- Nine winners and two runners-up recognised at the 2026 WA Innovators of the Year Awards
- Over $310,000 in prize money awarded to support the development and commercialisation of local innovations
- 20-year milestone celebrates over 100 winners recognised across the program's history
- Cook Labor Government proud to grow and support WA's innovation and start-up sector
The 2026 WA Innovators of the Year Awards have marked 20 years of celebrating Western Australian innovation, with nine winners and two runners-up sharing more than $310,000 in prize money.
Oto Medicines won the Emerging Innovation Award for their treatment using beneficial bacteria to help prevent childhood ear infections and reduce the need for antibiotics and surgery.
Augment Technologies took home the other major prize, the Growth Innovation Award, for their physics-based modelling and AI technology platform that tracks ore movement during blasting, helping gold and copper mining operations reduce ore loss across Australia and Africa.
A total of 152 eligible applications were received across eight award categories, highlighting the breadth of innovation across the State. Winners were selected following an independent assessment process involving panels of highly regarded experts from across the innovation ecosystem.
Since its launch in 2006, the WA Innovators of the Year Awards program has recognised over 100 winners across its award categories, marking a significant milestone for Western Australia's innovation ecosystem.
The 2026 awards also introduced a new Advanced Manufacturing category, recognising WA manufacturers using technologies such as automation, additive manufacturing, and digital systems to improve productivity and develop higher-value products. The category reflects the sector's growing importance to the State's economic future.
Two winners were also selected to receive the Centre for Entrepreneurial Research and Innovation (CERI) Scholarship prize.
The awards program supports the goals of the Cook Labor Government's Innovation Strategy by raising the profile of Western Australia's innovation ecosystem and supporting the growth of innovation-based industries.
The WA Innovators of the Year is delivered through the Cook Labor Government's New Industries and Innovation Fund. It helps startups, entrepreneurs, and small to medium enterprises build credibility, connect with industry, and access opportunities to develop and commercialise their ideas.
All finalists participate in an Accelerator Program featuring professional development opportunities, including workshops on intellectual property, media, pitching, and wellbeing.
Finalists also receive professional photography and video packages to help promote their innovations.
These awards are generously supported by our Major Sponsor - Malka Foundation; Platinum Sponsors - Adarsh Australia, Biodesign Australia, Business News, Wesfarmers, Woodside Energy, and Young Entrepreneurs Academy of Western Australia; Gold Sponsors - Bankwest and Wrays; Silver Sponsor - Moore Australia; and Community Sponsors - Australian Innovation Management Institute, BetterLabs, CERI, and Visagio Australia.
For more information, visit www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-energy-and-economic-diversification/wa-innovators-of-the-year-2026-winners
As stated by Science and Innovation Minister Stephen Dawson:
"For 20 years, the WA Innovators of the Year Awards have celebrated the ingenuity, ambition, and talent of Western Australians.
"This is an extraordinary milestone and reflects the strength of our State's innovation ecosystem and the people working to shape its future.
"Congratulations to this year's winners and runners-up, whose innovations demonstrate the important role local businesses and entrepreneurs play in developing new ideas, technologies, and solutions to real-world problems."
