NZVC Portfolio Day: Fostering Innovation & Collaboration
Kia Ora friends!
Thank you for joining us on the NZVC Portfolio Day! Hope you enjoyed interacting with our amazing founders and supportive limited partner base. We can already see a lot of synergistic networks developing from the event so please reach out to us if we can connect you with a founder or investor. Below are some of the epic highlights from the event.
NZVC Portfolio Day Highlights
On October 27th we hosted our Inaugural Portfolio Day in Wellington, New Zealand. The event saw enthusiastic participation from over 15 of our Portfolio founders, several of our LPs and important stakeholders from the NZ startup and innovation ecosystem.
In true NZVC spirit, the event was an exciting opportunity for our Kiwi founders and investors to engage with thought leaders in technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The fireside chats featured our GP Mark Pavlyukovskyy interviewing:
Tom Staggs: longtime CFO and COO of Walt Disney (NZVC LP)
Hon Judith Collins: National Party Spokesperson for Research, Science, Innovation, Technology and Artificial Intelligence
Jaan Talinn: Co-founder of Skype, early investor in Deep Mind, AI thought leader (NZVC LP)
We had a lively conversation with EHF co-founder Yoseph Ayele who spoke about the idea behind EHF and its impact to date.
On the business leg of the day, our GP Ajay Gupta presented an overview of the fund to date and what the future investment strategy looks like. This was followed by short format pitches by 15 of our founders about their companies and current traction. We wrapped up with our GP Glen Anderson chatting with our founders on challenges founder CEOs face when starting a company from NZ that has global ambitions.
Chnnl founder Dr Liz Barryman probably summed up the feedback well in her note to us:
“A HUGE thank you for an awesome portfolio day!! I’m wearing my hoodie with pride! Was such an amazing lineup of speakers and people in the room were brilliant - how about the MIT physics AI professor! incredible talent. And Judith Collins was great too!
Great to meet the other companies too!”
Startup of the month: KiwiFibre
When we met Ben Scales, the 22 year old founder of KiwiFibre coming out of University of Canterbury, we were blown away by his passion and clarity of thought on how to build sustainable materials from New Zealand’s native plants. Ben and his co-founder Will wanted to solve the problem of carbon footprint created by the use of carbon fiber in most composite materials. And their ingenious solution uses Harakeke, a New Zealand flax plant that grew right on their doorsteps! It's one of Aotearoa’s most abundant natural plants, and is an important part of Maori heritage, and a key part of NZ’s history. It proved to be a strong and versatile material for plaiting and weaving cloaks, clothes, mats, kete and tools.
With an incredible 990 MPa of tensile strength, Harakeke has been used in rope form for centuries. Whether this be guiding Waka around the Pacific, or being exported to Europe, the natural strength of harakeke is tried and tested. It is the perfect fiber for natural fiber composite materials. KiwiFibre makes natural fiber high-performance materials to directly replace carbon fiber and fiberglass. To do this, they use harakeke fiber to create yarns, rovings, and fabrics to slot into existing composite manufacturing methods. KiwiFibre has superior energy absorption, radio transparency, vibration damping and strength to weight properties, which allows the creation of better performing products.
One of their key early adopters is a California-based global building, construction and geospatial companies that uses KiwiFiber’s KiwiComp material to make survey poles. Historically users of their carbon fiber survey poles have expressed unreliable data – turned out this was from poor radio-transparency of carbon fiber. KiwiComp solves this. Carbon is so stiff that a single crack spreads through the entire pole and is unrepairable. KiwiComp is repairable, and has an end of life. Every vibration is picked up by the legacy carbon tripods, and the energy travels right though the computer, affecting data collection. KiwiComp solves this too. Once these technical problems were solved, the environmental benefit sealed the deal. For the survey pole there is an 85% reduction in carbon footprint.
We are excited to support Ben and Will on this journey of building sustainable products for our planet!
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson