Welcome to PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS - a curated content stream where I interview people who are extremely good at what they do. Oliver Bazzani is one of the more interesting people operating in the Australian healthtech and innovation ecosystem right now - quietly building from Perth in ways that would surprise a lot of people on the east coast. (We were also once on a light plane together flying over Wadjemup/Rottnest island, that due to heavy winds, I wasn’t actually sure would be able to land - ever - but that’s a tale for another day!) - Gaz

I’d gotten to know Oliver Bazzani over the past 4 years or so as I got more integrated with the Western Australia tech/startup ecosystem, visiting for West Tech Fest, and generally observing quite the groundswell of momentum from my vantage point of seeing the fruits of labour whenever I visited, but being somewhat unawares on what the heartbeat was when I returned back to my home in Melbourne (WA minimally reported on). So, getting to know Ollie better with each visit, I thought it warranted a bit more of a deep dive to run a bit of a primer for what’s going on in WA for those who are unaware, and for those who already know Ollie, probably to find out a bit more about him in the process.

Ollie grew up above a country pub in the UK, the son of a chef. His grandfather worked the coal mines, then spent 30 years in a shoe factory he hated, his grandma running her own business. Ollie went to university, studied finance and business law, and was pointed squarely at a corporate career - until a retired VC professor at Queen's University in Canada during an exchange semester essentially planted a seed, ensuring a new path was forged.

He went back to Perth, and then unfolded a wide and diverse range of ventures he was involved in, including building the first co-working space in Mandurah, or putting on a music festival at University of WA that sold 2,000 tickets before realising there was no idea on how to actually run a music festival. Starting a creative agency. Ran Scott's Garage (with a unique Art Deco facade) hosting musical acts such as Pendulum, Spacey Jane, and a community of artists and designers, all mashed together. Then, he became Treasurer, then Chair, of Regional Arts WA. Got involved in Perth Angels. And then found his way to Biodesign Perth.

It’s quite the twists and turns story, but what stood out to me was the curiosity embedded throughout Ollie’s career, and how he has deftly navigated roles as the builder, the relationship-builder, and the convening of buildings that builds the unconventional career you read today.

Today, he’s Program Director at Perth Biodesign, on the WA State Government Innovation Advisory Board, and a (recently announced) founder of Fleming - a new syndicate backing early-stage healthtech companies. We discuss all this,  including the massive tech opportunities in WA, and acting as an ambassador for West Tech Fest, which this year takes over Fremantle.

Here's the chit-chat

The entry point into healthtech for most people is a solution. A device they think could work. A piece of software. An idea that came from watching someone they love go through the health system. Perth Biodesign's methodology - built on the Stanford Biodesign framework, which has been running for 25 years and is regarded as one of the most successful startup programs in the world - starts somewhere completely different.

“We start pre-problem, pre-idea. Truly day zero. We throw people into the hospital system - into theatre, into the wards, into aged care and disability - just looking for problems to solve. And we obsess in that problem space.”

The cohort Ollie assembles is deliberately weird. Engineers alongside clinicians alongside business people. A dancer in the current cohort. Teachers. Physicists. People who've spent careers working on satellites, or mining problems, at enormous scale. The common thread isn't the background, but instead, "looking for interesting, smart, driven people with some weirdness to them."

The insight that makes the Biodesign methodology distinctive is deceptively simple: most founders obsess about building the best possible solution to a problem, but very few apply the same rigour to selecting the problem in the first place.

The results speak to this approach:

Earflo - a Biodesign company - won Time's Best Invention and Best Digital Health Product at CES for their gentle-air-pressure-relief-solution, and is now in market in the US. VitalTrace, transforming fetal monitoring, is close behind them. And VeinTech - launching medical products to make 'simple' procedures simple, starting with vascular access - have managed to scale to the US and have seen their founder Dr Nikhilesh Bappoo win the Prime Minister’s Award for Innovation in 2025.

The clinical-to-commercial gap in healthtech is well documented, and consistently underestimated. Ollie explains:

Gaz:

When you look at healthtech companies that don't make it - what's the pattern? Is it usually a problem selection issue, a commercialisation issue, or something else?

Ollie:

“It’s often a problem-selection issue, or more precisely, a failure to validate the problem deeply enough. Even brilliant founders can fall in love with a technology or solution and then work backwards to find a problem it might solve. In health, that’s a dangerous order of operations. You can spend years building an extraordinary product that clinicians don’t adopt, patients don’t value, or the health system simply can’t integrate or pay for. And by the time you discover that, you’ve often built too much to change course easily. That’s what I like about Biodesign: it flips the sequence. Start with the unmet need, understand the clinical and commercial context, then build the minimum solution that actually addresses it. The commercial rigour starts before you build the product, not after.”

Gaz:

And the clinician piece - that's consistently undervalued isn't it? Not just as validation, but as genuine co-founders in the process.

Ollie:

“Hugely undervalued. The clinician isn’t there to validate an idea at the end. They’re there from day zero, because everything starts with a real, observed unmet clinical need. But the magic is what happens around them. You might have a clinician sitting next to an engineer, a developer, someone from finance, or even an astronomer who’s never been behind the scenes in a hospital before. That sounds unusual, but it’s incredibly powerful.

