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2027 Alumni Award nominations are now open
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"The most value is often made at the intersection of areas rather than just maximising one..,"
James Ferguson is a pioneering tech entrepreneur reshaping digital ownership globally as co-founder of Immutable, one of Australia’s most successful unicorn startups. James got involved with Ethereum in 2015 with his brother Robbie, and since then has built Immutable into the leading blockchain games platform in the world.
Along the way, they built the world’s first multiplayer blockchain game in 2017, the first blockchain trading card game and most successful blockchain game of 2018 and 2019 by revenue, the first zero knowledge-rollup for Non-Fungible Tokens, and helped develop a multibillion-dollar platform and decentralised token ecosystem for gaming. The Immutable Platform and Passport Wallet now serve hundreds of games — including customers like Ubisoft — as well as millions of gamers today.
James taught himself how to code by doing the MIT curriculum online and moving to Silicon Valley in 2014. Before moving full-time into the world of tech, James received a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce from the ±¬ÁÏÍõ.
Sydney Uni gave me the toolkit for blending finance, law and tech: learning options-pricing and market mechanics in my finance major, then diving into contract and IP law showed me how ownership rules can be coded. That mash-up became foundational knowledge critical for running Immutable, building trading and payment rails for video-game items and turning entertainment IP into tradeable digital assets that players truly own.
Swapping a bulge-bracket internship for a bunk bed in a sketchy SF flat to learn software. Immersing myself in frontier tech and learning to code at the source felt reckless next to my friends’ banking gigs, but the most value is often made at the intersection of areas rather than just maximising one, and that intersection of finance x technology became the basis for most of my professional life.
George Peppou is the CEO and Founder of food-tech start-up, Vow. Vow’s mission is to complement agricultural processes by culturing meat from cells, creating an entirely new category of food.
George began his career as a chef while studying at the ±¬ÁÏÍõ and in his second year, he discovered a love of biochemistry. Following the completion of his degree, he continued to pursue big ideas, working at UTS in their Design Innovation Research Centre, as an inventor which earned him over 30 patents to his name and founding agrifood accelerator, GrowLab.
Stephen Hicks is an innovator at the forefront of neuroscience, visual perception and entrepreneurship. With OXSIGHT, a spinoff from his lab at Oxford University, Stephen developed smart glasses that are changing the lives of millions with visual impairments. Alongside his world-changing tech, he is a prolific author with over 50 peer-reviewed publications and ten patents.
Stephen's groundbreaking work in cybernetics and vision has earned him prestigious awards, including the Google Global Impact Challenge and the Royal Society Brian Mercer Award for Innovation. His pioneering contributions also earned him a place as a finalist in the Advance Global Australian Awards: Gamechangers – Science and Healthcare in 2022. Stephen continues improving the quality of life for individuals facing glaucoma through AI and wearable technology in his new company IRIDA HEALTH.
Adam started his career in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers both in Sydney and Copenhagen. He worked with several major retail, media and consumer clients on their growth strategies before founding The Iconic in 2011. The Iconic was founded on the premise of customer experience leadership and the power of diverse, high-performing teams. It is now one of the largest online fashion retailers in Australia and has won multiple awards.
Adam’s goal is to create technology companies that help shape positive values-based societies, instead of creating social anxiety and isolation. He imagines a future where work connects our strengths and sense of purpose, so we can contribute against the values we care most about.
In 2017, Adam co-founded Hatch to connect university students to meaningful paid work while they studied. In 2020, when COVID-19 upturned society with skyrocketing unemployment, Adam responded by repurposing Hatch’s matching technology to launch The Hatch Exchange - rapidly redeploying thousands of Covid-19-impacted workers into new parts of the economy using their transferable skills and interests. The Hatch Exchange has assisted over 150 Australian businesses in employing over 10,000 stood-down staff.
Adam was awarded the 2018 Westpac Top 20 Business of Tomorrow for his work on Hatch and the 2014 Young Executive.
As a serial entrepreneur, Joanne Howarth witnessed first-hand through her own business, the devasting impact of EPS (polystyrene) upon our oceans and marine ecosystems and was compelled to find an alternative sustainable solution. Recognising the urgency and the opportunity to solve one of the world’s most intractable problems, Jo set about scouring the globe for a non-plastic solution. Jo embarked upon a journey to mimic nature and leveraged the thermal properties of waste wool to create an ingenious product called WOOLPACK.
Transforming supply chains across the globe, WOOLPACK is used to ship temperature sensitive food, seafood and pharmaceuticals from vaccines, IVF, chemotherapy and cosmeceuticals to meat, dairy, chocolate and artisan foods. At its end of life, it breaks down and returns valuable nutrients back into the soil.
Planet Protector Packaging is in a race to become the market leader in sustainable thermal packaging that does not harm the planet. With three operations across ANZ and vision to expand their footprint into Asia.
Made from ‘waste wool’ unsuitable for the textile industry, Planet Protector Packaging has taken this wool otherwise destined for landfill, diverted it, monetarised it and given it a new life. In so doing, they have increased the yield to sheep farmers, generated new revenue streams ($5.5 million to date) to drought-stricken farmers and saved our oceans from more than 7 million EPS boxes.
Impassioned about her legacy and leaving the world better, Jo is a vocal advocate for Dementia Australia and a community ambassador for the Melanoma Institute Australia, to whom she gratefully credits the fact that she is still here to drive change to a more circular economy.
Explore the annual Alumni Awards, featuring four Graduate Medals and four Alumni Awards.