The woman who wrote the video streaming standards for the internet has raised $1 million and spun her platform for virtual medical consultations out of the CSIRO.

Silvia Pfeiffer started Coviu with CSIRO colleague Nathan Oehlman in 2015, and it is now in use by 1100 healthcare professionals, with 160 of them paid subscribers to the software-as-a-service platform at $20 a month. More than 20,000 patients have been remotely consulted to date via the platform, which is browser-based and does not require a download.

Ms. Pfeiffer built Coviu on the 'Web Real-Time Communication' (WebRTC) platform she had helped develop while moonlighting from the CSIRO with the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards setter for the internet.

The year before, Ms. Pfeiffer had co-authored the specifications for HTML 5, the markup language that runs the web.

"I made sure video was a prime citizen of the web for the first time," she told The Australian Financial Review. 

Ms. Pfeiffer designed the video streaming standards and the open-source WebRTC platform to be as interoperable with other programs as possible, she said. 

That feature has allowed Coviu to offer a marketplace of tools, developed internally or externally via its application programming interface, that are suited to a wide range of specialist clinical needs.

For instance, physiotherapists using Coviu are able to measure a patients' range of movement with a drawing tool, applied to the patients' elbow and arm as they appear in the video stream.

Coviu also incorporates artificial intelligence tools such as image analysis to identify cancer, and a feature that leaves "click markers" on the screen for specialists such as ophthalmologists, who require patients to undertake rapid response tests.

"That's one area where our customers tell us the virtual consultation actually beats the face to face, because there's no need to stop the patient mid-test to keep up with recording results," Ms Pfeiffer said.

"Traditional video consultation solutions are designed for the boardroom. We've developed a solution tailored for health practitioners that enables rich experiences with patients in the comfort of their own home."

Coviu is the first example of a spinout from the national science agency that  "touches every aspect of the National Innovation and Science Agenda", CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall told The Australian Financial Review.

Combining research from the two business units Mr Marshall introduced into CSIRO under his '2020 strategy' – data science and health/biosecurity – Coviu's product was developed within the agency's ''ON" accelerator and has now been funded by its innovation fund, which is managed by Main Sequence Ventures and derived $30 million of its $100 million backing from CSIRO's royalties from inventing Wi-Fi.

"The result is much faster translation from pure science to jobs in the economy," he said.

The ON accelerator's partnership with 30 universities helped ease the bottleneck to commercialization these institutions had traditionally been, Mr. Marshall said.

"We're like Switzerland. The unis tend to trust us because we don't compete with them, we just want to collaborate."

Coviu is the ninth investment for Main Sequence's CSIRO Innovation Fund, which partner Phil Morle said would close on its $200 million funding target by June, with investors including superannuation funds.