The clinician brings years of lived experience with the problem. The outsider brings completely fresh eyes and asks, “Why do you do it that way?” or “Why couldn’t you do this instead?” They’re not carrying the assumptions that everyone inside the system has accumulated over time. So it’s not just clinician validation. It’s clinical reality colliding with radically different ways of thinking. And that’s often where the insight you wouldn’t get from any one discipline comes from.”

Any dismissal of Perth as a serious tech ecosystem is something Ollie has a clear, pointed answer to.

His first reference is historical. Western Australia built its economy by solving problems that most people said were impossible - the water pipeline into Kalgoorlie, the scale of its mining operations, the infrastructure required to run the world's largest resources sector from one of the planet's most remote outposts.

He references some phenomenal innovators along the way: people such as Professor Barry Marshall - Nobel Prize winner - who believed stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria when no one else did. He swallowed the bacteria himself to prove his thesis. Professor Fiona Wood built spray-on skin.

The Square Kilometre Array - an international project to build the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope across South Africa and Australia - is being built in regional WA, using more than 130,000 small antennas. "We have built Western Australia off the back of solving really hard problems that for many people would say are impossible," Ollie says. "That is in the blood of Western Australia."

His second reference is structural. Because the WA market isn't large enough to sustain a scale-up in most sectors outside mining, founders are forced to think globally from day one. Perth Biodesign now has almost 30 international partnerships as active pipelines.

The third reference, is capital itself. WA has the second largest concentration of family office wealth in Australia, as well as the Future Health Research Innovation Fund (sovereign wealth fund) and a culture of speculative betting from mining exploration that, while not yet fully translating into startup investment behaviour, represents a significant untapped pool.

“I’ve actually questioned my own conviction on some technologies that I thought were exceptional, simply because they weren’t getting much traction from the local ecosystem. Then we’ve taken some of those companies overseas and watched them become the darlings of a global market, winning awards and getting recognition from people who really understand what they’ve built. It’s made me realise that sometimes the problem isn’t the technology or the team. It’s that we’re too close to our own ecosystem to see what’s exceptional in front of us. Seeing that play out has made me want to push even harder for WA companies to get onto the global stage. We shouldn’t wait for the rest of the world to tell us what we have here.”

Ollie has the unique position of serving on the WA State Government Innovation Advisory Board, also directly referencing the commitment of the WA Minister for Innovation Stephen Dawson to the sector (I can vouch for that from my travels to WA in the past for West Tech Fest)

The gap Ollie kept seeing wasn't a pipeline problem, but mainly a first-cheque problem. Perth Biodesign was producing genuinely world-class early-stage healthtech companies, but a gap identified was more early believers willing to back a clinician-scientist before the product was built and before the story was easy to tell.

He’s launched Fleming alongside Oliver Tweddell: a syndicate focused on healthcare “I saw the gap of these great technologies, and I saw an opportunity not just to be the early believer in these amazing clinicians and scientists, but also a huge commercial opportunity to be backing these companies early and see a huge amount of alpha there. So that's why I'm choosing to do that and bring others along on the journey.”

The broader capital thesis Ollie is building toward is interesting: the immense amount of philanthropic giving that flows through health and medical research in WA comes from high-net-worth families and individuals betting on 20-year problems.

Some of that, he argues, should be carved out and deployed as early-stage LP capital into companies that will have nearer-term patient impact. A philanthropic mindset and the investment mindset aren't as far apart as they may seem.

*I’ll happily do the spruik here myself as I’ve gotten to know the WA ecosystem well from visiting the past 4 years, it has a phenomenal amount of momentum.

Explains Ollie: For founders building in the health space - particularly those outside WA who haven't yet looked west - Perth Biodesign is actively looking for people from all backgrounds and all geographies. The program has taken people from across Australia and internationally, including those who've relocated specifically to participate. The on-ramp into healthtech that Biodesign provides is, Ollie argues, genuinely unique - and the ecosystem it connects into is way more global than most people realise.

To recap: Ollie is Program Director at Perth Biodesign, on the WA State Government Innovation Advisory Board, and the founder of Fleming - a new syndicate backing early-stage healthtech companies. He's also an ambassador for West Tech Fest, which this year takes over Fremantle.

I like the unconventional backgrounds aspect of the whole journey - from running sold-out music festivals that kept an emphasis on social issues, to setting up coworking spaces, to backing clinician-scientists at day zero is a pretty great story, even better when you can rep your state as Oliver proudly does. The arts taught Ollie something about risk that the startup world often overcomplicates - that the bet is worth taking when you believe in what the room will feel like once people are inside it.

"All the great things that have been built are by relatively normal people that aren't too much unlike us. That really gave me conviction to follow curiosity and take some bets on myself - and fight to get into rooms that I otherwise wouldn't."

Find Perth Biodesign at perthbiodesign.au and Fleming at app.ventari.com/syndicate/fleming

As I do with each guest on PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS, I asked Ollie for a recommendation on what keeps his brain happy outside of work.