to a range of
sectors but has been particularly popular with
resources companies. Track’em is extending
its services to include drone/UAV technology,
having successfully trialled in 2015 a custom
UAV equipped with an RFID reader to read tags
between the heights of 30-70 metres over long
distances and in hostile terrain and conditions,
in what it believes to be a world first. This will
provide significant cost-savings for companies
wanting to manage large-scale assets with
minimal resources, and can be overlaid with aerial
photography to add a visual dimension for users.
Track’em services 40+ clients around the world
and won the $75,000 WA Innovator of the Year
Award in November 2015.
$100,000
Prize to roll out tech into resources
Sentient Computing is an award-winning
Perth-based software development company
that develops immersive 3D visualisation and
automation solutions for the resources industry.
Founded in 2002, with 18 staff and contractors
and 250+ solutions deployed in 30+ countries,
Sentient’s business is an advanced stage startup.
With its below $5 million annual revenue
(requirement for entry), it was the winner of
KPMG’s Energise 3 month accelerator program
and $100,000 prize to roll out its new MVX
product, which uses data to create interactive 3D
environments, to the resources sector. 86
MVX uses 3D game engine technology to
visualise real time and historical data, enabling
clients to understand and organise their data by
displaying dynamic data from different sources
in realistic 3D scenes. It has applications for
operational training and simulations, relating
complex concepts and processes and challenging
environments and displaying parts of operations
which are hard to access, such as internally
mounted components, underground facilities,
remote unmanned facilities, offshore equipment,
subsea pipelines or a remote railway track). It also
services remote operations by rapidly locating
equipment and/or people without having to access
original data or control systems, ‘see’ spatial
information such as distance, size, and height,
show operations from different vantage points,
and replay actual events for incident analysis. 87
500+
Innovators attended industry challenges
The founders of not for profit Resources
Innovation & Information Technology (RIIT)
Zane Prickett and Justin Strharsky developed
Unearthed to link resources industry problems to
innovators and crowd-source solutions. 54-hour
hackathons have been run in Perth, Sydney,
Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne in 2015 and
have connected 500+ developers and other skilled
experts and innovators to 28 industry challenges
and 130+GB of proprietary industry data
presented by Anglo American, Iluka Resources,
Gold Fields, OZ Minerals, CSIRO and BHP
Billiton. 100+ Entrepreneurs from around the
globe have produced more than 100 prototype
technologies that aim to improve industry
performance and competitiveness.
In August 2015, Unearthed ran its first Ore-X
Innovation Challenge, a global online competition
to develop an image processing algorithm
which could classify material in a gold mine as
high, medium or low grade ore, or waste. 100+
submissions from 20 countries globally and the
winner (from Canada) won the $10,000 first prize
with an algorithm that scores better on average
than a junior geologist.
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