Not career investors. Builders who crossed the table.

Who founded NZVC

Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta and Glen Anderson started NZVC in 2021 as New Zealand's first operator-run venture fund. Hendrik Remigereau joined as a venture partner and is now a General Partner.

Mark had just sold Piper, the DIY computer kit company he built in San Francisco, when he arrived in New Zealand in March 2020. Meeting founders here, he found technical talent he compared to Israel and Singapore. He also found companies with little capital, surrounded by investors who had never built a company. He took that gap to two people who had backed Piper.

Ajay Gupta had run equity trading in Hong Kong and Tokyo, then backed dozens of startups in the Bay Area. Glen Anderson had led applied machine intelligence at Google Brain for close to a decade. Both lived near San Francisco, where most of the fund's investors also lived. They agreed to be the fund's partners in the Bay Area.

Hendrik Remigereau had spent a decade building and backing companies in Berlin before he moved to Sydney. He saw New Zealand and Australia as Berlin a decade earlier, with the same momentum and the same missing link between local startups and investors in North America. He lives in Sydney and leads our investing in Australia.

We ask our investors for their time as well as their money.

Why New Zealand

We believe the next decade will produce several centers of innovation instead of one, and that the countries that stay stable and open will get more than their share. New Zealand is one of them.

We built this fund during the pandemic, over video calls. Many of our friends were leaving San Francisco at the time. Silicon Valley had become more a network than a place, and we could join it from here.

Mark was born in Ukraine, and in 2022 he wrote in Fortune that anyone who can work from a laptop should choose the place least likely to see war or conflict. New Zealand is a stable, predictable country in a decade of geopolitical instability. In 2026 it ranked second in the world on the Global Peace Index.

In 2021 we wrote that in a world of remote work great startups will be born anywhere, and that we wanted to help build the next innovation hub at the edge of the world. Our purpose here is to help New Zealand become one of the leading tech ecosystems in the world.

Where we invest, and why

Founders in New Zealand and Australia start with less money and fewer connections than founders in San Francisco. The region sits far from the large markets, so most companies here sell abroad from the first year.

We are usually the first institutional money in. Glen and Ajay live in the Bay Area and have backed startups there for years. Most of our own investors are veteran founders and investors in the United States. We introduce founders to those people for hiring, customers, and the round after ours. We made the early-stage mistakes at our own companies, and we help founders skip them. When a company is ready for American customers and investors, we help it make the move.

We back the person before the plan. The founders we want have lived the problem, iterate fast, and are the best in the world at the one thing their company must get right. We rank resourcefulness above credentials, and we invest before there is traction.

The NZVC partners

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  Mark Pavlyukovskyy

  General Partner

  He was born in Ukraine nine months before the Soviet Union dissolved and moved to America at nine. He studied molecular biology at Princeton and started a doctorate at Oxford before leaving to build Piper, the DIY computer kit Steve Wozniak praised and Elon Musk bought for his kids. Piper shipped 100,000 kits to more than 70 countries before Mark sold it. He came to New Zealand as an Edmund Hillary Fellow and started NZVC the next year.

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  Hendrik Remigereau

  General Partner

  Hendrik has been building and backing companies since 2015, starting in Berlin. He led the expansion of Founders Forum's strategy advisory, which was acquired by Accenture, then joined the leadership team of Merantix, the EUR 100m AI venture studio, where he founded the Berlin AI Campus and grew it past 100 companies and 2,000 members. He co-founded AI House Davos at the World Economic Forum. He moved to Sydney, joined NZVC as a venture partner on Fund I, and is now General Partner on Fund II.

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  Glen Anderson

  Partner

  He led the applied machine intelligence team at Google Brain for close to a decade and has invested in more than 50 early-stage companies, from deep tech to consumer. He lives in San Francisco. He co-founded NZVC in 2021.

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  Ajay Gupta

  Partner

  He spent 22 years in finance across Asia, Europe and North America and ran equity trading for Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong and Tokyo. He lives in the Bay Area and has backed dozens of early-stage startups there, Piper among them. He started NZVC with Mark and Glen in 2021.