New Zealand Innovations june Newsletter
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Kia ora friends! We are excited to have completed the first close of our fund on June 7th with some incredible Limited Partners on board. We will continue to do rolling closes in the coming months, If you are interested in getting involved, please contact us.
The vibrant energy of the New Zealand ecosystem continues to inspire us as we met over 20 startups in the last two weeks. They were brilliant founders working on exciting domains: autonomous flights, advanced prosthetics, inventory forecasting, AI/ML tools for enterprise, data wrangling for ML, cybersecurity tools, plant-based alternative meats, and mental wellbeing to name a few. We are looking forward to funding and engaging with several of them.
Our partners Glen and Ajay held office hours with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and advised some talented founders looking to build global businesses from NZ.
In the meantime, Mark was spotted in a flight suit doing due diligence on an unmanned aviation startup. An aircraft fitted for autonomous flying is the only way he would ever be able to fly one!
Startup of the month: Chnnl
Chnnl is a digital platform providing insights, information, and data on employee's mental health and wellbeing. Started by Dr Elizabeth Berryman who has a wealth of experience in the medical space as a registered nurse in community Maori Health before becoming a medical doctor. She is an inspiring leader who is determined to combat employee burnout, depression, anxiety and suicide in the workplace after having faced bullying herself in her early career.
Liz has built a solid team with their Head of Engineering coming from the best start-ups in New Zealand, Xero & Pushpay. The service is already getting good traction from hospitals, universities, and large organisations across New Zealand and Australia. They have rightfully won the NZ Hi-Tech Award for the “Most Innovative Hi-Tech Service this year.
We love Liz’s passion for supporting employee mental well-being through state of the art digital tools and are excited to be an investor in Chnnl!
University projects
Our venture partner Jae is actively working on connecting with the universities in New Zealand with the aim of finding the best student-led companies. NZVC will get directly involved in Velocity and X Challenge that are recognised as the biggest student start-up competitions around the country. Our goal is to build a strong relationship with the student ecosystem to grow and connect the top talents with our worldwide network of entrepreneurs.
Fun fact about NZ: Did you know…
… that scientists confirmed Zealandia,Te Riu-a-Māui in the Māori language, as the 8th continent in 2017! It is 94% underwater and is the smallest, youngest and thinnest continent in the world owing to a mysterious stretching action of the continental crust. This BBC article does a great job of describing the formation of this continent, without which we will have no Kiwi founders to speak to!
(Image credit: GSA Today 2017)
“Zealandia was originally part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which was formed about 550 million years ago and essentially lumped together all the land in the southern hemisphere. It occupied a corner on the eastern side, where it bordered several others, including half of West Antarctica and all of eastern Australia.
Then around 105 million years ago, "due to a process which we don't completely understand yet, Zealandia started to be pulled away", says Tulloch.
Continental crust is usually around 40km deep – significantly thicker than oceanic crust, which tends to be around 10km. As it was strained, Zealandia ended up being stretched so much that its crust now only extends 20km (12.4 miles) down. Eventually, the wafter-thin continent sank – though not quite to the level of normal oceanic crust – and disappeared under the sea.
Despite being thin and submerged, geologists know that Zealandia is a continent because of the kinds of rocks found there. Continental crust tends to be made up of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks – like granite, schist and limestone, while the ocean floor is usually just made of igneous ones such as basalt.”
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson