Australia's AI and robotics sprint is back! The 2026 cohort launched today with a live webinar featuring last year's winner Dominic Lindsay of Nexobot and ARM Hub Director of Research Programs Troy Cordie.

Seven companies now enter an intensive month-long sprint, working with experts from NVIDIA, Cooke Capital, Phillips Ormonde Fitzpatrick, SMBTech, RSM Australia and Stone & Chalk on commercialisation, IP, R&D financing, investor readiness and pitching under pressure. It all culminates in a virtual pitch night on 31 July, with the winner earning a four-week residency at MassRobotics in Boston.

Meet the 2026 cohort:

MotionLogic: Founder Alex McClung. A vision AI platform for manufacturing operations that monitors material-tool interaction, worker ergonomics and safety on the factory floor.

"We've built an optical interpretation layer for ergonomics and productivity. It interprets the structure and events of manufacturing operations, looking at how items move over space and time." - Alex McClung.

ProxGrid: Founder Rasmus Gupta. A high-voltage-immune drone that inspects, cleans and coats powerline insulators on energised lines in a single pass, replacing helicopter-based maintenance at $15,000 per hour.

"Towards 2040 we need to build 1.5 times the power lines we have today, so that's a huge expansion of the power grid." - Rasmus Gupta.

OarSense (Rowboatix): Team lead Oscar Jones. Oar-mounted waterproof sensors that measure crew timing and technique in real time, giving rowing coaches objective synchronisation data.

"Synchronisation between teams is one of the most important things for rowing, which is what we want to measure." - Team member James Nichol.

Aurova Robotics: Founders Dr Hugh Zhou (CEO) and Dr Tianhao Liu (CTO). A zero-emission autonomous ground platform for vegetation management in orchards, vineyards and solar farms.

"We build autonomous platforms for the agriculture and energy sector, and the main differentiator of our business is we don't rely on GPS." - Dr Zhou.

SpatioTemporal: Founder Andrew Ballard (CEO), with COO Matt Dickinson. A motion intelligence software layer that sits between a robot's perception and planning systems to predict the intent of people and objects in shared spaces.

"We're giving them reflexes, that system one thinking of how to cope in and near people like us." - Andrew Ballard.

JP Robotics: Founders John Burtt and JP Angulo. Autonomous robots using UV light for pest control in vineyards and other crops, with a deliberately simplified hardware approach.

"We're using UV light and autonomous robots to get rid of some pests in the vineyards and in other crops." - JP Angulo.

Contactile: CEO and co-founder Dr Heba Khamis (with co-founders Benjamin Xia and Associate Professor Stephen Redmond). A tactile sensing stack built on the patented PapillArray sensor, giving robot grippers a sense of touch so they can grip fragile or irregular objects without crushing or dropping them.

"If you think of tactile sensing along the spectrum of compass to GPS, we are the GPS and the Google Maps." - Dr Khamis.

Twelve months ago, Nexobot was where these seven companies are now. Today it has a live deployment in regional Victoria and a Boston residency behind it. The 2026 field spans factory floors, power grids, vineyards, orchards and rowing sheds, and the judges will have a genuinely hard decision ahead of them at month's end. Follow the sprint with us through July.