A big week for Duress: ATC 2026 Growth Equity winner, then on stage at WA Mining

Mid-September was a big week for Duress. On Tuesday 15 September, we won the Growth Equity category at the 2026 Australian Technologies Competition in Sydney. The next day, our Founder and CEO Trav Heaven was in Perth, joining a panel at the WA Mining Conference & Exhibition on how people and technology can work together as mining becomes more automated.

Growth Equity winner at the 2026 Australian Technologies Competition

The Australian Technologies Competition (ATC) has celebrated Australian technology companies since 2010 and is now in its 16th year. This year’s program drew more than 240 applications. From those, 95 semi-finalists were chosen and 33 finalists were shortlisted across 11 technology categories.

Duress was named a semi-finalist in May and a finalist in August. The finalists pitched live at the Finals & National Awards Night at Sydney’s Ivy Ballroom, in front of a sold-out room of more than 200 guests, before the winners were announced. Duress took home the Growth Equity award.

In announcing the winners, the ATC described Duress as “an Australian safety technology company protecting frontline and lone workers through wearable devices, live video streaming, and secure emergency communication systems that connect directly to 24/7 monitoring centres and emergency services in real time.”

“Building Duress has always been about one thing: making sure people can get help when they need it most,” Trav said. “To see that mission, and the business we’ve built around it, recognised like this is an incredibly proud moment.”

Trav said the award belongs to “every single person who has helped build Duress into what it is today”, and gave special thanks to Shien Ting Lim, who drove our entry.

Thank you to the Australian Technologies Competition and Scalare Partners for running the program, and to the judges for their time. Congratulations to all the other finalists and winners.

The next day: on stage at the WA Mining Conference

On Wednesday 16 September, Trav joined the panel “The Human-Machine Partnership: Workforce Adaptation in an Automated Mine” at the WA Mining Conference & Exhibition at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. He shared the stage with leaders from Hancock Iron Ore, Deloitte and the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association.

The session looked at how mining can keep people at the centre of operations as automation and AI transform the industry, from safer operations to smarter decisions and more capable workforces. The panel was set up to explore questions such as what a successful human-machine partnership looks like on the ground, how roles change as more work shifts to monitoring automated systems, and whether worker capability and wellbeing should be measured alongside productivity.

These questions matter to Duress because, whatever the worksite, safety technology only works if a person gets help quickly when something goes wrong. In FY26, the median time for a Duress alert to reach a live operator was seven seconds.

The Duress team was also on the show floor across the two-day expo. Thank you to Prime Creative Media for having us.

What’s next

We’re excited to share our new safety devices in October. Stay tuned.

See all our news and awards · Read the State of Lone Worker Safety FY26 report