Award name |
Recipient |
Bio |
Emerging Innovation Award Winner |
Oto Medicines Project Name: Spritz-OM: A novel nasal spray to prevent childhood ear infections |
Every year, millions of children experience the pain, hearing problems, and repeated medical visits caused by ear infections. Developed by Oto Medicines, a biotechnology company spun out of The Kids Research Institute Australia, Spritz-OM aims to help prevent these infections before they start. By harnessing a naturally occurring beneficial bacterium found in healthy children, Spritz-OM strengthens the body's natural defences against infection. This innovative approach has the potential to improve children's health, ease the burden on families, and reduce the need for antibiotics and surgery. |
Emerging Innovation Award Runner-Up |
WaveX Project Name: D-Spar Power Platforms providing persistent renewable electricity for coastal infrastructure |
WaveX is a renewable energy technology based in Perth. Recognising the significance of the State's sovereign ocean resource, WaveX reimagined wave energy conversion through the development of its D-Spar Power Platform - a reliable source of autonomous electricity in high value and strategic marine locations for operators and users of coastal infrastructure. The D-Spar uses ocean waves, firmed by onboard solar and batteries, to generate scalable MW of green electricity, and offers a highly persistent power generation profile compared to wind and solar which can strengthen grid stability and lower costs as the world decarbonises. |
Growth Innovation Award Winner |
Augment Technologies Project Name: Muckpile Block Model: Solving for ore movement across the mining industry |
Augment Technologies is a WA-built mining technology company solving one of the industry's oldest and most expensive problems: eliminating the 10-20 per cent ore lost at every blast. The company's Muckpile Block Model is a physics based and AI technology platform, used to reconstruct where every block of ore actually moves through the chaos of blasting, restoring the link between the orebody model, mining, and the mill. It is now embedded in the daily workflows of gold and copper mining operations across Australia and Africa. |
Growth Innovation Award Runner-up |
Hyperion Systems Project Name: TitanCell - Factory in a Box |
The TitanCell by Hyperion Systems is a deployable "factory-in-a-box" that allows large products to be manufactured almost anywhere. Built inside a standard 20-foot shipping container, it combines industrial robotics, material processing, and intelligent manufacturing software into a mobile production unit - transportable by truck, rail, or ship and deployable on site in days. At its core, a six-axis robotic arm fitted with a high-throughput extrusion system melts and deposits industrial thermoplastics layer by layer, within a build envelope of 4 2 2 metres. At full deposition rate, a 4-metre boat hull can be printed in under 40 hours, replacing weeks of tooling, layup, and skilled labour with no moulds or fixed tooling. Applications span recreational and commercial boat hulls, defence and maritime components, construction formwork, infrastructure assets, and on-demand replacement parts for remote operations. TitanCell runs both virgin and recycled polymer feedstocks, supporting circular-economy outcomes and sovereign manufacturing capability. |
Advanced Manufacturing Award Winner |
SpiroPak Project Name: SpiroPak: Additively manufactured process technology for cleaner, more efficient industry |
SpiroPak uses additive manufacturing to create highly efficient structures for use inside large industrial processing columns. These columns are essential to many separation processes used across industries such as chemicals, LNG, refining, and mining. One real-world application is post-combustion carbon capture, where SpiroPak can improve CO separation while reducing the cost per tonne treated. SpiroPak's innovation sits inside these columns, using unique patented 3D geometries that redefine how gas and liquid flow through them and significantly improve their efficiency. The result is the potential for industrial plants to use less energy, require smaller equipment, and operate at lower cost. |
Community Benefit and Wellbeing Award Winner |
Atherid Therapeutics Project Name: Erasing arterial blockage: The future of cardiovascular medicine |
Atherid Therapeutics' vision is to transform cardiovascular care from lifelong risk management to durable plaque clearance, preventing death and disability. Its first-in-class drug candidate, ATH01, is a short-course treatment delivered through the bloodstream to directly target and clear fatty plaques. ATH01 has the potential to reduce heart attack, stroke, and amputation risk while avoiding invasive procedures such as stents and bypass surgery. ATH01 uses a naturally occurring human protein that supports healthy cell function but becomes impaired when arterial cells are overloaded with fat. By restoring this function, ATH01 enables cells to metabolise fatty build-up, reducing plaque, and improving blood flow. This disease-modifying approach aims to actively reverse established disease, rather than simply slow its progression. |
Energy Innovation Award Winner |
Wevolt Project Name: Wevolt: Australian-built grid-aware software for EV charging |
