Team

Clinicians building for clinicians.

Aescia is built by a small team that writes its own pathways and ships its own code. Two products, one engine, one team.

Founders

James Kurrle

Founder and CEO

Critical-care physician with ten years of clinical and hospital leadership experience, trained and practised across rural New South Wales (Wagga Wagga) and Sydney. Authors the clinical pathway engine and leads company strategy.

Read full bio

Vasken Dermardiros

Co-founder and CTO

PhD from Concordia University in building-energy machine learning. Owns hosting, AI inference, EMR integration, and the pathway authoring infrastructure that underpins both products.

Operating team

Who ships the work.

Josh Casey

Compliance and Cybersecurity

Fractional contributor on compliance and cybersecurity. Privacy impact assessments, cybersecurity posture, and the SOC 2 readiness path that opens with the first US design-partner contract.

Shannon Kurrle

Resident Director, Aescia Pty Ltd

Holds the statutory Resident Director role required by the Australian Corporations Act for Aescia Pty Ltd. Not an operational position.

Clinical collaborators

Named clinicians on specific programmes.

Clinical leadership is attached to the programmes where the person actually does the work. Advisors are added here as each of them formally joins and consents to public acknowledgement.

Dr Kei Woldendorp

Clinical Advisor; Principal Investigator, SAFE-Discharge

BMed MBBS MPhil. Cardiothoracic researcher, The Baird Institute and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Principal Investigator of the SAFE-Discharge trial and Clinical Advisor to Aescia for Hospitals.

Clinical advisory

Formalising alongside the trial.

We do not publish advisory rosters we cannot stand behind. A clinical advisory is being formalised alongside the SAFE-Discharge trial at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the Product-Market-Fit programme at the CHEO Research Institute. Members are named here as each of them formally joins and consents to public acknowledgement.

For enquiries about the clinical advisory, use the contact page and we will route accordingly.

Company maturity

Funding, support, and the question of two years from now.

Early-stage buyers underwrite company risk. The honest answers are below: how Aescia is funded, who is on the other end of the line when something is wrong, and what the runway and round timing actually look like.

Funding posture: Funded to date through founder capital and a non-dilutive grant pipeline, operating at a deliberately low burn rate. Grants in flight or accepted include the NSW Medical Devices Fund R14 (Australia, in preparation), MVP Ventures R3 (Australia, submitted), the Industrial Research Assistance Program (Canada, accepted on a reimbursement basis), the R&D Tax Incentive (Australia, FY-cycle), and SR&ED (Québec, active). A SAFE round is targeted to open Q4 2026 via Australian angels under ESIC eligibility, with a priced Series Seed in early 2027 into the Ontario holding entity. Conversations with prospective angel investors are open; introductions welcome at contact@aesciahealth.com.
External programmes: Aescia is a portfolio company at District 3, Concordia University's innovation hub for bio, health, and high-tech startups (joined September 2025). Aescia is enrolled in the Medical Technology Association of Australia's MedTech Compass programme, and is selected for the CHEO Research Institute Product-Market-Fit programme (paediatric respiratory track), which runs from April 2026. These are external diligence and customer-development signals, not capital — they sit alongside the funding posture above rather than substituting for it.
Support model: During the design-partner phase, the named implementation contact is James Kurrle, founder and CEO. Not a queue, not a tier-one ticket triage. The operational coverage is spread across Sydney (AEST), Barcelona (CET), and US East and West Coast timezones, which in practice gives a US ASC effectively 24-hour responsiveness during the pilot window. A named operational counterpart is committed in writing at contract execution. This model evolves as Aescia hires; the named contact in the contract stays consistent for the duration of the design-partner term.
Team depth: Small by design. James is full-time on Aescia, owning the clinical pathway engine and company strategy. Vasken is part-time alongside another role, owning hosting, AI inference, EMR integration, and the authoring infrastructure for both the V1 trial stack and the V2 endoscopy production stack. Beyond the founders, Sara Nejatian is engaged as the UX contractor on the patient-facing flow, Josh Casey contributes fractionally on compliance and cybersecurity, and named clinical collaborators (Kei Woldendorp at Royal Prince Alfred, Paul Bannon at the Baird Institute) extend the engineering work for trial purposes without sitting on the cap table. Shannon Kurrle holds the statutory Resident Director role required by the Australian Corporations Act for the AU OpCo. The hiring roadmap is matched to the SAFE round rather than predicated on it; the V2 frontend contractor is the first planned hire.
Will Aescia exist in 24 months: Runway is multi-year at the current burn. The team is small and the spend is matched to it; both founders are committed to the company and to the SAFE-Discharge trial and the design-partner programme as the next milestones. Independent of the company question, the design-partner contract structure includes data portability terms and a destruction-of-records schedule on exit, so a customer recovers their data in a usable format inside 30 days regardless of what happens to Aescia. The /security page documents the exit terms in writing.

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