A burning desire to make surgery safer set Bond University Bachelor of Medicine Bachelor of Surgery graduate Dr Nishanth Krishnananthan (Class of 2005) on an incredible entrepreneurial journey.
At the end of the day, ‘Nish’ Krishnananthan didn’t really have a choice. “I come from a huge family of doctors,” he explains. “My mum’s a GP. My sister’s in paediatrics. And I’ve got 29 first cousins who are in every specialty you can think of. You get the picture! My occupational destination was pretty much pre-determined.”
That said, he did arrive at medicine the long way.
A year of a psychology degree and way-too-confusing Freudian theory at Macquarie University saw him switch to pharmacy at Griffith. But when an offer to study at the new Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine at Bond University emerged in 2005, he quickly made like the rest of his family and signed up for a career in medicine.
“I was part of one of the first cohorts studying to be a doctor at Bond. It was exciting to be part of a small cohort of 70 people learning in this terrific new PBL (problem-based learning) environment,” he says.
And it may well have been those early educational fundamentals, combined with nagging doubts about where medicine would ultimately lead him, that set Dr Krishnananthan up for what would come later.
“Perhaps because medicine for me was basically pre-set as an occupation, it’s not necessarily something that fascinated me in the way many others find it entirely immersive. I went through my first couple of years extremely unsure about where it all might lead.”
After graduating and a stint as a surgical registrar in the NSW Health system and time at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Austin Hospital in Melbourne as a research fellow, Dr Krishnananthan’s interests in teaching and surgery began to merge.
“One of the things that always stood out to me was how people went about learning surgical procedures and how that knowledge was handed down,” he says. “The archaic and subjective ‘see one, do one, teach one’ system of learning something troubled me. What if I was learning it the wrong way?"
“Surely we could go beyond waiting for simulation workshops or the limited real time access to mannequins and cadavers.”
Learning more about the way pilots learn to fly planes was another turning point. “Trainee pilots have to successfully log a significant length of time on flight simulators before they’re let loose on the real thing,” he says. “Why shouldn’t clinicians be afforded the same opportunity to refine their skills before they touch a real patient?”
Collating these thoughts and putting them into something resembling a business plan was a collective effort. Dr Krishnananthan’s good friend, Dr Vijay Paul, who finished medicine at UQ at around the same as Krishnananthan finished at Bond, shared a similar vision to build a virtual reality-based training tool for clinicians.
“What if I was learning it the wrong way?”
Enter Vantari VR.
“Vantari VR is the flight simulator of healthcare. We help doctors, nurses and students learn life-saving procedures in a safe scalable VR environment,” he says. “Our whole mission is to eliminate medical error.”
Dr Krishnananthan and Dr Paul had dabbled in medical entrepreneurship by establishing a Facebook-like mentorship forum for clinicians called ‘DocLife’. Their inability to support their idea with commercialisation while still sustaining medical careers left them determined not to make the same mistake twice when their new idea was starting to form.
“We wanted to make sure we were fully supported and funded,” Dr Krishnananthan said. “It took us six months of learning and listening. We had to be open to know what we didn’t know technologically too. We found a wonderful partner in our now Chief Technology Officer, Daniel Paull, during this period.”
So, armed with a great idea and a trio of co-founders now in place, acceptance into the NSW Health incubator and subsequently Australia’s leading health tech entrepreneurial accelerator program, HCF Slingshot, helped kick things along. “We were accepted into the program and pitched to an audience of 400 including potential investors in a dark V-Max cinema which was in hindsight quite daunting,” he says.
Whatever they said worked. Some early funding arrived, and Vantari VR was up and away. “Think of us like an app on the App Store. You download it onto your laptop, you log in through a user account, and then you select the medical procedure that you want to perform. “It could be a basic procedure like inserting an intravenous cannula or it could be something far more complex like a chest drain or central venous line insertion."
“You throw on a headset and you are completely immersed in a life-like environment. A virtual operating theatre or emergency bay, for instance. You perform your chosen procedure from start to finish according to best practice college guidelines and your proficiency score is automatically logged at the end.”
The idea has caught on. These days, the Vantari VR roll out is on in earnest, so much so that Dr Krishnananthan has moved to the US to help facilitate the expansion.
“We had a soft launch in the North American market in late 2022 through our first team member on the ground and now COO Jagrup Kahlon,” he says. “Over the last two years, we have partnered with leading hospitals such as Harvard BIDMC, Yale University Hospital, Henry Ford Health, Johns Hopkins, and Mount Sinai, as well as medical device/pharmaceutical organisations such as Boston Scientific, Novo Nordisk and B Braun."
“In addition, our platform has also now been accredited by Inteleos, the world’s largest accreditor for ultrasound training, and we are working with leading advocacy bodies such as the American Heart Association. We are already in several hospitals around Australia, including Liverpool Hospital in NSW, Fiona Stanley in Western Australia, and Western Health in Victoria.
“Reaching regional hospitals is also paramount for us as access to training is even more challenging in those environments - the potential of our technology to democratise healthcare training globally is immense.”
There’s broader industry recognition in play, too. Vantari VR won a generous grant in 2019 from video gaming and software development giant Epic Games, the creator of gaming phenomenon Fortnite.
The company was also a finalist for the prestigious Auggie Awards for Best Healthcare Solution in 2021 and a finalist for Best Digital Health Solution in the XTC Global Challenge 2022. In 2023, they were awarded state winner for the ‘Embracing Innovation’ category for New South Wales at the Telstra Best of Business Awards, and in 2024, won the best education and training platform at the Laval Virtual Awards.
“These awards are really beneficial in raising our profile and allowing the global audience to know who we are and what we do,” Dr Krishnananthan says.“It lets us tell our story.
“We are an Australian start-up trying to take on the world. It’s validating and nice to be able to stop and celebrate the journey thus far.”
Earlier this year, Dr Krishnananthan and his co-founder Dr Vijay Paul moved to the US permanently to help Vantari grow. Now based in Seattle, Washington with a team spread across two continents, Nish finds it hard to come to terms with what has been achieved to date. “Sometimes I can’t believe what we started seven years ago in a basement made the impact we always dreamed of."
“In medicine we have the opportunity to treat one patient a time, or a handful, but with Vantari, we can make a widespread long-lasting impact on healthcare.”
“In medicine we have the opportunity to treat one patient a time, or a handful, but with Vantari, we can make a widespread long-lasting impact on healthcare.”
