6 Startups Have Been Shortlisted For The INCITE Awards Start-Up Category

Six standout early-stage companies have been named finalists in the Start-Up category of the 35th INCITE Awards, with the cohort spanning medtech, mining navigation, motorcycle safety, cybersecurity, retinal heart disease screening, and AI for financial advisers.

Presented by StartupWA and run by the WA Information Technology and Telecommunications Alliance (WAITTA), the INCITE Awards drew 94 nominations this year, with 63 entries advancing to the finals across nine categories. Winners will be announced at a black-tie gala at The Westin Perth on Friday, July 17th, with category winners earning automatic entry into the national iAwards.

The Start-Up finalists

The six start-ups competing for the category are:

MateriaPOD — Led by founder and chief executive Dr Emily Zhen, an anaesthetic doctor at Fiona Stanley Hospital and clinical lecturer at the University of Western Australia, Materia Health is developing a portable, reusable preservation platform for donor organs and tissues. MateriaPOD provides active temperature control, proprietary tissue protection, and continuous in-transit monitoring to reduce ice-related injury and improve transplant outcomes. The company has been awarded $500,000 in non-dilutive funding through the 2024/2025 Innovation Seed Fund, supported by the WA Future Health Research and Innovation Fund, and was previously named a WA Innovator of the Year finalist.

Acculaser — Founded by James Hay, Acculaser has built a high-precision laser guidance and navigation platform for underground development drilling. The system replaces manual, error-prone alignment with real-time positional control at the drill face, translating engineered mine designs into on-ground execution with millimetre-level accuracy. Acculaser was runner-up for the Rio Tinto Emerging Innovation Award at the 2025 WA Innovator of the Year awards, and the company has been trialling its technology in select underground mines ahead of a full-scale rollout in 2026.

iline Pilot — Founded by John Barber, ilineapp has developed an in-helmet dashboard system to improve motorcycling safety by delivering ride-critical information within the rider’s line of sight, reducing the need to glance away from the road.

Steltek Constant — Founded by chief executive Aaron Kelder, who has more than 20 years’ experience in IT and cyber security, Perth-based Steltek has launched Constant, a real-time cyber security auditing and evidence-collection platform. Constant combines AI-powered reviews with certified assessor oversight, automatically collecting evidence and surfacing control gaps as work progresses rather than at point-in-time audits.

SPECTRA — Led by Dr Hadi Afsharan, CAD Spectral Technologies is commercialising research developed at UWA and the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research that uses polarised light imaging of the retina to identify markers of coronary artery disease. The underlying research has been backed by more than $1.8 million in funding from the WA Government’s Future Health Research and Innovation programme and the University of Western Australia.

PlanAi — Led by managing director Ross Thorpe, ThorAI Group’s PlanAi is an end-to-end AI platform built specifically for financial planners, automating client information capture and the workflows required to deliver compliant advice. The company operates from Perth and Melbourne and positions PlanAi as a purpose-built tool for the advice industry, with data hosted in Azure and customer data excluded from model training.

INCITE has run for 35 years and serves as WA’s direct route into the national iAwards.