2014 SA Award
At a gala iAwards luncheon held on Friday 27 June 2014 at the Adelaide Convention Centre, the Premier of South Australia, the Hon. Jay Weatherill MP, presented the 2014 Pearcey SA Entrepreneur Award to Dr Henry Detmold.
Dr Henry Detmold
In making the presentation to Prof Anton van den Hengel who stood in for Dr Detmold as he was overseas closing a large contract in the Middle East, the Premier noted that: "This is the seventh occasion that the Pearcey SA Award award has been presented. There have been several notable young entrepreneurs identified in the past and today's winner is no exception to that track record. This scientist was a successful academic in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide He was an inspirational teacher, focussing on large-scale and particularly distributed, computing problems. He was the leader of the Video Surveillance research program at the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies, directed by Prof Anton van den Hengel, the 2011 SA Pearcey Entrepreneur Award winner."
In 2009 Henry Detmold started Snap Network Technologies to commercialise this technology, and ensured that it achieved the initial venture capital funding required to begin development. He quit a tenured academic position to lead a start-up with limited funding and operating in a market dominated by multi-billion dollar companies. Snap allows large scale numbers of cameras to be used pro-actively and immediately to manage events as they unfold. The technology has been installed in airports, museums, and universities.
Snap Network Technologies has very recently closed its Round A funding process, bringing the total investment to around $4M. This entrepreneur’s approach to software engineering is rigorous, but his approach to leadership demonstrates the same commitment to inspiring those he leads as he did towards his teaching.
This young man took a large personal risk to form, and steward, Snap from its very beginning. He has inspired many hundreds of students, but even more, has demonstrated inspirational leadership to his small team of six engineers. His company’s product is making a difference globally.
As the winner of the 2014 Pearcey SA Award, Dr Detmold is the SA finalist in the 2014 Benson Entrepreneur Award event to be held in Melbourne on the 29th August 2014.