Medical-technology entrepreneur & investor
Thirty-five years at the seam where healthcare meets software. Two ASX-listed health-technology boards, and an executive role at a third. One ASX listing executed. Based in Perth, Western Australia.
Countries where CommtechWireless was deployed at trade sale · 2008
Healthcare & public-safety sites running the platform at exit
ASX-listed companies · board seats at ALC and RAP; executive role at AZV
Building at the seam between software, hardware & healthcare
Board & governance
ASX-listed and private
Non-Executive Director, ResApp Health (ASX:RAP) 2017–20. Executive Director, Alcidion Group (ASX:ALC) 2016–17, and director of Alcidion Corporation from 2014. Advisory Board, Omnitronics 2017–22. Earlier directorships at Austco Communication, Horizon Wireless and K2 Wireless.
Australian Institute of Company Directors
Company Directors Course graduate (2011); former AICD member. Board experience spans clinical trials, regulatory approvals, capital raising, a reverse takeover and a trade sale.
TGA · CE Mark · FDA
Board oversight of ResApp’s European CE Mark and Australian TGA approvals in 2019–20, and of the clinical evidence behind them. The CommtechWireless middleware I built later gained FDA Class II clearance under Amcom.
Listings, transactions, critical systems
Led the capital raise and December 2015 reverse takeover that listed Alcidion; negotiated the 2008 trade sale of CommtechWireless; led the shareholder sale of Omnitronics in 2022. Three decades building systems where failure is measured in lives, not downtime.
Any board appointment comes with a written declaration of interests, and a commitment to step aside from any decision touching a company Allure Capital holds or is considering.
Beyond the boardroom
Expert Network member · Federal Government
Appointed to the Expert Network of the Australian Government’s Commercialisation Australia programme — a panel of entrepreneurs and investors assigned to founders taking research to market. Profiled by the programme in Value Proposition (December 2012) under the title “Man on a Mission”.
WA Government · Curtin · Cambridge
Judging and assessment work for the Western Australian Government’s Innovation Vouchers Programme, and for the Curtin and Cambridge universities’ Ignite and Ignition entrepreneurship programmes — reading the business cases of early-stage founders and deciding which ones earned backing.
Curtin Graduate School of Management
Keynote address to the graduating class of the Curtin Graduate School of Management, and a session on building teams delivered to the Curtin Ignition cohort using CommtechWireless as the case study. Earlier, a Success & Leadership breakfast address for WA Business News.
Perth Chapter · 2003–2008, 2010
Member of the Perth chapter of the global Entrepreneurs’ Organization, lapsed during the years based in Florida and resumed on returning to Perth. The WAITTA Lifetime Achievement Award (2005) was given for contribution to the Western Australian IT community.
Most of this sits in the decade after the CommtechWireless sale, when the useful thing I had to give was a set of scars rather than capital. I am looking for the next place to be useful in the same way.
Right now
Allure Capital
Family-office investment firm. ~100 proposals reviewed, ~6 invested. Currently sourcing new healthcare-software deals.
Illuminati Magic
Deep-technology business in electronic mentalism — applied AI, computer vision, neural networks, embedded electronics and on-device software — serving working professionals across 80+ countries. Built to be generational.
Halo Medical Devices
Clinical-grade digital goniometer. A passive seed shareholding retained under the Allure mandate.
ResApp Health 2017–20
Machine-learning cough diagnosis, listed in Brisbane. Joined the board Dec 2017; resigned 31 March 2020.
Alcidion 2014–17
Director of the private company from Apr 2014; led the raise and the Dec 2015 RTO; Executive Director of the listed entity Feb 2016 – Jul 2017. Position fully divested.
CommtechWireless 1992–2008
Founded 1992, sold to Amcom 2008; Amcom Software acquired by USA Mobility (now Spok) in 2011. The originating engagement.
