NEW ZEALAND INNOVATIONS may NEWSLETTER
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Kia ora tātou! Welcome to the inaugural issue of our newsletter! We are the first fund in New Zealand that’s run by operators with decades of experience building companies and investing in early-stage ventures in Silicon Valley. We are excited to bring our expertise to New Zealand and help create the next global innovation hub at the edge of the world. In this biweekly newsletter we will outline founders, startups and events we’re excited about in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We are excited to announce that we are having our first capital close on June 7th and have already started investing into companies here in New Zealand with partner capital. Read below about what we’re investing in and how to get involved with the fund.
Cutting Edge Innovation at the World’s Edge
After 4 months of tireless work, our entire team is excited to zero in on the date of our first close: June 7th. Fundraising is progressing well and we have already started writing checks from our GP funds.
If you are interested in getting involved, please contact us.
Startup of the week: Pyper Vision
Since the inception of flight, we have overcome many hurdles, developing aircraft that can operate in high winds, rain and snow. Yet low visibility caused by fog remains the largest weather-related disruptor, preventing flights from landing and taking off and causing the deadliest aviation disaster ever recorded (Tenerife two aircraft collision killing 583 people). Climate change has only amplified this problem so it’s not limited to just a few months a year.
At Pyper Vision their mission is to eliminate fog, making flight possible and safe every day of the year. We love the passion of their founder Emily Blythe, who grew up in a family of aviators and has herself been flying for 12 years. Their proprietary absorbent dispersed by drones for 10 minutes can clear a runway for 2 hours of visibility. Already approved for operation in Australia, we hope to see them up and running in NZ this year and at airports around the world just in time for global reopenings when large-scale travel will return.
We are happy to make Pyper Vision the first investment of the NZVC fund!
Waiheke Private Capital Summit
Our partner Mark attended the private capital conference where all the VCs investing in NZ came together. It was the first one of its kind and surprisingly everyone already knew about NZVC! Everyone was very friendly and cooperative. Mark says it felt like a charity gala instead of a VC conference.
The NZ venture ecosystem is relatively young. Only 3 funds (Movac, Punakaiki and Global from Day One) existed 6 years ago. Mark spent a good amount of time trying to understand this dynamic and it seemed that it emerged as a result of the initial batch of VCs in the early 2000’s failing due to lack of deal flow, and scant early capital in the form of angel money to validate the ideas. The government tried to fix this with the NZGCP Inspire fund, which matches 1-1 investments directly into companies. This allowed for a prolific angel ecosystem to grow and become the dominant player in early stage investing. On the back of this, there are now enough companies getting to the Series A stage looking for capital where VCs make sense. And hence the growth of VC funds in the last 1-2 years. To encourage this, the government also set up the Elevate fund ($300m) last year to match 1-1 investments into GPs.
We are delighted to be a part of this entrepreneurial ecosystem which is just about getting its virtuous flywheel going.
Recent NZ startup exits
We are excited to note the global interest in the excellent NZ SaaS companies as evidenced by these acquisitions by North American players in the last 2 months:
Timely: SaaS company in beauty and wellness space acquired by US based EverCommerce for >$100M
Seequent: Geosciences modeling company acquired by US based Bentley Systems for $1.05B
Vend: SaaS company in retail management acquired by Lightspeed from Canada for ~$350M
For the geography buffs, these startups are based in Dunedin, Christchurch, and Auckland, which shows the depth and breadth of New Zealand's innovation hubs.
Fun fact about NZ: Did you know…
… that the popular data science language R came out of University of Auckland! We learned that while talking to an AI startup in NZ this week. Here is the lowdown from Wikipedia:
“In 1991 Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, began an alternative implementation of the basic S language, completely independent of S-PLUS. They publicized this project starting in 1993. In 1995 Martin Maechler convinced Ihaka and Gentleman to make R free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. The R Development Core Team was created to manage the further development of R. John Chambers became a member at least as of August 2018. R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S.”
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson