The Business of Tech

Two days into the job, Roman Reyhani was confronting a $231 million question: how does New Zealand turn clever science into businesses that deliver lasting value here?

The founding chief executive of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology joins this week’s episode of The Business of Tech to explain his approach.

The institute represents a pivot towards high-tech research and commercialisation. But its funding has largely been redirected from other parts of the science system, rather than added to the pot.

That increases the pressure to deliver. Can a stronger commercial focus succeed without weakening the research pipeline feeding it?

From genocide prosecutions to Silicon Valley startups

Reyhani’s route to the role is unusually varied. Raised in Auckland, he began in international law, including an internship with the prosecution team at the United Nations tribunal investigating Rwanda’s genocide.

California offered a different way to make an impact. He established a legal practice and worked with technology startups, gradually moving beyond legal advice into strategy and business development.

Six years at Boston Consulting Group’s venture-building arm, now BCG X, followed. His teams helped major companies create products and businesses, recruiting people and taking technology to market rather than leaving clients with presentation slides.

Now back in New Zealand after more than two decades overseas, he wants the institute to bring an investor’s discipline to research funding.

“It’s not just here’s a chunk of money and a handshake and good luck to you,” he says.

Instead, funding would follow “stage gates” milestones with money shifted away from projects that aren’t progressing.

The institute’s territory sits between promising laboratory research and technologies mature enough to attract private investment. Bringing companies and investors alongside earlier could help bridge that expensive gap.

Applied AI is a big opportunity.

Then there’s the question of who benefits. Reyhani wants New Zealand to retain more value when taxpayer-backed technologies succeed, whether through financial returns, research facilities, skilled people or new businesses.

On artificial intelligence, he sees opportunities in applying existing models to New Zealand datasets, including agriculture and health, rather than competing head-on with the world’s biggest model developers.

It’s an ambitious brief for a modest budget by international standards. The challenge is choosing where New Zealand has a genuine edge, then backing it without confusing commercial discipline with impatience.

Listen to the full episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Andfoods isn’t trying to win the plant-based food battle in the supermarket aisle. It wants raving fans in Asia’s busiest kitchens.

The New Zealand startup is turning black gram, also known as black mung bean, into whipping cream. Its pitch to chefs is that dairy-free shouldn’t mean settling for second best.

On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, co-founder Alex Devereux explains why winning over the person holding the whisk could be a smarter business than chasing shoppers.

Devereux learned the food service trade at Fonterra, supplying ingredients to businesses where taste, consistency and price determine whether a product earns its place in the fridge.

After leaving dairy for technology roles, an invitation from Icehouse brought him to Massey University’s Riddet Institute. There, he and fellow Fonterra alumnus Leon Clement tasted a plant-based whipping cream that stood out.

“We knew the markets, we knew the dynamics and what customers were looking for in that kind of product,” he says.

The science tackles an awkward problem: beans taste like beans.

Replicating the taste and texture of dairy

Riddet researchers developed a fermentation process that strips out those sharp flavours while retaining black gram’s natural creaminess and ability to foam. Combined with coconut oil and other ingredients, it becomes a cream that, Devereux says, delivers dairy-like taste and texture.

There’s a practical selling point, too. He says the whipped cream holds its shape longer in hot conditions, a useful attribute for cakes and desserts in tropical markets.

But clever science doesn’t automatically win kitchen space.

Andfoods employs a chef in Singapore to demonstrate the product alongside its distributor. The aim is to talk chef to chef, showing how it performs rather than delivering a sales pitch.

“Chef-led sales is the most effective way to win this type of business,” Devereux says.

Get the product right and customers tend to stick around, without the marketing bill needed to build a supermarket brand.

Andfoods has secured Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands as a customer, with Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand on its expansion list.

Its model also departs from the familiar Kiwi export recipe: retain research and intellectual property here, but manufacture in China, closer to customers.

Having raised $4 million, Andfoods is seeking another $7m to fund growth, with culinary cream and cold foam products in development.

The ambition isn’t simply to replace dairy. It’s to become the cream chefs choose.

Listen to Alex Devereux on The Business of Tech streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The people building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems promise extraordinary gains. They also warn those systems could escape our control.

That is the ethical fault line running through this week’s episode of The Business of Tech.

My guest, New Zealander Peter Barnett, works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California. The University of Otago physics graduate develops governance plans aimed at preventing catastrophic outcomes from advanced AI. He previously worked on technical AI alignment, the difficult job of making powerful systems act in line with human intentions.

This conversation is a topical one.

OpenAI is facing fresh turmoil over its approach to safety. Three recently fired safety and alignment researchers claim they were punished for challenging the company and working with outside evaluators. OpenAI rejects that account, saying they mishandled sensitive information and breached its trust.

David Robinson, one of OpenAI’s senior safety figures, has also resigned. The former author of safety reports accompanying major model launches says the company’s culture is “broken” and the industry is not being nearly careful enough. He just sat down for a podcast interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, which makes for fascinating viewing.

These departures expose the moral dilemma at the centre of the AI boom.

Worrying emergent traits in AI

The companies racing towards more capable models say the technology could cure disease, lift productivity and create enormous wealth. But they face fierce competition, huge investor expectations and a geopolitical contest framed around beating China.

Every incentive rewards speed. Caution risks handing the advantage to a rival.

So who decides when the danger is too great?

Barnett argues it cannot be the companies themselves. He says frontier AI developers are effectively writing their own rules and can loosen them when safety commitments obstruct progress. Independent audits, government oversight and limits on training more powerful models may all be needed.

His concern is not simply that people will misuse AI. It is that increasingly autonomous systems could learn to game evaluations, work around safeguards and pursue goals their creators did not intend. Safety researchers still cannot reliably predict everything a frontier model will be capable of before it is trained.

Barnett believes New Zealand can play a role. We do not build frontier models, but our nuclear-free history shows a small country can challenge powerful nations on an issue carrying global risk.

When insiders abandon lucrative careers to raise the alarm, maybe it's worth listening to them.

Listen to the full conversation with Peter Barnett on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or your podcast app of choice.

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In business, and in the innovation game, experience is valuable. But sometimes, not knowing how exactly things are supposed to be done can be a superpower.

This week’s episode of The Business of Tech celebrates three young New Zealand designers tackling problems that established businesses have overlooked, with fresh eyes, tight budgets and a willingness to ask basic questions.

Sophie West, the national winner of the 2026 James Dyson Award, (with around $10,000 in accompanying prize money), and runners-up Jos Williams and Aysha Jay are engineers and designers with big ideas – and small budgets. Their inventions address sustainable menstrual care, indoor air quality, and movement therapy for children with cerebral palsy.

Better period products

Massey University graduate West won with Arla Gen II, a compact device designed to clean and sterilise reusable menstrual cups and discs. It tackles an awkward barrier to adoption: boiling period products in a shared kitchen.

West surveyed 105 users and repeatedly tested how the device would feel, fit together and fit into daily routines. Her approach puts privacy and practicality alongside engineering, rather than treating them as afterthoughts.

Williams, a Victoria University of Wellington graduate, found inspiration while cycling beside a motorway, breathing traffic fumes.

His Windfilter harnesses something Wellington has in abundance. An outdoor turbine transfers rotational energy magnetically through a window to an indoor fan, drawing air through wool filters. No mains electricity or holes in the wall required.

It challenges the assumption that solving a problem always means adding batteries, electronics, or greater complexity.

Canterbury graduate Jay’s Path Finder is an adjustable device intended to guide crawling movements for children aged two to six with cerebral palsy, potentially reducing a task involving several therapists to one.

Learning to crawl

Working with the Centre of Movement, she observed therapy sessions rather than assuming she understood what children, parents and clinicians needed.

“I don’t know anything, so I need to go find out,” she says, describing the mindset behind her research.

Jay built her proof of concept with a budget of about $50, inexpensive components, and help from university technicians.

None of these inventions is a finished commercial product. Further testing, funding and development lie ahead. The graduates also describe a tough employment market, but a desire to stay in New Zealand and pursue their projects here.

West, Williams, and Jay now progress to the international award stage, with the top 20 international finalists announced on October 14 and the winners, chosen by Sir James Dyson, revealed on November 4.

Listen to the full interview with the Dyson Award winner and runners-up on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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New Zealand wants more from its science system – more startups, more export revenue and more high-paying jobs. But in the rush to commercialise research, are we putting the discoveries that fuel future breakthroughs at risk?

That tension sits at the heart of the latest episode of The Business of Tech, featuring Professor Frank Bloomfield, the University of Auckland’s deputy vice-chancellor of research and innovation.

With around 39,000 full-time equivalent students supported and generating $1.63 billion in revenue last year, the university is New Zealand’s largest and a formidable concentration of researchers, specialist facilities and emerging talent.

Bloomfield, a respected neonatologist, researcher, and former director of the Liggin’s Institute, argues that its role extends far beyond teaching students and publishing academic papers. A modern university should also be a talent engine, an innovation partner and an active contributor to the economy around it.

From basic research to world-beating product

Auckland has already produced innovation success stories. Wireless charging pioneer PowerbyProxi is a prime example, emerging from university research with the help of the university’s commercialisation arm, Uniservices, before being acquired by Apple. The challenge is to repeat that feat in areas where New Zealand has genuine capability, including medtech, space, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology and clean energy.

Bloomfield says there is no single switch that turns an academic discovery into a successful company. Intellectual-property rules matter, but so do entrepreneurial skills, early-stage funding, access to laboratories, industry relationships and support from people who know how to take an idea to market.

The university is trying to assemble that full pipeline through its Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, commercialisation company UniServices and a $40 million evergreen Inventors Fund. Its Newmarket Innovation Precinct is also bringing researchers and companies together physically, with about 38 businesses and 140 people based there at the time of the interview.

Scale, talent, and connections

But significant gaps remain. Auckland, and New Zealand in general, is still short of the scale-up capital needed to turn promising ventures into global companies. Universities, business, councils and central government are not always pulling in the same direction. Academic career incentives can also favour papers and teaching over building products or spinning out companies.

Bloomfield wants stronger innovation precincts, smarter immigration settings and incentives that help attract talent and keep ambitious companies here.

His strongest warning, however, is against pursuing quick commercial wins at the expense of fundamental science. The technologies being commercialised today often rest on blue-skies research conducted years or even decades ago.

Stop funding that exploratory work, Bloomfield says, and New Zealand risks draining the pipeline on which its future innovators will depend.

