Swinburne startups in robotics, AI, and fintech shine

In summary

Swinburne's 2026 Luminate Showcase has celebrated ten fresh startups and a night of entrepreneurial spirit from staff, student and alumni participants.

Swinburne alumni-founded, Poly-motion, won the grand prize, with fellow alumni-founded Hashtag AI winning the runners-up prize, and student-founded startup SyncPay taking home the people's choice award.

The startups recently completed the six-week Luminate program, a practical program that guides and challenges founders to develop their ideas into something real.

Swinburne Innovation Studio's Associate Director of Programs and Operations, Audrey Jean-Baptiste, said the program plays a critical role in helping founders cut through early assumptions and focus on problems that are grounded in real customer need.

"Tonight's showcase wasn't just about completing a program, it reflects how far each team has progressed in testing their assumptions, working closely with customers, and sharpening their focus on problems worth solving and credible solutions," she said.

"Over six weeks, this cohort has engaged deeply with problems that matter - from the future of humanoid robotics, to aged care and emerging risks in AI - using customer insight to ensure their ideas are grounded in real need."

"Luminate gives founders the space to explore, validate and learn, and tonight's showcase captures that journey."

Poly-motion

Founded by Swinburne alumni Joshua Ince, Poly-motion is developing advanced artificial muscles for robotics application in humanoid robots, prosthetics and exoskeletons.

Compared to current robotics motors, Poly-motion's artificial muscles mimic real muscles through electrically driven polymer fibres that are lighter, cheaper and can produce more force than current options.

Born out of a desire to scale humanoid robotics, Joshua explained the Luminate program helped him identify and refine his initial ideas through deep industry research.

"As a technical founder, I knew I needed to stress test my idea objectively; I just didn't know how," he said.

"The Luminate program filled that gap and gave me the tools to validate my startup properly."

Hashtag AI

Hashtag AI supports reliable knowledge retrieval for AI agents, particularly for regulated industries, such as legal, tax, and compliance, where accurate and defensible answers are paramount.

The platform builds a knowledge base of concepts and relationships, which an AI agent can use to retrieve reliable and accurate information for users.

Founder Angie Simmons explained that parsing large volumes of technical information was a real problem in regulated domains, which the team discovered while refining their initial ideas.

"The Luminate program challenged us to really consider whether we were focusing on the right customer profile... we invalidated our initial market hypothesis," she said.

"We discovered that our approach for reliable and traceable knowledge retrieval across large datasets of complex documents was a real hair-on-fire problem."

SyncPay

SyncPay connects individual transactions to full, item-level records in accounting software, banking apps, and third-party finance tools.

The software tags each transaction with a unique code that links to a detailed view, attaching records at the time of payment and simplifying the accounting process.

Swinburne business student and founder Ezana Yohala had already scaled and exited a B2B business, but found the Luminate program helped him reframe his initial idea.

"The Luminate program was a great experience that helped me pressure test SyncPay, sharpen my focus on validation and better understand the next steps for the business," he said.