A recent feature in Hankook Ilbo following a delegation visit by the Korean Women Journalists Association captured something we see every day – but don’t often stop to articulate.
Australia’s deep-tech ecosystem isn’t just building startups. It’s building permission.
At Cicada Innovations in Sydney, where Rux Energy is based, the line between lab and company is intentionally blurred. The mindset is simple: the laboratory itself can be a startup.
That shift matters.
In Korea, ~88% of STEM students see startups as important, but only ~11% see it as a viable path – largely due to fear of failure and the cost of stepping away from stable incomes.
What struck the visiting journalists here was how deliberately Australia is addressing that gap at Cicada Innovations:
– Creating environments that support deep tech companies, which can take 10+ years to mature
– Lowering barriers for researchers to commercialise their work
– Treating startup experience itself as being important to universities
Cicada’s impact has been significant with about 400 companies in various fields such as space, quantum, biotechnology, and climate change successfully commercialising at Cicada, raising more than $6.5 billion in investment, and growing the breakthrough technologies based on science and engineering, for the ‘deep tech’ economy, of the future.
And for founders working at the cutting edge of science and engineering, that’s often the difference between an idea staying in a paper… or becoming a company.
It was great for Rux Energy to be featured alongside the incredible team at Cicada and to share a small part of the Sydney deep-tech story.
The takeaway?
If we want more breakthrough technologies in the world, we need to build eco systems that show what is possible.