Listen to the full conversation on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems.

Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI’s most influential figures, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue.

Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers.

An opportunity to lift productivity

Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity.

“We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,” he said.

“It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.”

Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher & Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles.

On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries.

“It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,” he said.

“One agent can do a different scale to one person, but they still require management and leadership like a person does, and I think that's often forgotten about in the business context.”

Don't forget the dishwasher knob!

Agents are now also powering the apps Fisher & Paykel field service technicians use to prepare for in-home visits, with the app serving up detailed information about the customer and suggesting which spare parts to bring on the job.

Khoury said running AI agents involved treating them like digital employees, monitoring their performance and output to improve how they operated.

“When we first put Agentforce in, the feedback to [Salesforce] was, I need more observability. I need to know how it's going. And over the course of time, they provided those tools- really, really cool testing tools. So actually, we're able to simulate how the agent will perform before we deploy it. That's really great."

Xero, another key New Zealand Salesforce customer, deployed an AI customer service agent on its website in April, which is accessible to around five million Xero accounting software users worldwide.

“It creates capacity for our people, our specialists, the deep, deep knowledge people, to still be involved, to still be part of it," says Nigel Piper, executive general manager, customer at Xero, which separately has created Just Ask Xero (JAX), an AI agent for use within the Xero interface that accesses a customer's financial data to serve up information quickly.

Agritech company Halter, which has seen its Salesforce grow to 300 people internationally as it scales up its smart cow collar business in the US, Europe, and South America, uses AI agents to deliver company data stored in Salesforce to the Halter app.

Agents on the ranch

A demo at Dreamforce showed how salespeople driving between farms in their company utes can interact with Halter’s voice agent via the app to set up meetings, adjust contracts and get an update on their sales targets.

Dreamforce’s major Salesforce announcement was “AI Force”, an approach designed to let organisations access Salesforce data and workflows through the interface that best suits them – whether that is Salesforce’s own software, Slack, Anthropic’s Claude or another AI front end.

Phillimore-Smith described it as a move towards greater customer choice, while retaining the security, governance and workflow controls that sit beneath the interface.

“Salesforce is saying that our platforms continue to provide everything they have done for 25 years around the trust, the security, the governance, the semantics and all those workflows that your business runs on are still there,” he said.

AI at a tipping point

But AI Force is also an acknowledgement that the future of software companies is not owning the interface, instead focusing on maintaining and organising high-quality business data so it can be accessed by your AI agents of choice.

But the harder task for the majority of Kiwi businesses remains scaling pilots into business-as-usual deployments and building workforce capability.

“We’re at that kind of tipping point now,” Phillimore-Smith told me.

“Businesses, organisations can see that the technology does work, it’s trusted, and I think we’re now seeing an up-skilling coming off the back of that.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Richard Phillimore-Smith on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.

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The tech giants have become the infrastructure of modern life. They mediate how we shop, communicate, advertise, store data and increasingly use artificial intelligence.

Yet the tools governments use to contain their power were designed for an earlier economic age.

Professor Susan Watson believes we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place. An internationally respected corporate law and governance scholar, Watson is Dean of the University of Auckland Business School and Acting Dean of its Faculty of Law. Her new research asks whether the legal structure of the modern corporation itself has helped Big Tech become so dominant.

Her starting point is the English East India Company, which was founded around 1600 and acquired permanent capital in 1657, growing from a trading venture into a private corporation powerful enough to rule territory and collect taxes. Watson sees an important parallel with today’s platform companies. Both created and controlled new forms of infrastructure while operating with privileges supplied by the state.

A new form of capital

Conventional competition law is largely concerned with markets, prices and consumer welfare. But many Big Tech services are free at the point of use. The real transaction involves data, which platforms can turn into a productive asset, using our behaviour to generate predictions, advertising revenue and further market power. Watson argues that data is not simply “the new oil”; it is a new form of capital.

She introduces two useful concepts. “Recursive capital” describes corporations’ ability to own other corporations through potentially endless chains of subsidiaries. “Capital-constituting corporations” can identify something previously outside the market – behavioural data or even low Earth orbit – turn it into capital and lay claim to its future value.

Reinventing how companies operate

Her proposed response is more scalpel than sledgehammer. Platform owners could be prevented from competing against businesses that depend on their marketplaces. Governments could also reconsider when large corporate groups should be allowed to own subsidiaries operating within those markets. Users might even gain representation in platform governance, reflecting their status as something closer to digital citizens than conventional customers.

The question becomes more urgent in the AI era. The companies developing frontier models also control much of the cloud infrastructure, computing capacity, data and distribution needed to bring them to market. With every incentive pushing them to move faster, Watson says the central concern is not AI itself, but who owns and controls it.

In this episode of The Business of Tech, we explore how these extraordinarily powerful corporate machines were created – and why, having made them, we still have the power to remake them. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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New Zealand-founded robotics company Syos Aerospace is building autonomous aircraft, drone boats, ground vehicles and underwater robots from its Mt. Maunganui base

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Syos founder Sam Vye tells me how a conservation-drone project in the Galápagos helped inspire the creation of Syos, now one of the country’s most ambitious dual-use tech companies.

Vye arrived in New Zealand in 2018 and worked in Yamaha’s unmanned-helicopter division before seeing an opportunity to apply drones to rural, agricultural and conservation work. His early venture, Envico Technologies, started with Cameron Baker, took on a project using drones to distribute pest bait in the Galápagos Islands.

We need a bigger drone

The pair realised that small electric drones could carry modest loads, while conventional helicopters remained expensive, complex and risky to operate. Their answer was to develop large uncrewed helicopters that could take pilots out of hazardous or costly missions.

Syos was founded in 2021 and initially targeted civilian uses including agricultural operations, cargo and surveying. Its founding principle, Vye says, is “minimum viable capability” – build systems that solve real-world problems quickly and at the lowest possible cost, rather than loading them with unnecessary features.

Going underwater

The company’s trajectory changed sharply as the global market for uncrewed systems accelerated, particularly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Syos expanded from aircraft into multi-domain autonomy, developing vehicles across air, land and sea, backed by a common command-and-control approach. It later acquired Tauranga underwater-robotics company Bay Dynamics, adding subsea capabilities for applications ranging from infrastructure inspection to surveillance and offshore operations.

Syos now has a substantial defence business. In February, the New Zealand Defence Force announced it would trial SYOS uncrewed systems across air, land and sea as part of a programme to develop its autonomous-vehicle capability. The platforms include uncrewed surface vessels, aircraft systems and a ground vehicle, along with training and technical support.

In the UK, Syos has also advanced in Project NYX, a Ministry of Defence programme exploring drones that could fly alongside British Army Apache attack helicopters.

The ethics of dual-use

That military work raises important questions about the ethics of autonomous systems and the kind of defence exports New Zealand should support. Vye acknowledges that drones are “a scary thing” in a world of bad actors, but says the company works with allied customers and follows its own moral compass.

We also explore whether New Zealand can build a credible defence-tech sector without compromising its values, and why drones, robotics and AI-enabled autonomy may become an increasingly important part of the country’s technology-export future.

Plus, I recap the tech founders who won categories in the BusinessDesk CEO Index Awards, including supreme winner Sir Peter Beck, talking about the two most important roles a CEO has to play.

Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Australasian venture-capital heavyweight Blackbird has closed a record $1.25 billion sixth fund – and its New Zealand general partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows says Kiwi companies are central to its investment strategy.

The fund, described by Blackbird as the largest venture-capital raise in ANZ history, underscores the firm’s rise from a small Australian startup investor into one of the region’s most consequential backers of technology companies.

Having backed the likes of Canva, Halter, Marloo, and Partly, Blackbird has structured the new fund into two roughly equal pools: about $600 million for investments from pre-seed to Series A, and a similar amount to support companies later in their growth.

That allows it to write the first cheque when a company is little more than a proposition, then retain firepower to keep investing as the business scales.

The Goldilocks fund

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Harrop Meadows explains why the unusually large fund is not simply a bigger pile of money chasing startups.

“It’s a sort of Goldilocks size,” she says, large enough to invest across a company’s life, but still built around identifying exceptional founders at the very beginning.

That is a marked contrast with the conventional division between early-stage venture funds and later-stage growth investors. The model is finding fertile ground in New Zealand. More than half of Blackbird’s new early-stage investments over the past year have been in Kiwi-founded companies, although Harrop Meadows stresses that measure is by number of companies rather than dollars invested.

Harrop Meadows, who grew up in New Plymouth, studied law at the University of Otago, before heading to London to work at Bain & Company, then in growth-equity investing ahead of joining Blackbird in 2021, says New Zealand is like a “Galápagos island of ideas”, where founders often start companies not because startup status is fashionable, but because they have encountered a problem they feel compelled to solve.

Listen to the full conversation with Phoebe Harrop Meadows on The Business of Tech, available on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What if space was not simply a place to launch satellites – but a factory floor for making things that cannot be produced on Earth?

That is the bet being made by Auckland startup Outlier Space, which has raised around US$7.35 million (NZ$12.3 million) in pre-seed funding to build reusable spacecraft that carry customer payloads into microgravity, operate them in orbit, then return them safely to Earth. Its first mission is booked for 2028.

The premise is straightforward, if technically formidable. In orbit, a spacecraft is in continuous freefall, creating a microgravity environment in which the familiar force of gravity no longer dominates. Molecules, crystals, cells and materials can therefore behave in ways that are not possible in an Earth-bound laboratory.

That holds incredible appeal to pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms and advanced-materials manufacturers. Microgravity can allow purer crystals to form, produce novel structures and open paths to materials and medicines that simply cannot be created – or cannot be created as effectively – on the ground.

Bringing the results home

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Outlier founder and chief executive Jamie France describes the company as an “anti-gravity chamber” for customers. They provide the proprietary manufacturing equipment and process. Outlier supplies the capsule-cum-satellite that allows access to the extraordinary environment of orbit, then brings the results home.

The opportunity is becoming more urgent as the International Space Station – the world’s most important microgravity research laboratory – approaches retirement. Commercial replacements are on the way, but France believes there is a major role for autonomous, uncrewed spacecraft designed for manufacturing and research missions where astronauts are not required.

France has the background to take on that challenge. He spent 15 years working with Emirates Team New Zealand, helped create Air New Zealand’s Skycouch, and spent almost a decade at Rocket Lab – from senior vehicle engineer on Electron to global director of the launch vehicle programme. Most recently, he sat on the board of FTN Motion, advising the founders as they scaled up production of their electric motorbikes (see episode 160 of The Business of Tech).

France’s career has been defined by teams willing to tackle difficult problems from first principles. At Rocket Lab, he says, the high-stakes peak-performance mindset of an America’s Cup campaign was not an occasional event. It was simply “a Tuesday”.

Outlier is now assembling its own team in Auckland, already numbering more than 20, to build a spacecraft capable not only of operating in orbit but also surviving re-entry and getting valuable payloads back into customers’ hands.

In this episode, France explains why space manufacturing is really about gravity, how a new form of a cancer drug could change treatment delivery, and why New Zealand’s deep-tech future may depend as much on audacity as engineering skill.

Listen to The Business of Tech for the full conversation with Jamie France, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is about to turn 80 – and is still plainly more interested in the next deal, the next big export market and the next practical problem to fix than in winding down.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, Brown delivers a typically uncensored account of how he thinks Auckland should use technology to drive economic growth. He has little patience for glossy AI rhetoric, power-hungry data centres, or Wellington bureaucrats telling him what to do.

“The government doesn’t know how to grow the economy, so I might as well do it,” Brown told me fresh from a morning visiting startups as part of the Council’s 100 Days of Startups programme, which sees him shine a light on one of the city’s startups each day in the run-up to Startup Week in October.

Brown says the city’s business people told him Auckland was lacking leadership on tech, despite it being home to around 60% of the country’s startups. He established the Auckland Innovation and Technology Alliance a year ago as a public-private partnership to foster collaboration across Auckland’s tech ecosystem.

Better, cheaper, faster

Brown draws on his engineering background and the lessons he collated in his 2007 book The Five Minute MBA to set a simple test for government, council and entrepreneurs alike. What is the problem you are fixing – and can it be solved better, cheaper and faster?

Auckland, he says, needs more firms able to turn local capability into global businesses, particularly in areas that play to New Zealand’s strengths: medtech, agri-tech, and biotech.

And he wants them to look beyond familiar markets in the US, UK and Australia. Brown argues the bigger opportunities lie in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Latin America – markets where Auckland’s diaspora communities, city-to-city relationships and sector expertise could give companies an edge.

His assessment of the political scene as the general election approaches is brutal. Brown describes the party-political offering as an “unappetising smorgasbord”, rails against bureaucracy and corporate welfare, and questions New Zealand’s reflexive alignment with America on trade and technology.

He’s particularly sceptical of the current data centre boom that Auckland is playing host to.

“If they want to come here, what will you do for us to have your f**king boxes here? It’s not the other way around.”

He has even less time for artificial intelligence.

Expect strong language, challenging claims and plenty of eyebrow-raising takes. This is no polished mayoral interview. It is Wayne Brown, in full: opinionated, impatient and with his own firm ideas on how to make Auckland the tech centre of the South Pacific.

Listen to the full episode streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The engineer who helped make GitHub Copilot a global force is building its open alternative from Christchurch

For millions of software developers, GitHub Copilot was the moment artificial intelligence stopped being an abstract promise and became a practical colleague.

Suddenly, AI could sit in the coding environment, suggest the next line, explain unfamiliar code and help turn an idea into working software. It changed expectations of what a developer tool could do, and opened the door to a new generation of AI coding agents.

Igor Costa was there as that shift gathered pace.

The Brazilian-born, Christchurch-based founder of Autohand held senior engineering roles across Microsoft, GitHub and AWS, and played a pivotal role in the development and deployment of GitHub Copilot.

It is an experience that gave him a close-up view of the potential of AI-assisted software development and of the trade-offs that come with putting powerful capabilities in the hands of a small number of global technology platforms.

Now Costa is building an alternative from New Zealand.

His startup, Autohand, is developing AI agents designed to take on more of the repetitive, time-consuming work involved in building and maintaining software. It also treats software as constantly evolving code that refactors itself automatically, avoiding going out of date and becoming a security risk.

But the company’s proposition is not simply that AI should write more code, or work faster. It is that businesses should retain control over the technology doing that work.

That is why Autohand has embraced open source, releasing its code and building around open-source models. For Costa, the issue is one of sovereignty as much as capability. A company using AI to understand its systems, access its codebase and act across its engineering workflow needs to know where its data is going, how its tools behave and what degree of control it can retain.

The market for AI coding tools is becoming crowded, well-funded and increasingly dominated by proprietary platforms. Costa’s bet is that a different model can succeed: powerful AI agents that are transparent, adaptable and deployable in ways that suit the organisations using them.

In this episode of The Business of Tech, Costa talks about the formative years of GitHub Copilot, why he chose to build a company from Christchurch, and why he believes the next phase of software development will be shaped not only by what AI can do, but by who owns and controls it.

It is a conversation about code, autonomy and the possibility that New Zealand can play a meaningful role in building the AI tools of the future.

Listen to the latest episode of The Business of Tech with Igor Costa, founder of Autohand, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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New Zealand’s startup scene loves a good success story, but few have moved as fast – or gone as deep – as Wellington energy software venture Factor.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Factor co‑founder Jessica Venning‑Bryan to she and co-founder Simon Pohlen assembled a team with serious domain expertise, built a specialised energy pricing platform, landed major customers offshore, and sold to NZX‑listed utility software company Gentrack in barely two years.