In one paragraph
I’m Nathan Buzza. Thirty of my thirty-five years have gone into building medical-grade clinical technology — and a parallel line of custom secure-communications work for the United States Secret Service, including the wireless duress platform that protected the President of the United States across the Bush administration. CommtechWireless (founded 1992, exited 2008, seven and a half thousand sites across fifty-three countries), Alcidion (Executive Director of the listed entity, 2016–17, having led the December 2015 RTO) and ResApp Health (NED 2017–20) gave me a single conviction about what it takes to ship something into a hospital ward — or onto a Presidential motorcade — that runs at three in the morning without failing. One trade sale during the GFC. One RTO. One divestment.
I now run two things. Allure Capital is the family office I founded in 2011 with my own capital. It is patient. Illuminati Magic, founded in 2017, is an electronic-mentalism business serving the world’s leading performers in 80+ countries — a craft I expect to be running for the rest of my life. Whether Ethan and Lachlan ever want any of it is theirs to decide.
I do this work because the discipline of building things people depend on — clinicians, magicians, or the Secret Service — is the one I want to keep practising. I have served as a director of two ASX-listed health technology companies and am open to a further non-executive role. Company Directors Course graduate (2011); former AICD member.
Built, run, or directed
Eight companies. Three and a half decades. The two I run today come first. The credentials follow. For a deeper brief on each, including the full menu of sections, see the Businesses page.
2011 — Present · Perth
Founder · Directors: Nathan & Trudi Buzza
The family-office investment firm I founded in 2011 to do, with my own capital, the kind of investing I’d wanted done for me twenty years earlier. Healthcare, medical-device, and technology businesses with management who have actually shipped — seven criteria, all non-negotiable, thirty-six-month exit horizon.
Past engagements include Azure Healthcare (ASX:AZV, now Austco Healthcare; position divested), Alcidion (position divested), and the Omnitronics sale on behalf of shareholders. Current active: Allure Capital itself, Illuminati Magic, and seed in Halo Medical Devices.
2017 — Present · illuminati-magic.com
Founder & CEO
A deep-technology company serving the world’s leading performers across 80+ countries — applied artificial intelligence, real-time computer vision, neural networks, custom miniaturised electronics, and a single native engine that runs on-device across desktop, embedded hardware and iOS. The work spans Perth headquarters, engineering teams in India, partners across Europe and the United States, and a global dealer network. Founded after a David Blaine TV clip got under my skin and I started buying tricks to entertain Ethan.
Magic, taken seriously, is the closest art I know to engineering. The horizon is indefinite. Out of respect for the performers who depend on the work, the products, methods and platforms are not discussed in public. The business is being built to last beyond me — whether Ethan or Lachlan ever want it is for them.
1992 — 2010 · Perth · Sydney · Jacksonville · Hong Kong · Vejle · London
Founder, CEO & Chief Technologist
Founded as Commtech Paging Systems in 1992 (incorporated 1994, renamed CommtechWireless in 1999). The starting capital was twenty-four thousand dollars saved while I was still at Austco. After a photocopier, two PCs and a print run of brochures it was down to five thousand two hundred — which I figured would last twelve months at a hundred dollars a week. The office was a nine-square-metre shed behind a friend’s house in Mosman Park that hit forty-five degrees by the middle of summer.
The thesis was simple. Hospitals had nurse-call, patient-monitoring, fire-alarm and security systems; casinos had slot-machines, surveillance and incident response; and none of these systems spoke to each other or to the staff who needed the information. We built the middleware. The first sale — BASEPage, the world’s first PC-based wireless-messaging platform — went to Telecom New Zealand in 1995. Within a year, it was running in every public hospital in New Zealand.
By exit we ran across 53 countries and approximately 7,500 customer sites, with offices in Perth, Sydney, Jacksonville, Boca Raton, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Vejle and London. Customers included Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, the Saudi Ministry of Health, Wynn Macau, the US Army/Navy/Air Force, the NSW Rural Fire Service, Erie County Homeland Security (PA), FAO Schwarz New York, the Mulia Hotel Jakarta, and a duress platform for the President of the United States.
