Breakthrough Technologies 2024

From the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of our galaxy see which technologies, built and deployed out of Lot Fourteen, are impacting and changing the world for the better. 

In South Australia, we are developing world leading technology including hydrogen power, the most accurate clocks in the world and quantum computing. These key innovations have the potential for radically changing our lives. Here we deep dive into five companies doing awesome work at Lot Fourteen.

Remote sensing coupled with advanced processing – AI or machine learning elements – is one way Stone & Chalk company D-CAT is helping customers track and detect greenhouse gas emissions.

As we move towards a net zero economy, provision of critical evidence for carbon and sustainability projects of the actual and measurable impact of carbon offsetting, carbon sequestration is paramount.

D-CAT uses the most advanced spectral, interferometric, image processing and machine learning techniques on satellite imagery (optical and radar), potentially fused with other data, to derive insights about what is on the ground. Example applications include the tracking of biodiversity, land change, tree detection and height mapping, GHG emissions, water quality and land movement. The latter is a good example of marrying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from satellites with cutting-edge differential interferometric techniques (DInSAR) to detect even the smallest movements of land or assets.

The company’s Fusion Platform provides data to be delivered at scale automatically, assisting sectors as diverse as finance, energy, utilities, food and agriculture with valuable business insights. 

The opportunities are endless, just ask D-CAT co-founder and chief technology officer Dr Moira Smith who has spent her career as an aerospace engineer, working predominantly in defence but now focused on bringing the benefits of this technology to other sectors worldwide, together with those closer to home like Elders and Veolia.

More consumer electronics and more electric vehicles, means more electronic waste. And that includes batteries. Australia, Europe and the rest of the world are increasingly looking to recycle batteries to recover the critical elements therein, rather than consigning them to landfill.

Iondrive and University of Adelaide are researching the development of a viable, environmentally sustainable, and recyclable, deep eutectic solvent (DES) and other benign, biodegradable organic solvents that selectively recovers critical metal elements from spent Li-ion batteries without the use of corrosive agents.

“The breakthrough innovation of our DES recycling technology lies in its unique ability to differentially isolate and recover metal elements from cathode materials, notably NCM, widely employed in electric vehicle batteries,” says CEO, Ebbe Dommisse. “Moreover, the use of benign organic solvents that are biodegradable in a closed loop recycling process considerably reduces the environmental footprint of a hydrometallurgical process – which is very attractive for EU and USA markets looking for more eco-friendly processes”. 

The Battery Stewardship Council reported that in 2017-18 just 6%, or 320 tonnes, of lithium-ion batteries that reached end-of-life were recycled. A stark contrast to 50 per cent recycle rate in Europe.

“Our primary objective is to commercialise the technology,” says Dommisse.

“To this end we have scaled up the technology from laboratory research to large-scale bench trials and in the process of completing a pre-feasibility study to complete a techno-economic valuation and benchmarking study before embarking on a pilot plant project. The fully integrated, continuous closed loop pilot-scale process kicks off in July 2024 and evaluate and develop/optimise the process over a 2-3 year period”.

ASX-listed Iondrive have a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the University of Adelaide with an initial investment of $2.5 million over three years in battery and research development, while several Federal grants have been awarded to co-fund further research activities – to be announced soon.

Traditional accounting has had a seismic shift in the past couple of decades thanks to cloud accounting systems, with one Lot Fourteen startup part of the revolution. 

For Link4, based in the Stone & Chalk Startup Hub, it’s all about a service that streamlines and automates the invoice process for finance teams, ensuring quicker payment. Sending invoices via email is a risk for every business, and the biggest security hole that malicious players target. 

Platform-agnostic, Link4 is designed to add-on to current accounting and ERP systems to enable users to send invoices directly into their customer’s accounting systems instantly. Basically, they are a translator that allows the accounting systems to communicate in a safe, secure, real-time environment. This is all done with ground-breaking tech developed in Adelaide and being used across 5,000 organisations in the region. And, thanks to a new a strategic partnership with Oracle NetSuite, Link4 is rapidly building an international client portfolio in new markets. 

Link4 now has offices in four countries that currently service customers Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Norway, Belgium, France and the UK.

eInvoicing is now mandated by the Australian Government, and Link4 boasts more federal government customers than their second and third most popular competitors combined. The Link4 technology meets Peppol eInvoicing standards while using the stability and security of AWS to pass the stringent requirements of governments around the world. The team at Link4 are looking to double in the next 6 months and will no doubt add more countries to their resume as the year progresses.