The exit, announced in May, was valued at $24.9 million with a $10 million earn-out tied to hitting $17 million in annual recurring revenue within three years. Gentrack funded the acquisition out of its cash reserves.

Venning‑Bryan doesn’t sugar‑coat the journey. She talks candidly about the “fastest and longest” two years of her career – the tension between capital efficiency and ambition, the stress of fundraising, and the constant questioning of whether the team was moving fast enough or in the right direction.

If you’ve ever wondered what startup life really feels like beyond the glossy pitch decks, this conversation delivers the unvarnished reality.

Deep domain experience pays off

What makes Factor’s story compelling is how textbook “problem–founder fit” looks in practice. After a decade inside the energy sector at Flick Electric and Flux Federation, Venning‑Bryan and Pohlen knew, in forensic detail, the headaches utilities face trying to price complex commercial and industrial energy contracts.

Instead of accepting that clunky, generic enterprise software was as good as it gets, they built a true SaaS product – APIs for everything, rapid deployment, and integration into the messy legacy systems that dominate energy, banking and healthcare.

The episode also digs into how Factor uses AI, including time‑series LLMs like Amazon’s Chronos.

What this episode reinforces is that deep domain knowledge can be the most powerful startup advantage you have. It also reveals why API‑first SaaS remains a winning strategy in conservative, regulated industries, and how to think critically about AI’s role in high‑stakes forecasting and pricing.

Most importantly, Venning‑Bryan’s story is a nudge to anyone sitting inside an industry, staring at a persistent pain point: if you understand it better than anyone, why not be the one to fix it?

Tune in to The Business of Tech this week to hear how Factor went from energy headaches to a $35 million exit – and what that playbook might mean for your own next move. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Australian fintech pioneer and serial entrepreneur Dom Pym knows a thing or two about starting companies and scaling them into market-leading players.

This week’s episode of The Business of Tech dives into Pym’s extraordinary journey, from bootstrapping niche financial platforms to building one of Australia’s most popular digital banks – Up – and then reinventing himself as one of the region’s most active startup investors.

Pym’s path into fintech started long before “fintech” was a buzzword. After a whirlwind early career working with Fortune 500 giants, he went on to build a grain exchange platform that digitised how Australian farmers sell their product, followed by Pin Payments, an all‑in‑one payments service that expanded into New Zealand, Asia, the UK and the US before being acquired.

That set the stage for Up, the app‑based bank that hacked its way through regulatory and infrastructure hurdles to become a breakout success with younger customers and a major strategic asset for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

Now, post‑exit, Pym is channelling that experience into backing others. As Australian Investor of the Year, he’s supporting funds and startups via his family office, and pushing for more secondary deals so founders don’t have to wait a decade for liquidity.

In The Business of Tech, he explains his investing philosophy, why he doesn’t obsess over unicorn valuations, and how he thinks about risk in an era dominated by AI and software.

Pym is heading to Auckland in September to deliver a keynote at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo, New Zealand’s new flagship gathering for founders, investors and corporate leaders.

If you want a preview of the themes he’ll bring to the stage – and a candid assessment of where New Zealand tech needs to lift its game – check this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio or in your podcast app of choice.

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New Zealand isn't exactly famous for producing automotive brands, but FTN Motion is trying to change that.

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, the company’s co-founders Luke Sinclair and Kendall Bristow recount how a backyard BMX hack led to them creating one of the country's most distinctive electric vehicle startups.

That was almost a decade ago, when two mechanical engineering graduates from Waikato University strapped a motor and battery onto a BMX bike in Pukekohe, before electric motorcycles were even a mainstream concept.

That scrappy experiment sparked an idea: a new vehicle category sitting between an e-bike and a motorcycle, built for the 20 to 30-kilometre urban commute. The result is the Street Dog, a retro-styled café racer that channels the romance of classic motorcycles while running on electric power.

I spent a day test-driving the new Streetdog 50 on the streets of Wellington, enjoying a smooth ride on a bike that’s easy to get to grips with. This version doesn’t require the rider to have a motorcycle licence, so will appeal to people who want a bit more flexibility getting around town than an e-bike provides.

Rather than chasing a futuristic look like many EV makers, FTN Motion doubled down on nostalgia and craftsmanship, betting that riders want something that feels like a classic, not a gadget. That bet is paying off, particularly in Wellington, a city custom-built for the bike's use case, with concentrated inner-city roads and no need to touch the motorway.

At the heart of the co-founders’ success are relationships and networks. Luke and Kendall reveal how a chance conversation at a barbecue led them to Wellington incubator Creative HQ, how a single media column penned by professional director Mike “MOD” O’Donnell generated their first hundred pre-orders almost overnight, and how those early wins snowballed into relationships with Wellington’s Angel HQ and engineering veterans from Rocket Lab and Dyson.

FTN Motion has resisted the industry's urge to over-engineer the user experience, deliberately skipping apps and unnecessary tech to keep the focus on the ride. And as the company eyes expansion into Australia, the US and beyond, Luke and Kendall get candid about what it actually takes to manufacture vehicles in New Zealand, why scaling slowly has been their secret weapon, and how they plan to stand out in a global market increasingly crowded with cheap electric alternatives from China.

Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Queenstown has long been associated with jet boats, ski fields and postcard-perfect mountains.

But if veteran entrepreneur and online travel heavyweight Roger Sharp has his way, the resort town’s next big export won’t be adrenaline, it will be software.

Sharp, who has spent decades at the cutting edge of online travel with companies like Webjet, Lastminute.com.au and WebBeds, is on a mission to diversify Queenstown’s tourism‑heavy economy by turning it into the southern hemisphere’s go‑to hub for travel technology.

His vehicle for doing that is Technology Queenstown, which has a 20‑year plan to grow a billion‑dollar tech economy in the region, lifting tech from 1.5% of local GDP to as high as 15–20%.

Travel tech conference as a catalyst

In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Sharp makes the case for why a town built on tourism must now become equally famous for tech. Next week’s Web in Travel (WiT) conference, which Sharp secured the rights to host, will see a who’s who of travel innovation descend on the lakeside town, including senior leaders from airlines, hotel tech, payment platforms, online travel agencies and B2B marketplaces.

For Sharp, hosting them is about giving Queenstown critical mass and visibility as a testbed for new travel technologies. He tells me how he’s been building the scaffolding needed for a true cluster, convincing Queenstown Resort College to teach data and machine learning, coaxing the University of Otago to establish a digital tech campus, as well as recruiting a roster of long‑term corporate backers from Accenture to Genesis Energy and One NZ.

Learning from tourism towns

He’s borrowed lessons from North American mountain towns like Bend and Boulder, which successfully layered high‑value tech jobs on top of lifestyle economies.

But this isn’t a Silicon Valley clone play. Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating “a two‑class society” where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London.

Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The National Party is aiming to introduce legislation for its proposed social media ban for under‑16s before November’s election.

The move, replicating a ban already in place across the Tasman, might look like a neat political fix – but it is far more likely to fail, backfire and leave our kids and critical infrastructure less safe.

That’s the stark warning from veteran tech consultant and internet governance expert Daniel Spector, my guest on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech. Spector, a long‑time KiwiFoo stalwart and current Internet New Zealand board member standing for re‑election, argues that prohibition‑style policies are the wrong tool for the job.

We don’t stop teenagers drinking by banning alcohol. We won’t stop them using TikTok and Instagram by declaring them off‑limits either.

Wait for the VPN boom

Instead, Spector says Australia’s under‑16s ban is already doing something unintended but entirely predictable – upskilling teenagers in VPNs, masking tools and hacking techniques, as they learn how to route around clumsy age‑verification systems and facial recognition.

In his view, New Zealand is on track to copy a model that not only won’t protect children, but will produce a more technically adept generation of young hackers while entrenching a surveillance architecture dressed up as “child safety”.

We examine the deeper question politicians are mostly dodging: why are we attacking the demand side – who can log on – rather than the supply side of harm, like infinite scrolling, rage‑bait design and hyper‑targeted advertising?

Spector highlights recent US court moves that treat addictive features such as endless scroll as “defective by design”, putting liability squarely on Meta and Google, and argues this is the direction New Zealand should be watching - and even replicating.

A golden age of hacking

Spector also lays out why Anthropic’s Mythos and similar cutting‑edge models are likely to usher in a “golden age of attack hacking”, systematically hunting for vulnerabilities in decades‑old code. Criminal groups will get them eventually, and board directors – with the potential to soon face personal and even criminal liability for cyber breaches – are nowhere near ready.

We talk zero‑knowledge proofs, digital identity, data sovereignty, and why outsourcing our safety to offshore tech giants and hurried bans is a dangerous illusion.

You can hear the full discussion with Daniel Spector on The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts.

Show notes

A Modest Proposal for the Orderly Dissolution of New Zealand. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn

The verification layer did say 'yes'. Well... once. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn

#DigitalSovereignty: A personal professional crisis. And a national one, too. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn

NCSC got nation-state grade AI. Now what? - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn

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Australian startup Heidi Health has become one of the most visible examples of AI actually shifting the dial on healthcare productivity – and New Zealand is at the forefront of that story.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Heidi co‑founder Yu Liu about the company’s journey from student training tool to AI “care partner” for clinicians, and its audacious goal of doubling global healthcare capacity.

Heidi didn’t start life in the emergency department. Yu and his co‑founders first built Oscar, a chatbot that helped medical students practise exam skills – essentially simulated patients for training bedside manner and clinical questioning.

Oscar was useful, but the startup team struggled to find students willing to pay for it. In 2019, Liu and his co-founders, Dr Tom Kelly and Waleed Mussa, pivoted to tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare – the hours clinicians lose every day to documentation and administration.

Widespread use in emergency departments

That created Heidi Scribe, an ambient AI scribe that sits in on consultations, listening to the conversation and producing high‑quality clinical notes tuned to each hospital’s templates and workflows. Clinicians were quick to adopt it. Liu describes doctors using Heidi in every consult and calling the founders directly when it went down, because they no longer wanted to go back to typing everything themselves.

In New Zealand, that enthusiasm has translated into national‑scale deployment. Health New Zealand is rolling Heidi out across all emergency departments, with clinicians in places like Hawke’s Bay cutting documentation time per patient from roughly 17 minutes to around four minutes.