In October 2008 — three weeks into the global financial crisis, with twenty-two investment banks newly underwater — we sold the business to Amcom Software. The funding came from CIBC, a Canadian bank that was, miraculously, still answering its phone. The cheque didn’t bounce. In 2011, Amcom Software was acquired by USA Mobility (now Spok) for US$163.3m.
2017 — 2020 · Brisbane
Non-Executive Director
Built around technology developed by Associate Professor Udantha Abeyratne at the University of Queensland: a machine-learning model that listens to a thirty-second cough recorded by a smartphone microphone and tells you, with clinical-grade accuracy, what’s wrong with the patient’s respiratory system. No accessories, no spirometer, no hardware beyond a phone they already own.
The products were ResAppDx (paediatric respiratory diagnosis) and SleepCheck (consumer sleep-apnoea screening). I joined the board as Non-Executive Director in December 2017 — the first company I’d worked with where the core IP was not architecture or workflow but an algorithm trained on labelled audio.
I resigned from the board on 31 March 2020. In April 2022 — about two years after my tenure ended — Pfizer announced an intention to acquire ResApp, beginning at A$0.115 per share. After a confirmatory COVID-19 study missed Pfizer’s thresholds, the offer was cut to A$0.146 before being raised to a final A$0.208 per share, valuing ResApp at approximately AUD $180m. Approved by about 82% of shares voted, cleared by the ACCC, and implemented on 26 September 2022 — thirty months after I left the board, and not a transaction I was party to.
2014 — 2017 · Adelaide
Director, Alcidion Corporation · Executive Director of the listed entity, 2016–17
Built quietly in Adelaide over a decade by Professor Malcolm Pradhan (PhD Stanford, Medical Informatics) and Ray Blight (former CEO, SA Health Commission). Their platform — Miya — was a clinical decision-support system surfacing risk to the clinicians who could act on it.
In August 2015 we announced a reverse takeover of Naracoota Resources Ltd (ASX:NRR) to list Alcidion on the ASX. Backed by Allure Capital, BlueSky Private Equity (ASX:BLA) and Patersons Securities. The deal valued Alcidion at $12m initial scrip, with two further $4m tranches contingent on revenue milestones.
The reverse listing completed December 2015; I joined the listed board as Executive Director in February 2016 and stepped down on 31 July 2017. Alcidion has traded as ALC on the ASX ever since — carrying a current market capitalisation of over AUD $130m and with the Miya Precision platform now running across 400+ hospitals globally.
1989 — 1992 · Perth
Software Development Manager & Director
I joined Austco at nineteen as Software Development Manager — one of the youngest in the building, and almost certainly the only one who’d ever shipped a video game. Austco was Australia’s largest nurse-call manufacturer, with eight subsidiaries around the world.
The products I worked on — CallGuard, CellGuard, Medicom — were the first time I’d seen what happens when software has to be right in a hospital ward at three in the morning. The principle — that the seam between software and the clinician is not a place for cleverness but for unblinking reliability — has been the standard I’ve held every product to since.
1988 — 1990 · Perth
Software Engineer, aged 17
Between Scotch College and a Curtin business degree I never quite finished, I took a job at Omnitronics — a Perth-based electronics design house. They’d been approached by Geoff Haselhurst about a laser-tag system he was prototyping. I wrote the PC software in Turbo Pascal alongside Peter Lowe’s embedded firmware on a Motorola 6805 C8.
The first venue, the Quasar Centre, opened at 160 Beaufort Street, Northbridge. I drew the original logo too. International rights sold to Ivano Cafallo in 1991; the brand renamed Q-Zar in 1992 after a trademark dispute with Philips Magnavox. Q-Zar went on to become one of the most popular laser-tag franchises in the world.
1984 — 1986 · New Zealand
Founder, aged 14
My first company started in a hospital bed at Kings College in New Zealand, after an eight-hour operation for an astrocytoma in the motor section of my brain, followed by twelve weeks of radiotherapy and most of a year off school. My father — the kind of West Australian builder who turned every adversity into a deal — bought me a 1984 IBM PC at $13,000 and 24% interest, and billed me on a payment plan. “Well son,” he quipped, presenting the machine at the foot of my ICU bed, “you’re an unsecured minor fresh out of brain surgery, which puts you at a 24% interest bracket.”
