OCULO

Oculo grew out of the Centre for Eye Research Australia, or CERA, a non-profit institute attached to the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne. Professor Jonathan Crowston and Dr Kate Taylor started it in 2015.

The problem they saw was old and unglamorous. When an optometrist spots something worrying in a patient's eye, getting that image and referral to an ophthalmologist was slow and messy.

Faxes, printouts, lost paperwork. Oculo built a secure digital pipe to send scans and referrals instantly between eye care professionals.

It became CERA's first spin-out company.

Oculo runs a secure network for eye care. Optometrists, ophthalmologists, GPs, and hospitals use it to share clinical images, referrals, and notes about patients.

Think of it as a private, medical-grade messaging system built specifically for eyes. Clinics and health systems pay to use the platform.

The pitch is simple. Faster referrals mean problems get caught earlier, which is better for patients and cheaper for the health system.

The product spreads when enough eye professionals in a region join, because the network gets more useful with every clinic on it.

The core product is the Oculo platform, a secure system for sharing eye-care images, referrals, and clinical notes between professionals. It connects optometrists, ophthalmologists, GPs, emergency rooms, and patients.

Features include e-referrals, secure image sharing, and remote monitoring so a specialist can review a case without the patient travelling. Under Revenio it became part of the iCare family of eye-health products, branded as iCare Oculo.

Oculo grew by getting embedded into the daily workflow of eye care. It partnered with Optometry Australia, the national body, which gave its platform credibility and reach with optometrists across the country.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when in-person visits collapsed, Oculo offered members free telehealth access. That timing turned a useful tool into an essential one almost overnight.

It also plugged into practice-management software so clinics did not have to change everything to use it. Slow, sticky, network-driven growth.

Selling software to healthcare is a grind. Doctors are busy, hospitals move slowly, and the privacy rules around patient data are strict.

Oculo needed enough clinics in a region to join before the network became genuinely useful, which is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. It also stayed relatively small and Australia-focused, which capped how big it could get on its own.

That ceiling is part of why being acquired by a global player like Revenio made sense. The platform needed a bigger parent to take it worldwide.

Oculo's biggest backer was always the Centre for Eye Research Australia, which incubated it and stayed its major shareholder. A notable angel investor also took a stake.

This was someone who had a life-changing treatment at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and wanted to give back. That is an unusual cap table for a tech company.

Mostly a research institute and a grateful patient. In March 2021, Finnish health-tech firm Revenio Group acquired the company for about A$18.5 million.