The Winter ‘25 cohort is full of founders chasing the edge of what’s possible and dragging the future closer.

A future where period poverty is a thing of the past. Where anyone can service a machine like an expert, where AI doesn’t just answer questions, but books your Uber, edits your work, and fills a hospital shift.

From AI-native workplaces to at-home cervical screening kits, super-intelligent healthcare agents to haptic gloves that make VR touchable, this cohort is solving problems you didn’t know could be fixed and tackling challenges most shy away from.

And the founders?

They’ve trained as surgeons and taught at a university at 15 years old. Demoed their hardware at Open Sauce, built and sold old companies, then started sover. They’re reinventing how we hire, how we heal, how we feel, and how we play. So let’s meet them!

Each startup in the accelerator will receive an equity investment from Startmate. The standard terms are $120,000 at a $1.5M post-money valuation cap. 70% of this cohort will be getting this deal. The remaining 30% have already had a valuation set by VCs or angel investors before joining the accelerator, and Startmate will be buying in at that valuation.

Founders: Melvin Chen, Ethan Atkins & Andy Bui

Admin is eating healthcare alive—a third of all healthcare costs are paperwork, not patient care, totalling a staggering $1.3 trillion annually in the US alone. Care GP is eliminating that burden with integrated AI agents that automate provider administration, starting with document processing, billing, and patient communications. Their vision? Enabling the first generation of super-intelligent healthcare providers.

Led by a team of experienced founders, including Melvin Chen (ex-VP at Latch and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree), the company has already hit $200K ARR in just 3.5 months, with 50% week-over-week usage growth.

Founder: Marcus Schappi

AI assistants can think and talk, but they can't take real-world action (like booking an Uber) because they lack access to apps and data. Ninja AI solves this by making it easy to build, host, and share tools that AI agents can use. Think of it like an App Store, but for AI agents to get things done. In just six weeks, founder Marcus Schappi launched three platform versions, attracted over 700 users, and already has more than 50 tools in the ecosystem, proving strong demand from SaaS teams and AI builders.

Founders: Louis J Sisk, Jordi Hermoso

The healthcare system is broken for both doctors and patients. Doctors want flexibility, and patients want faster care, but there's no easy way for doctors to find roles or deliver care online and offline. Medlo is fixing this by connecting doctors with short- and long-term roles while handling credentialing and onboarding. Its companion platform, Doccy, enables those doctors to provide digital care, creating an end-to-end hybrid care platform. Led by a doctor and a seasoned technical co-founder, Medlo has already onboarded 310 doctors and partnered with 80 hospitals since launching in November 2024.

Founders: Holly Sanders, Jack Harber & Nick Glynn

Hiring is a founder's biggest pain point, with 70% of startups failing due to bad hiring. Matchbox solves this with a smarter, founder-first approach. It uses AI to deeply understand a startup's hiring needs, then connects them with a curated network of domain-expert recruiters and talent communities. The incentive structure is flipped by rewarding their network solely for finding the perfect candidate. Led by a team with over 40 years of combined experience, they’ve felt the pain of hiring gone wrong firsthand and are now making it human-first and AI-powered.

Founders: Divyanshu Chauhan, Henry Choo

Behind every yellow ticket promotion on supermarket shelves is a broken system. FMCG brands still manually analyse and run multi-million-dollar retail promotions using clunky spreadsheets, leading to costly errors and missed opportunities. Promosync maximizes ROI for these brands by analyzing data and automating manual processes to create optimal retail promotions. The vision is to unlock real-time optimisation for retail promotions, similar to how Google Ads works for digital advertising. The founding team brings a blend of industry expertise from companies like P&G and Nestle, and deep tech startup experience.

Founders: Hunter Jay and Slava Chalnev

Senior technicians take years to develop their expertise, but that knowledge walks out the door when they retire. Integuide captures how the best technicians work via body-cam recordings and then uses AI to transform that expertise into accessible knowledge for junior staff. Every insight and hard-won lesson becomes institutional memory, searchable and citable. The goal is to enable any technician to perform at a senior level by giving them AI-powered access to an organisation's collective expertise, dramatically accelerating the path from novice to expert.

Founder: William Kirkwood

Today's AI tools for work are fragmented, requiring users to copy and paste between a doc and a chatbot. Luck replaces this messy workflow with an AI workspace that edits, writes, and thinks with you directly inside the tools you already use. With full context across your work, you can see every change highlighted and granularly accept, reject, or refine it. The vision? One AI-native workspace that connects every tool and every AI model, so your work lives in one place and your AI truly understands it.

Founder: Remy Tucker

Over 3 in 5 Australian women are using makeshift solutions for period products due to a lack of access. On The House is tackling this national crisis by installing digital vending machines in public and commercial bathrooms that provide free, organic period products, funded entirely by brands looking to advertise. The vision is bold: from 2 in 3 to 0 in 3 women experiencing period poverty by 2035. Founder Remy Tucker brings a unique blend of frontline women’s healthcare insight and commercial experience to a mission she deeply believes in.

Founder: Steph Brook

The best recommendations come from people who truly get you, but there’s no simple way to swap them. Rave is changing that. Users can add their favourite recommendations—films, skincare, or must-visit spots—to their profiles. Others can explore their recommendations and see what their friends are raving about. Founded by a former Atlassian engineer, Rave launched its MVP focused on podcast recommendations and attracted 10,000 users in just three months. Now, the platform is scaling beyond podcasts to become a discovery engine for everything you love.

Founder: Grace Toombs

The rates of cervical screening are low, and STI rates are skyrocketing, yet less than half of Gen Z women regularly see a GP due to shame or stigma. June Health offers self-collection kits for STI and cervical screening, shipped straight to your door. Swabs take just five minutes and are analysed by accredited labs—all from the privacy and comfort of home. Founded by a proud First Nations woman with a background in public health, June Health has already partnered with Australia's largest pathology provider and gained paying customers in every state and territory since its launch in March 2025.

Founder: Sara Richardson

Australia loses a staggering 269 billion litres of clean drinking water each year from leaking underground pipes. That's thousands of litres every second. Leakster is changing this. Using acoustic sensors and AI-powered software, it detects, locates, and tracks leaks in real time, reducing water loss and saving maintenance teams hours of investigation. Founder Sara Richardson, a former utility economist, is building the solution she always wished existed, a system that replaces reactive water maintenance with smart, real-time monitoring across global pipe networks.

Founder: Freesia Gaul, Sean Coulon-Clark

Extra VR gear, like gloves that let you “feel” things, is often expensive and complicated. On Zero is fixing this by building affordable, customizable gloves that help you touch, grab, and interact inside virtual worlds. The big idea? Let anyone fully step into virtual reality, not just see it, but feel it too. Founded by Freesia Gaul, a quantum engineering student who taught university-level classes at 15, and her mechatronics co-founder, Sean Coulon-Clark, the company is making VR more real and more fun for everyone.

Founders: Ikya Thearam, Matteo Beretta, William Cerdelli

In a world full of distractions, people with ADHD often struggle with focus, task management, and burnout. STU is a friendly, conversational desk robot designed to support people with ADHD. It helps users break down their thoughts, plan their day, and stay on top of tasks, acting like a helpful teammate that sits beside you. The team behind STU has both lived experience with ADHD and deep technical expertise in machine learning. In just four days, STU’s early test launch grew to 150 users, with over 1,000 people now on the waitlist.