Cicada HealthTech Hub Masterclass: How to strategically tailor your funding runway for early-stage healthtech
Description
Raising capital is one of the hardest parts of building a healthtech venture. Health and medicine is a highly regulated space, with rigorous risk management, clinical validation, and regulatory requirements to navigate well before reaching the market, and traditional fundraising playbooks don't always translate.
Join the Cicada HealthTech Hub on August 5th for an intensive, in-person workshop designed to help you build a strategic funding runway. This session gives you the frameworks to identify the right funding options, time your approach, and put together a compelling case for support.
Learn from venture advisors, successful founders and start-ups and avoid the pitfalls.
What You Will Learn:
Funding Landscape: Identify the most relevant funding options for your project and map your project's stage to the right funding requirements.
Timing and Translation: Understand the timing, deliverables, and expectations involved in moving your work toward commercialisation.
The Narrative: Craft a compelling problem-solution-impact story that links clinical value to system-level outcomes.
Budgeting and Positioning: Structure a project plan and milestone budget aligned with funder priorities, and position your solution competitively through differentiation, team capability, and preliminary validation.
Grant Writing: Write a compelling grant application, with live feedback from industry experts.
Who Should Attend?
This session is designed for health technology innovators, clinical and research entrepreneurs, founders and teams of early-stage health assets actively pursuing dilutive or non-dilutive funding.
Eligibility applies.
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Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights from industry experts and network with fellow health tech innovators.
Lineup
Megan O'Connor (Managing Director at Kantara Consulting)
Megan O’Connor, PhD, MBA, is the founder of Kantara Consulting, specializing in funding, government relations, and industry engagement for life science companies. With over a decade at global consulting firms, including as National Life Science Leader at Deloitte, she has also worked in an Australian biotech startup. Her clients—some of Australia’s Top 100 Innovators and Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation recipients—have successfully secured funding through State and Federal programs. Megan holds a PhD in Neurobiology and is dedicated to supporting Australia’s most innovative companies.
Duncan Macinnis (Industry Growth Program Commercialisation Adviser)
Dr Duncan Macinnes has spent more than 15 years working at the intersection of business and science, having worked in industry, tech transfer and the not-for-profit sector. Most recently, as Director for Stakeholder Engagement at MTPConnect, Duncan was an assessor on multiple grants programs (including writing the funding guidelines and application form for the Clinical Translation and Commercialisation - Medtech program) and has assisted hundreds of companies and researchers with advice and guidance in non-dilutive funding strategies.
Stéphane Chatonsky (Venture Adviser and Board Director)
Stéphane is a healthtech mentor and venture adviser with deep experience across medtech, diagnostics, digital health, AI and life sciences. Drawing on senior experience in investment banking, venture capital, strategy consulting and board leadership, he helps early-stage founders move from technical promise to commercial and investment readiness. He has supported companies through major funding rounds, governance design, international expansion and commercial strategy, and brings a practical, founder-first approach to scaling health ventures. His current advisory and board work includes AI healthtech, vascular imaging, microbiome science, neurotech and clinical trials.
Noam Pilpel (Venture Lead, University of Sydney)
A biotech professional with 20 years of experience bridging the gap between science and the commercial arena, having successfully raised funding from international VCs.
Jerry Zhou, Founder CEO, Amazing Gut
Senior lecturer and clinical fellow at WSU School of Medicine with over 10 years experience in clinical translational research. Winner of 2026 MDF grant, as a newly emerging health tech innovator and founder of Amazing Gut, the technology approach gut problems as users and solve them as clinicians, engineers and designers, starting with a real need and innovating around it.approach gut problems as users and solve them as clinicians, engineers and designers, starting with a real need and innovating around it.
FAQs
- What is the Cicada HealthTech Hub?
Cicada Innovations is proud to be collaborating with the Westmead Health & Innovation District, Australia’s fastest-growing health and innovation precinct, for this commercialisation masterclass series. These masterclasses are to help bridge the gap between research and commercialisation.
Find out more about the Cicada HealthTech Hub
The Cicada HealthTech Hub is proudly supported by NSW Government and is part of the Westmead’s Health & Innovation District. The district includes 4 major hospitals, 4 world-leading medical research institutes, 2 university campuses and the largest research-intensive pathology service in NSW. By 2036, the number of full-time staff will increase to more than 50,000 and the number of students will expand to more than 10,000. Among the first projects for development is a viral vector advanced manufacturing facility to provide ground-breaking trial therapies for infections, cancer and genetic diseases.
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