Heidi, which has now raised around US$100 million across several VC-backed fundraising rounds, blends frontier large language models with specialised, region‑local models trained on clinical language and medication names, hosted in‑region to satisfy data sovereignty requirements. That’s how it pushes accuracy toward the near‑99 per cent threshold clinicians need to trust AI‑generated notes, says Liu. Heidi wants to transform assistive AI into something closer to infrastructure.

From scribe to evidence-gatherer

Heidi doesn’t retain recordings of conversations, and while many doctors create transcriptions on their smartphones or laptops, the Heidi Remote is also available – a mobile recorder doctors and nurses can carry around clinics and hospitals for easy recording that doesn’t rely on an internet connection.

The company is already moving beyond transcription. Heidi Evidence surfaces relevant clinical research and guidelines at the point of care, while Heidi is expanding into pre‑chart summaries, referrals and spoken commands that trigger real actions in electronic health record systems. The aim, says Liu, is to let doctors focus on diagnosis and human connection, and let AI handle everything else.

In the episode, we dig into Heidi’s founding story, its rapid uptake in New Zealand’s public health system, and the governance and privacy questions that come with putting AI in the consult room.

Tune in to the full conversation with Heidi Health co-founder Yu Liu on The Business of Tech, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Another New Zealander has joined the global AI big league.

Auckland-raised engineer Jeff Hawke is now co‑founder and chief technology officer of Odyssey, a Palo Alto‑ and London‑based frontier lab that has just raised an eye‑watering US$310 million at a US$1.45 (NZ$2.55 billion) valuation – making it one of the world’s hottest AI “world model” startups.

On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Hawke about how he went from tinkering with autonomous forklifts in New Zealand to helping shape the next era of artificial intelligence from Silicon Valley and Shoreditch.

Odyssey isn’t building another large language model. The company is focused on “world models” – AI systems that learn from sight and sound to understand how the real world works and then simulate it. Instead of spitting out text, these models simulate the real world, allowing robots that learn like humans, and games that feel like living worlds.

Amazon to power Odyssey’s models

Global investors are piling in. Odyssey’s Series B is led by US fund Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD, GV, EQT, IQT and other heavy hitters on the cap table, plus a who’s who of Silicon Valley angels. Amazon Web Services has also signed on as Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, betting that its Trainium AI chips can give the lab an edge in what is rapidly becoming an arms race for compute.

For Hawke, it’s the latest step in a deep‑tech odyssey. After studying mechatronics and computer science at the University of Auckland, he cut his teeth at a local autonomous forklift startup before heading offshore. Stints in the US and at the Oxford Robotics Institute led to him becoming the first technical hire at UK autonomous‑vehicle company Wayve, working alongside Kiwi founder Alex Kendall as they grew the company to a multibillion‑dollar valuation.

In our conversation, Hawke explains why he thinks world models are the missing piece of the AI puzzle, how Odyssey plans to move from a “GPT‑2 era” of world simulation to its own ChatGPT‑style breakout moment, and what this means for robots, jobs and the balance of power between tech companies and governments.

We also look at what his success says about New Zealand’s tech ecosystem – and why a new generation of Kiwi founders is quietly wiring itself into the very top tier of global AI.

You can listen to the full interview with Jeff Hawke on The Business of Tech, available now on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

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China is racing ahead in artificial intelligence and robotics – and New Zealand risks being left on the sidelines if it doesn’t pay close attention.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to two Kiwis who’ve just had a rare front‑row seat on China’s AI boom – Auckland-based ElementX co‑founder and chief technology officer Ming Cheuk, and Christchurch AI engineer and consultant Blake Harkness.

They’ve returned from an AI discovery tour organised by the AI Forum and the New Zealand China Council that took them inside some of China’s most advanced AI labs, hyperscale cloud providers, hospitals, banks, councils and robotics manufacturers. What they describe is a country where AI has moved well beyond pilots and proofs of concept and is now deeply embedded in everyday life and industrial processes.

The AI hospital

In healthcare, they visited a single hospital serving around five million patients a year, where AI chatbots handle initial triage in multiple languages, imaging tools cut the time to analyse scans by 80%, and robots in the pharmacy automatically pick and dispense prescriptions. Everything is done with the scan of a QR code. For a country like New Zealand, grappling with an ageing population and over‑stretched health services, it’s a glimpse of what fully scaled AI-enabled care could look like.

They also met with frontier large language model labs and firms building China’s own AI tech stack, often with a strong open-source ethos. Models that can be deployed on customers’ own infrastructure – even as part of sovereign AI arrangements – are central to China’s strategy, allowing overseas organisations to adopt Chinese AI without sending data back to Beijing. It’s a clever way to sidestep geopolitical mistrust while still extending technological influence.

On the robotics front, Ming and Blake toured factories producing humanoid robots and agile robotic “dogs” that are already off‑the‑shelf tools for search and rescue, asset inspection and industrial maintenance. The sheer number of robotics companies, and the pace at which they’re iterating on hardware and control systems, underscore how serious China is about becoming a global robotics powerhouse.

The tech divide

Yet geopolitics is never far from the surface. Export controls, national security concerns and shifting alliances mean much of this technology may never be directly available to Western buyers. Even so, Ming and Blake see real opportunities for New Zealand in partnering around open-source models, sovereign AI builds and targeted robotics deployments in sectors like infrastructure, manufacturing and agriculture.

If you want to understand where AI and robotics are really heading – and what that means for New Zealand’s economy, workforce and policy choices – this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

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