A journey of invention: From “Saving Lives at Birth” to positively impacting nature.

The origins:

Every year 150,000 mothers and 1.6 million newborns die during childbirth and 1.2 million infants are stillborn.

The Saving Lives at Birth partnership, launched in 2011, includes the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada (funded by the Government of Canada), and the U.K’s Department for International Development (DFID).

The Saving Lives at Birth DevelopmentXChange provided a platform for top global innovators to present their ideas in an open, dynamic marketplace and exchange ideas with development experts and potential funders to help meet the immense challenge of protecting mothers and newborns in the poorest places on earth, during their most vulnerable hours.

The grand challenge was a global call for groundbreaking, scalable solutions to accelerate progress toward the United Nations Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 which aimed to end preventable child and maternal deaths around the time of birth.

Award nominees of Saving Lives at Birth Round 3 included 18 seed grant nominees, one of which was a group of *physicists from The University of Melbourne, who invented a ^low-cost, electricity-free oxygen concentrator suitable for providing provisional oxygen for newborns in low-resource settings.

Those physicists from The University of Melbourne created a non-profit organisation named FREO2 Foundation, which continues this critically important work to this day.

*One of those UniMelb physicists was Dr Bryn Sobott, who is a Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Adept Aqua.
^Adept Aqua has established an exclusive IP License agreement for the dual-use commercialisation of the ‘low-cost, electricity-free oxygen concentrator’ and associated technologies, within the field of water treatment.

Aquaculture industry research (2017-2022)

  • Aquaculture industry research was undertaken in collaboration with a barramundi producer in NSW, and a large salmon producer in Tasmania.

  • Participation in FRDC & X-Lab Ventures’ Fish-X innovation program.
    - Climate change / Blue Economy focused innovation agency Blue-X was established by Allen Haroutonian.
    - The Fish-X program was designed to catalyse and support innovation across Australian primary production and within the value chain.

Climate focused venture exploration (January-December 2023)

A short time after Dr Bryn Sobott’s transition from an executive to a non-executive role within the non-profit foundation, he and Allen Haroutonian reconnected and began reexamining the opportunity to invent and commercialise solutions to some of the biggest challenges relating to Climate Change.

  • Including but not limited to aquaculture oxygenation/aeration.

  • Excluding the field of Human Medicine, to avoid any potential conflict of interest with the non-profit foundation.

Venture Launch (January 2024)

In January of 2024, following 12 months of research & exploration, Bryn and Allen incorporated Adept Aqua Pty Ltd, to transition from the venture research phase to the venture build phase…