New Zealand Innovations August Newsletter
Kia Ora friends! There was no summer slowdown here (probably owing to the fact that it’s winter in NZ) as Rocket Lab’s IPO kept propelling Kiwi founders to dream big. As Peter Beck’s tweet suggests, we see a huge wave of entrepreneurs coming out of NZ and are happy to be engaging with them as they get started!
Next close of NZVC fund on September 15th
We are happy to announce the next close of the NZVC fund on September 15th, backed by tremendous LP’s. If you would like to be a part of that, please reply to this email within this week.
Startup of the month: Arcanum
For some time now, we have been looking for an enterprise AI solutions company in New Zealand and are happy to have found Arcanum. We love their founder Asa Cox’s vision to make Machine Learning based decision making accessible to all organizations without having to hire AI specialists. In a world where 80% of ML projects fail at the point of IT integration, Arcanum provides high ROI through their MLOps platform that monitors and manages ML models in production. Their strong NZ traction and international expansion plans make them a great investment for our fund.
NZGCP event
Mark attended a roundtable discussion with New Zealand Growth Capital Partners (NZGCP) which is the government arm supporting venture funds and startup investing. The focus of the discussion was to ask the venture community how NZGCP can continue to assist VC funds both through funding them from their fund of funds (Elevate) as well as how to engage with deal flow from their Aspire direct investment fund. It was quite interesting to see all the major NZ firms in one room discussing and debating ideas. One topic that stood out as the biggest point of agreement across all attendees was the need to quickly and safely open the borders given the difficulty this has caused for NZ businesses.
Office hours with Te Ohaka Incubation Program
Our partners Glen, Ajay and Vishal held office hours at Te Ōhaka in Christchurch, helping startups with their pitches. It was great to see more women founders and focus on mental wellbeing startups.
Opportunity for EHF fellows to enter New Zealand!
There is a potential development which might allow some of our LP’s who are EHF fellows to apply to enter the country in the coming months. Please reply to this email if you're interested in this opportunity.
One of the things that will be looked at is what contributions the fellow has made to the country so far, and the potential for further impact. This can take many forms including starting companies, mentoring and advising etc but capital investment is the easiest one to measure.
Fun fact about NZ: Did you know…
… that much before Rocket Lab, New Zealand has had a long history of producing rocket scientists starting with Bill Pickering who ran NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for 22 years from 1954 to 1976. He was responsible for launching the first American satellite Explorer 1 into space, just 4 months after Russia’s Sputnik.
Bill led successful NASA missions into far reaches of the solar system: Mariner II to Venus and Mariner IV to Mars, and found himself on the covers of two Time magazine issues.
(Source: https://www.nzedge.com/legends/william-pickering/)
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson