Dr Eamonn Colley and Dr John Carroll met as PhD researchers more than a decade ago. Together they focused on understanding how blood moves through the body, and how tracking changes in vasculature could help predict, and potentially prevent, heart attacks and strokes. Today, they are co-founders and co-CEOs of Vexev, a Sydney medtech startup whose medical device scans the blood vessels of the arm in 3D.

In 2024, when Vexev locked in a clinical trial for their device in San Antonio, the device wasn’t yet ready, but with a dwindling runway the date couldn’t be shifted. What followed was a race to get their device ready, through safety checks, and shipped to the US with the Vexev team in tow. They made key updates to the device’s algorithm just days before the start of the trial. Once the trial started, the hardware and software were locked, so there was no going back.

In this conversation with Kate Glazebrook, Eamonn and John tell the story of an overnight drive to Melbourne to make a last minute safety check, why they wrang a sumo wrestling club asking for help, how the pair approach their co-CEO working relationship, and plenty more.

Could Australia build a frontier AI model to rival OpenAI or Anthropic? If it’s a competition of scale and raw compute, certainly not any time soon. But two Australian founders think there’s another angle: smaller, specialised models built to be the best at a specific thing.

Pip Bingemann co-founded Springboards, an AI platform for advertising and marketing teams that is optimised for creativity and novelty. Jesse Clark founded Celeris, which is focused on speed: LLMs that can respond in milliseconds, with utility in use cases that benefit from real-time responsiveness. Both companies started by building applications then went on to train their own AI models, and both leverage advancements in open-source AI technologies.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, described the AI industry as a five-layer cake, with raw energy at the bottom, and AI models and applications at the top. Both of the founders in this episode are vying for a bigger slice of that AI cake, and if Australia is able to successfully compete at those top levels, the potential upside is huge.

Tom Humphrey, Partner at Blackbird, is the guest host for this episode, and speaks with Pip and Jesse about what it takes to actually train an AI model, how open-source and open-weight models are changing the AI landscape, and why Australia developing its own AI models could be important for national security.

Springboards: https://springboards.ai

Celeris: https://celeris.ai

Dilani Kahawala has three kids, a partner with a busy job in tech, and a startup to run. At the dinner table, with twenty minutes to get the kids fed, all too often she’d be thinking about what goes in tomorrow’s lunchboxes and planning logistics for the week ahead, rather than simply being present with her kids. That’s the mental load that Anna, the AI assistant for parents, was designed to carry.

Dilani path to co-founding a startup was a winding one. She got a PhD in theoretical physics, before deciding physics and academia moved too slowly for her tastes. Following a stint at McKinsey, and working product roles at Etsy, Meta and Atlassian, she co-founded a company and developed Braid, an AI powered tool designed to help software teams with project management. After deciding Braid didn’t have product market fit, the team went through a period of rapid exploration, experimenting with eight or nine different product ideas in a five month period. After gaining strong early traction, Anna was the idea that stuck.

In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with Dilani about the decision to move away from using frontier models in favour of open source AI models, how the Anna team internally leverage AI agents “up the wazoo”, the surprising fact that most of their users eschew the Anna app in favour of communicating with Anna directly in messaging apps, and why Dilani isn't too worried about OpenAI launching a parent product.