Wevolt is Australian-built software that runs EV chargers from more than 35 manufacturers as one managed network. Chargers from different brands do not talk to each other, so operators end up running a separate system for every make. Wevolt runs the whole fleet as one business instead. Its load management shares a site's existing electricity supply across the chargers, so a site that could support five vehicles can serve twenty without a costly upgrade. Built in Perth, the platform manages over 800 charging ports at more than 300 locations across Australia, including the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia. |
Great for the State Award Winner |
Infin Robotics Project Name: Autonomous Solar-Powered Underwater Vehicle |
Infin Robotics has developed a new class of autonomous ocean robot - a solar-powered underwater vehicle capable of extended, uncrewed operation across vast marine areas without any fixed support infrastructure. The vehicle addresses a fundamental limitation of current ocean robotics: conventional autonomous underwater vehicles run on battery power, limiting them to hours of operation before requiring recovery by a crewed vessel. Uncrewed surface vessels have unlimited endurance but cannot dive, leaving them blind to subsurface conditions. Infin Robotics solves this capability gap by combining dive capability with solar energy harvesting. The robot surfaces periodically to recharge, upload collected data via satellite, then dives again, autonomously, without any human in the loop |
Government Innovators of the Year Award Winner |
Landgate Project Name: WA Vegetation Extent (WAVE) Pilot Beyond the green pixel |
The WA Vegetation Extent (WAVE) Pilot has reimagined vegetation mapping beyond a pixel-by-pixel search for greenness. The team developed an AI-powered workflow that interprets the context, texture, and structure of entire landscapes rather than individual pixels. By recognising patterns across whole scenes, WAVE can more accurately identify native vegetation in sparse and complex environments where conventional approaches struggle. WAVE demonstrates how emerging technology can deliver more reliable native vegetation data over vast areas for better environmental decision-making across government and beyond. The pilot involves several government agencies and is also engaged with a variety of scientific, academic and industry research partners, and technical experts. |
Young Innovators of the Year Award Winner |
Agni Renewables - Comet Bay College/GoSH Project Name: Sustainably Transforming Electronic Waste into High-Purity Alumina |
Electronic waste is growing rapidly, yet valuable aluminium within discarded electronics can be difficult to recover because it is mixed with plastics, adhesives, and other materials. Agni Renewables is developing a circular process to recover aluminium from electronic waste and transform it into high-purity alumina, a valuable industrial material. Our innovation uses gallium to assist in separating aluminium, while recovering and reusing the gallium in a closed-loop system. By improving the recovery of aluminium from electronic waste, Agni Renewables aims to reduce valuable resources being lost to waste, support a more sustainable recycling approach, and contribute to a circular economy. |
Young Innovators of the Year Award Winner |
CoolaBee - Hale School Project Name: Thermoregulating Beehive Attachment |
Bees worldwide struggle to endure harsh summer temperatures, a problem set to worsen with climate change. This design is a cooling box that sits atop a standard hive, actively driving cooled air downward via fans when internal temperatures surpass a dangerous threshold. Air is cooled evaporatively, pulled through acrylic panels lined with water-soaked air-conditioner filters, a low-cost stand-in for dedicated evaporative cooling pads that achieves the same wetted-surface heat exchange more efficiently. By keeping hives within a safe temperature range, this product offers beekeepers a legitimate way to protect colonies, honey yields, and the broader pollination they support. |
CERI Scholarship Winner |
CAD Spectral Technologies Project Name: Breaking the Barriers of Heart Disease Detection Through the Eye |
CAD Spectral technologies is manufacturing a special type of camera for heart disease monitoring called SPECTRA-Mini. SPECTRA-Mini is a portable medical imaging device that screens for coronary artery disease through a four-second, non-invasive eye scan. It uses polarisation-sensitive optical coherence tomography, an advanced retinal imaging technique that captures both the structure and microscopic integrity of blood vessels in the back of the eye. No radiation, no dilation (eye drops), no contrast agents, no needles. |
CERI Scholarship Winner |
ChemCentre Project Name: Transforming Underutilised Sandalwood Seeds into Research Backed Therapeutic Products |
The innovation transforms underutilised Western Australian sandalwood seeds into scientifically validated therapeutic and skincare products including the world first genome sequence of this species. The project addresses a major industry challenge - sandalwood growers wait 20-25 years for income from heartwood, while around 200,000kg of seeds are underutilised annually. Through analytical chemistry, biological testing, formulation, and TGA-aligned regulatory translation, the team developed premium therapeutic and anti-ageing products from seed oil and hull and created a new revenue stream for the growers. This innovation creates circular value, regional and Aboriginal employment, local manufacturing, and positions WA as a leader in natural therapeutics. |
