When Mikaela Jade first pitched her mobile app to potential investors the response left her speechless.

"One investor did say to me: 'I'm gonna be honest with you: you're a female, Indigenous person, working in tech in a remote area … quite frankly that's high risk'."

When she meets me in the middle of breathtakingly beautiful, remote Kakadu national park, it is stiflingly hot, humid, and very quiet.

It certainly feels a world away from the buzzing start-up hubs of Sydney and Melbourne.

The town of Jabiru, surrounded by the park, is perhaps one of the most unlikely places to launch a tech business.

But Ms Jade is not afraid of doing things differently, and the former park ranger is not your typical entrepreneur.

Her app, Indigital Storytelling, uses augmented reality (the same technology that enables Snapchat and Pokemon Go) to tell the ancient stories of Indigenous people in the Kakadu area, and it was developed in close consultation with traditional owners.

Once downloaded, the user opens the app, points their mobile phone or tablet at pre-programed symbols, objects or sacred sites and an animation will start that tells a story associated with that object.

The Indigital app explains the stories of Indigenous people around Kakadu. ( ABC News )

Working directly with traditional owners

Ms Jade did not intend to launch her start-up in remote Australia.

"My partner was offered the role of park manager for Kakadu and we'd previously been living in Canberra so I thought why not," she says.

It was a good move that enabled Ms Jade to work directly with the local traditional owners — and a good internet connection means she can work remotely with developers around the world.

Mikaela Jade was nervous when she showed her app to Indigenous artists and traditional owners at Jabiru. ( ABC News: Nadia Daly )

"I have a team of coders in India who I work with to do the 3D animation and I have a graphic designer in the Philippines," she says.

"So we work primarily through Skype every day, which sometimes means I'm up until the middle of the night working in Australia because they're in a different time zone to me."

'We've talked about this story for tens of thousands of years'

Sitting on a large woven mat at a park in Jabiru, Ms Jade is nervous as she shows the app for the first time to a group of senior Indigenous artists and traditional owners who helped her build it.

Neville Namarnyilk watches the animation on the mobile phone and nods in approval: "It's very good," he says.

"We've talked about this story for tens of thousands of years and now we're bringing it into animation."

As a Cabrogal woman the work has special meaning for Ms Jade, who only found out about her Indigenous heritage when she was 29 years old and now travels each year to New York to attend the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues.

Indigital is now available in the Apple and Android app stores — but that almost did not happen after Apple initially refused to publish the app, saying it had "limited" usefulness, although the company later reversed its decision.

Learning how investors look at the app

Despite the knockbacks and challenges, Ms Jade is not deterred and is more passionate than ever.

And what is her response now to that first investor who doubted her?

"I'd have to say thank you actually, because that always in the back of my mind as I was building this app and platform: how does the investment market look at something like this, how do we pitch it appropriately to them?" she says.

"I realised from that moment that was a key weakness for me as a business owner.

Last year Ms Jade showed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull her app while at Parliament House. ( Supplied: Indigital )

"So I put myself through business school in Melbourne to learn about business entrepreneurships so I could communicate on their level."

Now she is looking to the future and is working to add more Indigenous stories to the app.

This story is part five in a six-part weekly series taking you into the lives of some of the Northern Territory's most colourful characters. Read part one, part two, part three or part four.