First backers of Australasia's most ambitious founders.

The five Dawn Aerospace cofounders with the Mk-II Aurora — Dawn Aerospace

Finn Puklowski and Jason Goodison on a rooftop terrace — Finn Puklowski & Jason Goodison, General Compute

Eric Laakmann beside the water — Eric Laakmann, Vessev

Shoaib Iqbal and Joey Lorenczak of Esper — Shoaib Iqbal & Joey Lorenczak, Esper

Ben Scales and William Murrell of KiwiFibre — Ben Scales & William Murrell, KiwiFibre

Brooke Roberts, Sonya Williams and Leighton Roberts — Brooke Roberts, Sonya Williams & Leighton Roberts, Sharesies

Elise and Toby Hilliam in a kitchen — Toby & Elise Hilliam, Appetise

Philip Fierlinger, Upstock

Jamie Jermain and Jovan Pavlicevic with the Sky Tower behind — Jamie Jermain & Jovan Pavlicevic, SquareOne

Amos Palfreyman with the Miruku team in the greenhouse — Amos Palfreyman, Miruku

Liam Kampshof at the QuadSense stand — Liam Kampshof, Bovonic

David Moodie at a Foundry Lab casting machine — David Moodie, Foundry Lab

Divya Dhar Cohen, Becoming

Thomas Sohmers, Positron

The three Generalist founders behind a pair of robot arms — Pete Florence, Andy Zeng & Andrew Barry, Generalist

Tristan Amell and his cofounder in the Plots launch video — Tristan Amell and his cofounder, Plots

Max Arshavsky in the Zenno Astronautics workshop — Max Arshavsky, Zenno Astronautics

Brian Lo and Martin Li of Markato — Brian Lo & Martin Li, Markato

Janine and Alan Grainger of Easy Crypto — Janine & Alan Grainger, Easy Crypto

Sam Vye in the Syos workshop — Sam Vye, Syos Aerospace

Four changes are remaking the world at once.

Machines are learning to think.
Machines are learning to work.
The unipolar world is fragmenting.
Biology is stretching human life toward centuries.

New Zealand and Australia enter this world with unusual advantages. We are stable democracies that allies already trust with defense contracts and intelligence. We have restricted airspace and empty coastline to test in. And our home markets are so small that every serious company here builds for the world from day one. Most of what we back starts in New Zealand or Australia.

Machines are learning to think.

Every model that gets better makes the compute to run it scarcer, so the hard problem moves from writing models to running them.

Two of the General Compute team standing between data centre racks — AI is growing faster than data centers can be built, so the next wave of compute has to go inside the ones already standing.

General Compute grows AI compute faster than new data centers can be built: its air-cooled silicon drops into the data centers that already exist and runs workloads within weeks. Finn Puklowski and Jason Goodison founded it in 2025, and we backed them when the company was two people and an idea.

An Atlas server opened to show its inference boards — Running a model now costs more over its life than training it once, so we are betting on silicon built for nothing but inference.

Thomas Sohmers, Barrett Woodside and Edward Kmett founded Positron in 2023 to build inference-first silicon. Their Atlas accelerator serves the same models as Nvidia's H200 on a third of the power.

Machines are learning to work.

The jobs worth automating are the physical ones, in pipes and operating theaters where a person should not have to be.

One model teaches many robot hands, so a machine picks up a new job without being programmed for it.

Generalist trains one model to drive many kinds of robot hands, so general-purpose machines can take on the physical work. Pete Florence, Andy Zeng and Andrew Barry left Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics to found it in 2024.

The Andromeda Surgical robot arm positioned at a surgical table with a surgeon seated alongside — The robot takes the repetitive steps of the operation, and the surgeon keeps the judgment.

The endoscope mounted on the end of the Andromeda robot arm — The endoscope rides on the end of the arm, where a surgeon would otherwise hold it.

Andromeda Surgical builds autonomous robots for surgery, starting with endourology. Its robot pairs with AI models that take on surgical tasks while the surgeon stays in the loop.

