Steve Dunn is an entrepreneur, author and mentor with a passion for IoT and access control. Steve’s fascination with access control began in the early 2000’s, when he was an Asset Manager in Local Government, and he found himself constantly overwhelmed with the management of access to council’s assets such as community centres, swimming pools, sporting stadiums, art galleries, conference centres, and libraries. Being in charge of distributing metal keys to the staff, volunteers, contractors, and community groups to access the properties was time-consuming, expensive and an ongoing security nightmare. It was impossible to know who held a metal key to the assets (keys can be cut for a few dollars in a few minutes at hardware stores), and who was letting themselves in at any time.  

 

Steve was also living an apartment building at the time with magnetic-stripe keycards, and he found the cards demagnetizing on a weekly basis, meaning constant lockouts of his apartment building. He soon learnt that its common for keycards to demagnetize when held against a mobile phone and other magnetized cards such as credit cards. Steve thought there had to be a better way to manage access other than metal keys and keycards.

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After facing the aforementioned problems, in his workplace and at home, Steve began investigating mobile phone unlocking solutions in the market but he found zero existing solutions that could meet the council requirements, and for use in his own apartment, so he built his first app with digital keys that interfaced with a smartlock.

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At the time Steve was also studying a Masters in Business Administration, and he entered his app in his University’s annual innovation competition and won. He then assembled a team of other engineer and marketing students to become his co-founders, and they entered the prestigious Licencing Executives Society Annual Entrepreneurship Competition, representing his University and beating other teams from Harvard University, Standford and Yale to finish Runner up.

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To support the development of their product, Digital Keys was accepted into 3 accelerator programs including Innovyz Accelerator in Adelaide, Australia; The 10x Accelerator Program run out of the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, USA, and the IoT accelerator run out of H-Farm in Italy.  The company has also received R&D grant funding from the Australian Government, and the European Commission.

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Steve shares his insights, inspiration and knowledge to students and audiences around the world as a mentor in University Business Plan competitions. Steve has co-athored the book ‘Startup Accelerators’ published by leading global academic publisher Wiley.