Mentoring a bridge to new tech business opportunities

In 2025, Tanzila Arafin, a PhD student in engineering studying autonomous systems and computer vision at Deakin University was paired through the IMNIS mentoring program with a mentor, Conrad Guimaraes, an experienced startup product manager. Through monthly online meetings, they spent the year growing Tanzila’s confidence, workplace skills, and her understanding of the Australian tech environment. By the end of the year, they realised they wanted to keep the partnership going.

Within months, Tanzila and Conrad’s exciting ideas turned into business potential. Now, with input from potential customers to understand the pain points, with input from potential customers to understand the pain points, they’ve created a tech startup with an initial product in development and investors lined up. Coaxial AI takes Tanzila’s coding and robotics experience and pairs it with Conrad’s product and industry sense to fill a gap in the data centre installation market.

Data centres power the technologies of our digital world. They store the tech infrastructure that delivers our emails, stores our files and streams us live World Cup games. And they power the AI tools that more than a billion people around the world access every day.
With AI, the internet, personal data and global communication all relying on data centres, installing and maintaining the technology they contain is a global innovation playground.

Data centres are large spaces, huge empty rooms filled with row after row of computer servers. Tall stacks of dark boxes, thousands of flashing lights, and all connected by untold kilometres of carefully placed fibre optic cables. It’s installing the cables that’s the bottleneck in the data centre business, with each delicate cable – capable of carrying hundreds of gigabits of data per second – needing to be pulled from one end of the room to the other across hanging wire trays attached to the ceiling. With thousands of servers each needing a data cable and a connection to the outside world, the complexity of the install grows rapidly.

What Tanzila and Conrad came up with as they discussed their potential customers’ needs were autonomous robots that could position cables on their own, carrying them along the length of the cable trays up high, removing the need for multiple people to spend long laborious hours on ladders to get each cable installed. Capable of navigating the grid of cable trays without external input, the robots will work efficiently on their own as they learn the layout of each individual data centre. They will evolve the complex and delicate task that has to date been done laboriously by hand.

Coaxial’s first corporate contact, a specialised data centre engineering company, has helped inform their initial product offering and is involved in the early prototyping and development. With contacts and interest in Australia and around the world, these first steps are setting a solid foundation for the business. A busy end of 2026 will see the team hopefully start generating revenue in early 2027. With Tanzila finishing her degree over that same time, she’ll soon be moving up to Sydney from Melbourne to get closer to the rest of the team, and importantly, closer to where the prototypes will first be deployed.

A solid mentoring relationship provided the foundation for the business. Clear communication and honest conversations reduced the risk and the anxiety of the leap into startups.

This entry point into the momentum of an exhilarating industry couldn’t have worked out better. With a supportive team and a swell of excitement driving Tanzila and Conrad’s steps into the business world, Coaxial AI is now at the very start of its story.