The unipolar world is fragmenting.

Every bloc now has to build its own drones, castings and compute, and it buys them only from countries it already trusts.

The vehicles a country sends into danger are going to stop carrying people. Nobody is aboard anything in this footage.

Sam Vye founded Syos Aerospace in Tauranga in 2021 to build uncrewed vehicles for air, land and sea, and its SA200 helicopter lifts 200kg for up to two hours. In April 2025 the UK Prime Minister announced a NZ$67M contract for Syos uncrewed vehicles for Ukraine, and the company now runs a factory in Hampshire with 150 people.

A cast metal impeller held in a hand — A part drawn in the morning is cast by the afternoon, which changes what a hardware team is willing to try.

Foundry Lab casting machines in rows on the production floor — A conventional foundry takes weeks to make what these machines cast in a day.

David Moodie’s Foundry Lab turns a CAD file into a cast metal part the same day with a microwave furnace, and a conventional foundry takes weeks to make the same part. Foundry Lab runs a plant in Fremont, California.

Biology is stretching human life toward centuries.

Biology is becoming an engineering discipline, and a lab can now build the organ or the therapy itself.

Biology is becoming an engineering discipline, and this lab grows the organ a life depends on.

Becoming is engineering the placenta, the organ every life depends on. Its lab-grown placenta has nurtured a mouse embryo outside the body, and founder Divya Dhar Cohen is a New Zealand-trained medical doctor with a Wharton MBA and a Harvard MPA.

A sleeper in bed beside the Orion bedside tower — The cheapest way to extend a life may be to fix the third of it spent asleep.

Orion is a longevity company focused on improving sleep. Harry Gestetner’s first product is a water-cooled AI mattress cover that holds a sleeper’s core temperature through the night.

We invest before there is traction.

Electric hydrofoils will carry commuters before they carry tourists. At speed, only the foils touch the water.

Vessev was an idea and a small prototype when we backed it, and its VS-9 Kermadec now carries paying passengers for Fullers360 on Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour.

The Vessev VS-9 Kermadec up on its foils at sunset — Fullers360 now runs it on the Waitematā with paying passengers aboard.

The Pyper Vision crew preparing a drone at night under work lights — Fog closes airports that have no way to clear it, and this crew is building one.

We back founders who lived the problem.

A dairy herd grazing in a paddock below hills — A red light tells a farmer a cow has mastitis within a minute, early enough to save her.

Liam Kampshof is a sharemilker’s son who spent five years in London building blood-testing devices for hospitals, came home mid-pandemic, and started prototyping QuadSense in his parents’ garage in 2021. It launched at Fieldays in June 2024 and flags mastitis with a red light in about a minute.

We back the founder over the first idea.

A Kiki member event in London at sunset — This founder rebuilt the same company twice, in two cities, and that is what we backed.

Phone makers killed VXT’s voicemail wedge, so Luke Campbell went and sat with law firms, and Saunders & Co became the anchor customer for VXT Phone. Kiki’s Toby Thomas-Smith filled 1,500 Bondi homes, took the network to New York, shut it down there, and moved to London alone to rebuild.

The VXT team in matching black T-shirts — We are betting on the team that kept going after the phone makers killed their first product.

We back work that takes decades.

An aircraft that reaches space from an ordinary runway can fly again the same day, which is what makes it a business.

Stefan Powell and his four cofounders started Dawn Aerospace in 2017, and on 12 November 2024 their Mk-II Aurora passed Mach 1.1 at 82,500 feet. No civil aircraft had broken the sound barrier since Concorde.

The nose of the Mk-II Aurora against the curve of the earth — The Mk-II Aurora climbed to 82,500 feet and landed on the strip it took off from.

The Dawn Aerospace Mk-II Aurora on a runway at a South Island aerodrome — Concorde retired in 2003, and the next civil aircraft to go supersonic took off from this South Island aerodrome.