On 16 November 2017, Sydney TechCrunch and Elevacao hosted the inaugural Startup Battlefield Australia in Sydney. The highlight of the day was the Startup Battlefield pitch-off competition, featuring startups from across Australia and New Zealand, who were hand-picked to pitch their companies to expert judges from the area and abroad.

Judges named Sydney startup HealthMatch as the winner of this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Australia. The runner up was FluroSat, from the University of Sydney’s “Inventing the Future” course. CancerAid, Life Whisperer and Spalk were also finalists.

Overall 15 startups competed for A$25,000 cash, plus an all-expense-paid trip to San Francisco to compete in TechCrunch’s flagship event Disrupt SF 2018, the world’s leading authority in debuting revolutionary startups.

Over the last two months, these 15 startups refined their business models, demos and messaging with TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield team and editors. Their hard work culminated onstage with a five-minute pitch and live demo in front of an audience of investors, entrepreneurs, technologists and live stream viewers. Each startup then faced a tough Q&A session from our panel of judges.

HealthMatch was founded by Manuri Gunawardena and Arran Schlosberg in 2016. Their HealthMatch app uses machine learning and proprietary algorithms to match patients to available clinical trials, a process that was previously time consuming for patients as well as ineffective and costly for CROs. The service is free for patients and charges CROs on a per-client basis or on an annual license.

FluroSat was born out of the University of Sydney “Inventing the Future” course and focuses on finding innovative solutions to complex agricultural problems. FluroSat uses state-of-the-art remote sensing technologies and data collected from airborne (drones) and satellite platforms, with products ranging from crop type-specific heath assessments and fertiliser prescription maps to yield prediction. CEO and Founder Anastasia Volkova says “Food security is one of the most important global problems. We see providing decision makers in the field with the actionable data as the key to solving it.”

To date, more than 700 Startup Battlefield contenders have raised more than $7 billion in funding — and more than 100 of those companies resulted in acquisitions or IPOs. Battlefield Alumni include companies like Dropbox, Yammer, Cloudflare, Getaround, Fitbit, Mint.comand Trello — acquired by Australia’s own, Atlassian.

View all the Startup Battlefield Australia pitches here.