We participated in Tech23, Australia’s premium pitching competition. I went in with no expectations. I just wanted to put the company out there a little bit – let the rest of the world know what we were doing. After pitching in the morning, I spent most of the day talking to some really cool people including Brendan Lewis who runs Churchill Club, Ben Levi who co-founded Fishburners, Andrew Birt who co-founded LIFX and Scott Julian, who founded Effective Measure. And demonstrating the arm to everyone who would listen.

I hoped that we would win something. A little prize would be nice, I thought. I was flabbergasted when we won the major prize, the Innovation Excellence Award, as well as 4 others! This was our prize haul:

1. Innovation Excellence Award
2. ATP Innovations Explorer Award
3. Meeting with Susan Wu
4. ThoughtWorks Getting Stuff Done Award
5. The New Agency Best Growth Hacking and Boot-Strapping Prize

Thank you Tech23 for the opportunity, Rachael Slattery and all the prize donors and supporters of the event. We look forward to redeeming our prizes and adding even more value to our robotic arms!

On 9 October, we did our final Melbourne Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP) pitch to a roomful of MAP supporters, mentors and other curious folks.

We worked really hard to generate good results for the day and were pleased to show a prototype, videos of the arm’s intended movements and the arm lifting weights.

Less than a week later, on 15 October, all the Melbourne Accelerator teams flew to Sydney to meet with investors during the day (including Blackbird Ventures), before pitching to a roomful of investors that night at Google’s new Sydney offices. Thank you MAP for the camaraderie, the office space and the support.