I taught myself to program. Philips Electronics New Zealand — new to the personal-computer market and looking for software to bundle with the launch of their YES:PC — picked up a video game I’d written on a royalty deal: eleven dollars a copy to a fifteen-thousand-dollar cap. The cap was paid out inside a week.
A few stories along the way
2005
In late 2005 I was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Western Australia in the Technology, Communications, E-Commerce & Life Sciences category. It came on the back of the Telstra & Australian Government’s Panasonic Australia Business Award (Best small business) award — and four consecutive years on the BRW Fast 100.
2007
A US$1.1m contract with the White House Communications Agency to develop a wireless duress platform for the President of the United States and the First Family. The brief, roughly: let the people responsible for the most powerful family on earth quietly request help, anywhere, instantly, without anyone noticing they’ve done it. We did.
2007
A Homeland Security-funded emergency alerting system: ten thousand pagers, a county-wide simulcast paging network, and the requirement that every first responder in northwest Pennsylvania get the right message at the right moment, on the worst day.
A few highlights, would you believe
Some of these I tell at dinner parties. Some only when asked. All of them are true.
February 2007. Our Florida receptionist took a call: “Hi, my name is Agent Tim. I’m calling on behalf of the President — I’d like to speak to your President.” Several nerve-racking White House meetings later (and reportedly a couple of AK-47s in the room), we won the contract: a wireless duress platform for the President and the First Family — a US$1.1m award that grew, with follow-on product and maintenance orders, into a multi-million-dollar programme. Used through the Bush administration.
A parabolic flight out of Cape Canaveral aboard G-Force One — Zero G’s specially modified Boeing 727, the same plane NASA used to train astronauts. Thirty-second weightless arcs over the Atlantic, a couple of Superman moves, and a view of Kennedy Space Center on the way home. The vomit rocket, they call it. I held it together.
I founded Illuminati Magic in 2017 to build infrastructure for the world’s leading performers in electronic mentalism. It is a deep-technology business — applied AI and real-time computer vision, neural networks for segmentation, speech and voice synthesis, custom miniaturised electronics, and a single native engine that decodes on-device across desktop, embedded hardware and iOS. The business now operates across more than eighty countries, with engineering teams across two continents and a global dealer network. The work itself remains private, out of respect for the performers who rely on it.
October 2008. Twenty-two investment banks had collapsed the month prior. We sold CommtechWireless to Amcom Software in a transaction funded by CIBC, a Canadian bank that was, miraculously, still answering its phone. We sat at the closing table on a Friday night. The cheque didn’t bounce. The next day, three years of trade sale due diligence finally felt like it had been worth it.
After eight hours of brain surgery for an astrocytoma at fourteen — the operation that saved my life — the IBM PC my father loaned me at 24% interest sat on a hospital tray-table. The video game I wrote on it was bundled by Philips Electronics New Zealand with the launch of their YES:PC at eleven dollars a copy, capped at fifteen thousand. The cap was paid out inside a week. The cheque cleared the IBM loan with allowance to spare.
In December 2017 I joined the board of ResApp Health as Non-Executive Director — an ASX-listed company whose machine-learning model listens to a thirty-second cough recorded on a smartphone and tells a clinician what is wrong with the patient’s chest. I resigned on 31 March 2020. Pfizer acquired the company by scheme of arrangement thirty months later, on 26 September 2022.
A few moments along the way
Telstra & Australian Governments’ Small Business Awards podium — the night that opened the door to EY Entrepreneur of the Year a few months later.
Department of Industry & Resources, ICT category — CommtechWireless went on to ship into 53 countries by exit.
A parabolic Zero-G flight out of Cape Canaveral — a 39th-birthday present that, briefly, took the floor away.
Family office
Investment criteria, named positions, and the combined stock portfolio — allocation by percentage.
Recognition
EY Entrepreneur of the Year · 2005
Telstra · Panasonic Australia Business Award (Best small business) · 2005
40 Under 40 · First Amongst Equals · 2003
BRW Fast 100 · 2002–05
Deloitte Tech Fast 50 · 2002–05
C.Y. O’Connor Award · 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006
In the press
Three of the more representative pieces — from the 2003 40under40 cover through to the 2012 EoY alumni follow-up. The full archive, including PDFs, sits on the Media page.
Family
Trudi, Ethan and Lachlan. The reason for the long arc, the reason for the patience, the reason any of the work was ever worth doing.
Wife · BSc Psychology
A psychology graduate who worked at Youth Focus in youth-suicide prevention before motherhood — the kind of work that asks more of a person than most careers ever will. We met on a first date at the Vic in Subiaco; our first kiss was in front of five hundred people at the WA Industry & Export Awards on date number three. Engaged at The Peak in Hong Kong, married at Christchurch Uniting Church in Claremont on 14 January 2006. Trudi runs the household, the boys’ lives, and her own steady counsel on every business decision I’ve made since the day we met. The rest of the entire trajectory of this page would not exist without her.
Older son · b. 2006 · UWA Fogarty Scholar
Born late 2006 after fifteen hours of labour and an emergency C-section — during which I was photographing the CommtechWireless pagers on the nurses’ ankles. Scotch College through to graduation. Now reading a double major in Artificial Intelligence and Finance at the University of Western Australia, on a Fogarty Foundation Scholarship — UWA’s full undergraduate scholarship, awarded by application to a small cohort each year on a basis of academic merit and leadership potential. A serious thinker and an instinctive performer, and a quiet sounding-board for half the decisions in this house. What he does with his own life is his to write.
Younger son · b. 2009 · Year 11
Born in Jacksonville, Florida — named after either Tiberius Claudius Nero or James Tiberius Kirk, depending on who’s asking. American and Australian by citizenship. Currently in Year 11 at secondary school, due to finish in 2027. The funniest member of the household by a clear margin, and the one most likely to ask the question that resets the room.
This page is about Trudi and the boys because they’re the people who live this work with me day to day. The rest of the people who shaped me — my parents, my brother Mike, the wider family — have their own stories to tell, in their own way, on their own time. They know who they are.
A few words about home
Some years ago, Trudi and I sat down with an architect and started sketching what a long-term family home might actually look like. A great many decisions later, the result was a build our team titled A Zenith of Modern Lifestyle.
HIA AWARDS · WINNER
Stone-clad feature walls, as much glass as we could justify, and a pool you can see from the kitchen.
Designed for
“A family that builds things at home.”
An office above the garage, a workshop downstairs, a study above, and enough quiet corners that all four of us can think at once.
The HIA Award itself is a small piece of perspex sitting on a shelf upstairs. We treasure it less for the trophy than for what it meant about the people who got us across the line — the architect, the builder, the trades, and the year of decisions every couple has to make about what their forever home looks like.
The home is where most of the rest of this story happens now — usually with two boys raiding the fridge.
Cross-check
The principal claims on this site point to public sources. If you’re doing diligence, the canonical references are below.
ASX
Alcidion Group · ASX:ALC
Company announcements, financials, share-price history since the December 2015 RTO.
Pfizer
Pfizer completes acquisition of ResApp Health
Official press release confirming the scheme implementation on 26 September 2022. Cited only to date the transaction that followed my departure.
Austco Healthcare
Austco Healthcare · corporate site
Formerly Azure Healthcare (ASX:AZV) — Management Consultant 2012–13, Executive Vice President 2013–14; holding since divested. A different company from Austco Communications (1989–92), above.
Laser Tag Museum
Q-Zar · company history
Independent record of the Q-Zar franchise origin, including the LeisureCorp / U2 acquisition.
ASIC
Allure Capital Pty Ltd · ACN 152 310 766
Company register lookup. Search the ACN for directors, registration date, status.
in/nathanbuzza · professional profile
Cross-checkable timeline of positions, public endorsements, and shared connections.
Press archive
Scanned features, 2003 onward
PDFs of Business News, EY Connections, Commercialisation Australia features.
