Eight companies, three and a half decades.

Illuminati Magic exists because of a David Blaine television clip. After CommtechWireless sold in 2008, I came back to Perth with two small children and time on my hands for the first time in twenty years. I saw Blaine perform “card to impossible location” on Harrison Ford — Ford’s reaction wouldn’t leave me — and I started buying tricks to entertain Ethan. I joined the Academy of Magical Arts at the Magic Castle. By 2017 it was obvious there was a platform missing — the engineering, firmware and software infrastructure that working professional magicians needed and that nobody else was going to build. So I built it. The business sits where my career has always sat — the seam between hardware, firmware and software — and the customer is the person on stage who cannot afford a method to fail in front of two hundred people.

The principle — one consolidated architecture, designed for the seam between the performer and the audience — is the same one that ran through every business I’ve built since 1992: the right information, to the right person, at the right moment. The customers are different. The architecture is the same.

Underneath the craft, this is a deep-technology company. The platform runs on real-time computer vision, applied machine learning, custom miniaturised electronics, and a single native engine written in C++ that shares one implementation across desktop, single-board hardware and iOS — validated bit-for-bit against a golden reference and holding a hard real-time budget on a handset, decoding on-device rather than in the cloud. Elsewhere in the product line we run neural networks in earnest: GPU-accelerated segmentation models, neural speech recognition, and neural text-to-speech. Around all of it sit Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals, RFID, custom microcontroller firmware, purpose-built camera hardware, augmented-reality display glasses, and a localised application layer shipped in multiple languages.

Out of respect for the performers who rely on the work, the products, methods and platforms are not discussed in public. The discipline of method-secrecy is itself a craft.

The company operates as a properly distributed business — a Perth head office, engineering teams in India, partner relationships across Europe and the United States, and a roster of professional consultants and performers who feed the R&D pipeline. We supply some of the world’s leading mentalists, with new performers onboarded continuously and an active customer-support and training operation behind every line of work.

This is also — deliberately — the last business I expect to be running. Magic, taken seriously, is the closest art I know to engineering. R&D on a new effect is structurally identical to R&D on a piece of medical-grade firmware: you iterate, you instrument, you watch what the audience does with their eyes, and you tighten the seam until the seam disappears. The horizon is indefinite. Whether Ethan or Lachlan ever want it is for them to decide; the business is being built so it doesn’t depend on the answer.

Alcidion had been built quietly in Adelaide over a decade by Professor Malcolm Pradhan (PhD Stanford, Medical Informatics) and Ray Blight (former CEO of the SA Health Commission). Their platform — Miya — was a clinical decision-support system that surfaced real-time risk to the clinicians who could act on it. Sepsis. Deterioration. Falls. The right information, to the right person, at the right moment. The thesis that had run through my career was sitting on the other side of the table with a working product and a customer list.

In August 2015 we announced a reverse takeover of Naracoota Resources Limited (ASX:NRR) to list Alcidion on the ASX. Allure Capital led the deal alongside BlueSky Private Equity (ASX:BLA) and Patersons Securities. The structure was $12m in initial scrip on completion, plus two further $4m tranches contingent on hitting $10m and $15m revenue. Alcidion was deployed live at Western Health hospitals in Footscray, Sunshine, and Williamstown before the listing was complete.

Shareholders approved the reverse takeover in December 2015, valuing the business at $10.25m, and Alcidion was re-quoted on the ASX in February 2016. It has traded as ALC on the ASX ever since. I served as Executive Director of Alcidion Group Limited from February 2016 to July 2017, when I stepped down. I have since divested the position entirely — resigning as director and selling my shares — though the platform’s subsequent global trajectory under Kate Quirke’s leadership has been remarkable.

The Miya platform has gone on to become a global concern. As of 2026, Alcidion runs across 400+ hospitals, supporting 50,000+ beds and 130,000 active users in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Landmark UK NHS contracts include South Tees Hospitals (A$9.5m, the largest Miya Precision deal at execution), University Hospitals Sussex (multi-year EPR, January 2026), North Cumbria Integrated Care (10-year contract, 2025), and continuing rollouts at Alfred Health in Melbourne. Through the MKM Health and Patientrack acquisitions, which I finalised before stepping down and which completed in July 2018, ExtraMed and Silverlink (2021), and most recently Telstra Health Kyra (2026), the company has consolidated as Australia's flagship clinical-informatics business.