Fund II is open.

Who the fund is for.

The people in this fund are founders and operators who built companies before they started backing them. They come in for frontier technology at the price it trades at before a round has a lead, and they stay because they can read every company we hold rather than the three we would rather talk about.

Why the region.

New Zealand and Australia are stable democracies that allies already trust with defense contracts and intelligence, they have restricted airspace and empty coastline to test in, and their home markets are too small for a serious company to sell to alone.

Both governments run co-investment programs for early-stage venture, and that takes some of the risk out of a position taken here.

A residency path.

NZVC is one of the few funds approved under the Golden Visa program, which lets an investor obtain permanent residency in New Zealand by investing NZ$3 million. Write to us and we will take you through how the fund sits inside that pathway.

The record.

Every company we have announced is on the portfolio wall, with what it does and why we backed it. We take a prospective investor through the fund's performance directly, line by line.

How the fund invests.

We invest before there is traction, usually at pre-seed and seed. Most of what we back starts in New Zealand or Australia and sells to the world from the first year. When a company works we come back in at the next round rather than letting the position thin out.

Our focus.

We invest in high-tech companies in three areas.

• Artificial intelligence.We back companies building foundational models, automation tools and machine learning that change how an industry works.
• SaaS and platforms.We back scalable software that a business runs on, sold to a global market and pulled through by the product itself.
• Deep tech.We back companies solving hard scientific and engineering problems, from robotics and advanced materials to health tech and space.

The portfolio wall carries all six categories we file companies under, so bio and healthcare, ag-tech and climate, fintech, and consumer and marketplace sit there too.

What investors get.

• Reporting on every company

  You get the whole portfolio, not only the part of it that is working.

• Room in the breakout rounds

  You get a seat at Portfolio Day each October and access to the sidecar vehicles we run when a company breaks out.

• Partners who pick up

  The people who answer your questions are the people who made the investment.

We build companies too.

Alongside the fund we run a product studio called Antipodean Labs and an Entrepreneur in Residence program. An EiR spends three months with our partners pressure-testing an idea, running customer discovery and early sales, and leading the first fundraise, with the goal of walking out a co-founder on founder equity. We run it from Sydney, Auckland and San Francisco.

Operators who want to go again can apply to the EiR program.

Who you will be dealing with.

Mark Pavlyukovskyy is a General Partner. He co-founded and exited Piper, which shipped more than 100,000 units into over 70 countries, and he came to New Zealand as an Edmund Hillary Fellow one day before the borders closed in 2020. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and was Princeton’s Entrepreneur of the Year. He answers mark@nzvc.co.nz.

Hendrik Remigereau is a General Partner. He spent a decade in venture capital and corporate innovation in Europe, where he founded and ran the European arm of Founders Forum’s strategy advisory business until Accenture bought it. He then joined the AI venture fund Merantix, co-founded AI House Davos, and built the AI community around the AI Campus in Berlin. He moved to Australia and joined NZVC to back founders in the region. He answers hendrik@nzvc.co.nz.

The other partners and the venture partners are on the team page.

Talk to us.

Write to invest@nzvc.co.nz

We will send the fund materials and put an hour with a partner in the diary. Founders raising a round should write to the founders page instead.