About the festival.

• Event Ops & Logistics
• Partnerships & Community
• Program Design

Aneeqa led Game-On Girls, a startup tackling the drop-off in girls’ sport participation through high school. She built the concept from ABS data and on-the-ground interviews, brought in partners including UWA, WA Football, Tennis WA, Willetton Basketball Association and the Bachar Houli Foundation, and pitched as a finalist at the Just Start-It Gala.

She works casually with WA Football and The Athlete’s Foot alongside her degree, and is active in multicultural inclusion work across sport and civic life.

Her ambition for WA is an ecosystem that reflects how multicultural Perth actually is, and high school students who build real knowledge of innovation and investment early enough to see themselves as future founders.

• Partnerships & Community
• Program Design

Colin moved to Perth from regional WA having spent years building startups and digital projects on his own. The biggest of them is Grade Tracker Pro, an academic analytics platform that began as a spreadsheet to map his own ATAR after one bad maths test, and grew into a product used by students and schools across the state.

He also runs a web agency, Romeo, and a media agency, Fez Video Productions. He was Head Boy at school and an elected Honorary Takeover Captain on the Leeuwin II.

He argues WA is good at building products and less deliberate about building self-aware founders — and wants an ecosystem that normalises ambition and celebrates grit over the myth of natural genius.

• Program Design
• Partnerships & Community

Eliana is a Science Communicator at Scitech and studies Space and Planetary Science at Curtin — a field where innovation, investment and startups decide how far WA’s space industry gets.

At nine she organised “Run For Rett, Gather for Goldie”, a lap-athon for her cousin Goldie, who has Rett Syndrome. She chased sponsorship and prizes herself, ran the day, spoke at it, and raised over $6,000 towards assistive technology. It set off a run of fundraisers in her community.

She wants environmental sustainability much closer to the centre of WA’s innovation ecosystem — with the funding and the visibility to match.

• Marketing & Content
• Program Design
• Partnerships & Community

Joanna is a Communications and Engagement Coordinator at Curtin, contributes to Young Investors Circle, and is building her own marketing agency.

She led the communications and engagement strategy end to end for the Global Sustainability Challenge, across Singapore in 2024 and Dubai in 2025 — coordinating students, industry partners and global organisations across time zones while keeping the participant experience coherent.

Her read on WA is that the talent is here and the access is not. She wants an ecosystem open and human enough that people can step in before they have everything figured out.

• Program Design
• Partnerships & Community

Natasha grew up around family businesses and started early — selling slime and craft projects at school while planning an export company with her uncle’s seafood business.

She is an executive member of two Curtin clubs, part of the ENACTUS project, works for the Faculty of Business and Law, and helped deliver Women in Business’s annual Spring Markets, where the club covered stall insurance for two student traders.

Her focus is regional youth: maker spaces, online mentoring and direct lines to Perth mentors, so young innovators outside the city do not have to travel to be taken seriously.

• Program Design
• Event Ops & Logistics

Pershant is in his final year of Computer Science at Curtin, interning at pre-seed computer vision startup Indrus, and building an AI-powered hospital scheduling platform as a solo founder. It pairs a constraint solver that generates legally compliant fortnightly rosters in seconds with an agent layer managers can talk to in plain language — work that previously took hours by hand.

He is a member of Startmate’s Launch Club, and sits right on the crossover between the student network and the startup world.

He sees two compounding gaps in WA: the visibility gap between having a technical idea and having a funded company, and the builder gap between engineers who spectate and engineers who ship.

• Partnerships & Community
• Marketing & Content

Sarah spent five years in the media industry and is now moving into tech and marketing through her business degree.

Straight out of high school in 2020 she directed and produced her first feature film — a steep lesson in production management, marketing and morale. It is now on Amazon and took her to an international awards ceremony in Amsterdam. She sits on the WIFT committee.

Her mission is a company that puts AI and people to work together to create jobs rather than cut them, starting with the industry she came from.