On Thursday 13 November 2025 I stood up in front of a room at the Macquarie University Incubator and pitched Trilbii AI properly for the first time.
Ten resident startups, three minutes each, one panel of judges. No demo, no second run at it. Here is what I pitched, what three minutes taught me, and who else was in the room.
What the Pitch Final is
The Incubator’s Pitch Final brings the resident startups together in front of a judging panel and an audience of founders, students, researchers and Macquarie staff. Each team gets three minutes on stage and then takes questions.
Three awards were up for decision on the day: Best Pitch, the Research Engagement Award, and Most Appealing Investment. The judges were Carly Martin, Archie Judd, Richard Soussa and Alex Shapilsky.
Ten companies pitching back to back is a strange and useful thing to sit through. You hear a medtech device, then a consumer app, then a piece of climate infrastructure, and the pitches that land are almost never the ones with the cleverest technology. They are the ones where you understood the problem inside the first sentence.
What I pitched
Trilbii AI is a practical AI assistant for the everyday work that sits around clinical care in dental, medical and allied health practices. Marketing that has to go out consistently. Patient recalls that quietly stop happening when the front desk gets busy. Communications that have to hold up against the advertising rules. New team members who need to be brought up to speed on how this particular practice does things.
The case I made on stage is the one I have been making for years inside practices. A five person practice carries the regulatory obligations of a healthcare organisation without the marketing department, the HR manager or the compliance officer to carry any of it. The owner does all of it, usually after hours, usually last.
That is not a technology problem waiting for a clever model. It is an operational problem, and it is specific enough to build for properly.
I also made the point that matters most in healthcare. Nothing Trilbii produces goes out on its own. Content is drafted, risk is flagged in plain language, and a person decides what happens next.
Three minutes is a good discipline
I had been carrying a much longer version of this pitch. Three minutes removes the option of easing into it.
What survived the cut was the problem, the person it belongs to, and what we do about it. What did not survive was most of the product detail I thought was essential. Nobody in that room needed the feature list. They needed to believe the problem was real, and that we were the right people to be near it.
That is a useful thing to be forced into. I have used the three minute version far more often since than the long one.
The founders I shared the stage with
Congratulations to the winners on the day:
- Best Pitch, MusoLingo
- Research Engagement Award, NanoDx Corp
- Most Appealing Investment, TerraSeek
And well done to everyone who pitched: Akili Sono, ASK Scientia, bluefriend, Carebotics.ai, Defectech, EasySplit, MusoLingo, NanoDx Corp, TerraSeek and Trilbii.
Ten founders solving ten unrelated problems is a good corrective to the belief that yours is the interesting one in the room. It also makes the shared parts obvious. Almost everyone I spoke to that day was working on the same three things: how to say the thing in one sentence, how to find the first customers who will tell you the truth, and how to say no to features.
Thank you to the judges for their time and their questions, and to the Macquarie University Incubator team for building a place where founders can practise this badly before they have to do it well.
What is next for Trilbii
We are building the waiting list for our pilot with practices across Australia, in a limited intake so each one is set up properly rather than handed a login. The practices who join early shape what Trilbii becomes.
If your practice is wearing too many hats, that is exactly who we are building this for.
Related reading: Demo Day at the Macquarie University Incubator.
Three minutes removes the option of easing into it. What survived the cut was the problem, the person it belongs to, and what we do about it.
Carolyn S Dean, Founder, Trilbii AI
Trilbii AI pitched at the Macquarie University Incubator Pitch Final on Thursday 13 November 2025, alongside nine other resident startups.
