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Nathan Batham at work
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Nathan Batham: Reimagining medtech

In the second of our series on the finalists of the Luminary Tech Visionary category of the Victorian Young Achiever Awards, we profile Nathan Batham – founder of medtech product development studio Product Design Lab.

Tami Iseli
Tami Iseli

09 April 2025

7 minute read

Nathan Batham at work

Ever since he was a kid, Nathan Batham has had a fascination for tinkering with technology. At the age of nine, he built his first computer – and when he was asked what he wanted to be, he would say ‘inventor’. 

So it wasn’t too much of a leap from his childhood aspirations when he decided to take on an engineering degree at the University of Melbourne, focusing on mechatronics. “I really loved the intersection of physical and software technology,” he says. “As a young adult, when I was given the career options, engineer seemed closest to inventor.”

His passion for tech took on a deeper purpose with the tragic loss of both of his parents to terminal illnesses during his time at university. His mother suffered from a condition called Multiple System Atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement, balance, and autonomic functions. “It meant that her muscles effectively wasted away, eventually to a point where she was in a wheelchair,” he explains. “That in particular shifted my studies from mechatronics to really wanting to go into the medical or rehabilitation field, to try and develop stuff that could have helped someone like my mother.”

His mother’s background as a paediatric surgeon, and later a psychiatrist, also helped shape his leaning towards medical technology: “I'd been raised with that medical background but I could never do inside bodies so this was sort of my way of being able to give support in the medical space. My father also had dementia and then eventually prostate cancer, so that sealed the deal in terms of trying to focus on technologies that can support or alleviate some of these conditions.”

Following on from his university degree, Nathan ended up working as a research engineer, developing a lower limb robotic exoskeleton to help paraplegics and spinal cord injury patients stand and walk. “It was an opportunity that came up with the University of Melbourne that I was very fortunate to be able to take on, because there's not a lot of that in Australia, and I felt that it really aligned with my vision, particularly around my mother's condition, and being able to develop technologies that would help people like her.”

Nathan with exoskeleton
Nathan with colleague

Broadening the impact

While he was working on exoskeletons, Nathan met a young founder who was looking to develop a device to administer eye drops for glaucoma patients. “They were having struggles to develop their product, so I offered to support them during that journey and did a couple of months of pro bono work with them. That eventually turned into some on the side consulting work. And then people saw what I was doing with that and just asked if I could do similar things for them.”

Eventually this work grew to a point where Nathan had to decide whether to continue doing his research work with exoskeletons, or focus on helping start-up founders get through the early stages of product development. 

“I was left with a decision of either I continue doing my research work with the exoskeletons, which would allow me to focus on one piece of technology that may make it into the market in 10 years time, or I could help to support many different founders with a lot of different medical technologies get from ‘zero to one’, which is arguably the hardest stage in product development. So ultimately I decided to go ‘all-in’ on trying to help more people get their technology across that line.”

Launching Product Design Lab 

With that decision, Product Design Lab, or ‘PDL’, was born. PDL is a product development studio that specialises in helping medical technology startups deliver functional product prototypes that serve as a launchpad for securing investment. So far, PDL has helped develop products to help with a wide range of medical conditions, including sleep apnoea, respiratory disease in children, limb loss, glaucoma and lung disease. 

One of PDL’s key objectives is to make the product development process accessible to early-stage start-ups with limited resources, so that their world-changing ideas have more of a chance of making it to market. While traditional product development firms often require significant capital upfront, PDL aims to bridge this gap. 

The PDL difference

So what’s the secret to overcoming the barriers that early start-ups face with product development? Nathan puts it down to a combination of three things. 

“Number one is having a constraint-based development approach. Rather than trying to build out the perfect product from the get-go, with all the bells and whistles, we help them focus on the very minimum that is required to get to the point of being able to raise capital, so they can afford to go and do the proper big development.”

The second point is about processes. “From a technology perspective, we have all of our fabrication equipment in-house, so we can prototype much quicker and we don't have to rely on external fabricators to build stuff for us. So whether that be 3D printers, silicon moulding, or anything like that, we can do that in-house. 

“Then from a business perspective, we use various forms of AI to help us in some of the early ideation stages and also to reduce the operational drag of a lot of admin tasks – research summaries and those sorts of elements that otherwise would suck up large amounts of our engineers’ time. We also try to keep our cost structure as lean as possible by using as much off-the-shelf technology as we can. We'll only develop something truly custom if it's absolutely necessary. That helps us to build ‘cutting edge’ only where it matters for the product. If it's just a problem that’s already been solved, we make sure we're not spending excess resources there.”

Another way that PDL aims to make its services more accessible to start-ups is by offering an alternative to the traditional hourly rate fee structure. “All the other design firms that we've come across bill purely by the hour, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard of one that comes in on budget,” says Nathan. “We believe in aligning incentives, so there's a shared risk. That means they know how much it's going to cost and we are motivated to work efficiently towards shared outcomes.” 

Reflecting on the journey so far

So what has been Nathan’s biggest lesson as a founder? “Probably the biggest lesson, and one of the hardest, is that building a great product or providing a great service is only 10 percent of the way there,” he says. “Once you have that, you then have to work out how to run a business. And that's very different. That's often very underestimated. It's a case of the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality in a way, but all of these things eventually have to be a business that is self-sustaining – otherwise there's not really any point in doing it.”

And his advice for any young tech entrepreneurs following in his footsteps would be not to ditch your day job too soon. “Don’t jump all-in until you have the financial support structure there in terms of ensuring that you're working on your start-up or your product part-time. A source of income allows you to take more shots at goal in whatever your business is. The founders that can ride the ups and downs are the ones that are able to support themselves through other means while they figure stuff out, while they learn. And then once they've learned how their business works, then they can double down and go for growth.”

Asked what it would mean to him to win the Luminary Tech Visionary Award, Nathan says it would be a great validator for him and his team. ”I feel like for me it's a validation of the work that we are trying to do, and the impact that we are trying to have in the health technology space and early innovation space. While I am sort of at the front, there is a big team behind us that work tirelessly towards this mission. I feel it would be a validation for them as well, that we are doing good work. Even to get to this stage (of being a finalist), it's exciting to see that being recognised.”


The winners of the Victorian Young Achiever Awards, including the Luminary Tech Visionary Award, will be announced at a gala dinner in Melbourne on 9 May.


Tami Iseli
Tami Iseli

09 April 2025

7 minute read

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