HEAD OF WOMEN’S FOOTBALL, AFL  

Nicole Livingstone has been the Head of Women’s Football for the AFL since December 2017. She has steered one of the most momentous shifts in Australian women's sporting history, transitioning women's football from a fringe pursuit played by amateur athletes to one of the most prestigious female sporting leagues in the country.

Under Nicole’s leadership, the number of registered teams has doubled and the community player base has increased to over half a million girls and women, one-third of the national football-playing total. The number of women playing elite football has also grown tremendously, from the inaugural 216 players to 420 women currently in AFL Clubs around the nation. 

Following an outstanding career as an Australian Olympic and Commonwealth Games swim team champion – she won ten consecutive 100m backstroke titles, a record still unbroken today -  Nicole went on to become an expert television commentator on sports and women’s health issues. A great ambassador for Australian sport, Nicole’s awards include the Medal of the Order of Australia and the Australian Sports Medal.

Nicole is also the Patron of Ovarian Cancer Australia, a charity which she founded in 2001 with her sister Karen Livingstone, after their mother passed away from the disease.

FOUNDER & CEO, BRIGHTE

Katherine McConnell is the CEO, Chairperson and Founder of Brighte, a financial technology platform offering consumers a fast, easy and streamlined way to pay for home energy and home improvements. Since it launched in 2015, Brighte has approved over $330 million of applications from more than 40,000 Australian homeowners and was recently recognized by Deloitte as the fourth fastest growing tech business in the Asia Pacific. Katherine founded Brighte with a mission to make paying easy. Brighte’s purpose is to enable a brighter future today and she believes that every Australian family deserves access to a sustainable and comfortable home.

Brighte has been through Series B funding, underscoring the viability of its powerful, sustainable platform. Recent investment has allowed the company to expand to include home improvements such as pools and patios.

Prior to founding Brighte, Katherine had a highly successful corporate career; first as an economist for the Australian Treasury and government departments, then at Macquarie Bank, where she worked for more than a decade as a Senior Manager in Energy Leasing and Equipment Finance.

FOUNDER & CEO, HEALTHMATCH 

Manuri Gunawardena is the Founder & CEO of HealthMatch, a clinical trial matching platform designed to make accessing emerging potential treatments easier for patients. A former medical student, Manuri’s passion lies in leveraging digital technologies to improve inefficiencies in order to deliver better healthcare. 

Manuri was in her fifth year of a medical degree, working in a neuro-oncology research lab, when she first interacted with patients struggling to find clinical trials relevant to their conditions. Determined to tackle the problem, Manuri paused her studies and founded HealthMatch in 2017. 

HealthMatch uses proprietary algorithms to sort through the thousands of clinical trials being run by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and matches them to relevant registered patients, thus connecting people with potential cures and treatments. In the past three years, HealthMatch has raised over $7.5 million in venture capital, launched in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong and won the inaugural Australian TechCrunch Start-up Battlefield.

A passionate advocate for education, Manuri has also been a mentor for The New York Academy of Sciences Global STEM Alliance, an international initiative to encourage the next the generation of female STEM innovators.

CEO & CO-FOUNDER, FLOODMAPP 

Juliette Murphy is a water resources engineer turned entrepreneur who co-founded FloodMapp in 2018. FloodMapp offers rapid and real-time flood forecasting products and predictive flood inundation mapping, providing greater warning time that can potentially save lives and reduce damage. Flooding is the world’s costliest natural disaster, taking thousands of lives and costing hundreds of billions of dollars in annual damage globally. In Australia alone, flooding costs $9 billion every year.  

After seeing firsthand the devastation of the 2011 Queensland floods and 2013 Calgary floods in Canada, Juliette was motivated to improve flood preparedness. In 2016, she and developer co-founder Ryan Prosser established FloodMapp as a passion project and in 2018, the pair went full-time on the venture, hiring a small team of engineers, developers and data scientists. By 2019, the business had raised $1.3 million in funding to assist its rollout in Australia and the US.

FloodMapp’s core customers are insurers, utilities, mining, energy, and government agencies in Australia and abroad. Since launch, FloodMapp has helped businesses to prevent damage to assets and improve safety for their staff and communities.

JESSICA CHRISTIANSEN-FRANKS AND LUCINDA HARTLEY, CO-FOUNDERS, NEIGHBOURLYTICS

Jessica Christiansen-Franks and Lucinda Hartley are urban designers and serial entrepreneurs who havebeen leading the global conversation on urban innovation for more than a decade. In 2017, they founded Neighbourlytics off the back of BlueChilli’s SheStarts accelerator. Since then, the company has created data for more than 1000 neighbourhoods in 12 countries, and was named in the 2019 Deloitte Rising Star List. In the same year, Neighbourlytics secured $1.25 million seed funding to support its plans for global growth, and was selected as one of Australia's inaugural SheEO ventures. 

Pioneering the use of digital data in citymaking, Neighbourlytics is a unique data analytics platform that helps governments and property developers understand and measure local life in the neighbourhoods they plan, create and manage. The digital data dashboards help customers plan and create places people love and feel connected to. Neighbourlytics is now also creating summary metrics on wellbeing to enable benchmarking of neighbourhoods across Australia and the world.

With over a decade of experience in urban innovation, Lucinda Hartley was a Myer Innovation Fellow, Westpac Social Change Fellow and previously helped shape UN Sustainable Development Goals. Jessica Christiansen-Franks is one of Australia's leading voices on cities who has advised major international agencies including World Bank and Asian Development Bank on complex urban development issues, with a focus on civic innovation.