Why Big Tech Failed at This Simple Farming Task
Mark Pavlyukovskyy and Hendrik Remigereau host TechMates, the NZVC podcast. The guest on this episode is Liam Kampshof, Founder of Bovonic, and it went out on 9 October 2025. It covers the NZVC portfolio company Bovonic.
- Guest
- Liam Kampshof, Founder of Bovonic
- Date
- 9 October 2025
- Companies
- Bovonic
- Watch
- YouTube
- Listen
- Spotify
Liam Kampshof, founder of Bovonic, turned an early milking-shed prototype into QuadSense, a snap-in, battery-powered sensor that measures each teat's conductivity and flags likely mastitis within about 30 seconds. It retrofits into the short milk tube, has no moving parts, a roughly three-year battery, and costs about five times less than legacy lab systems. In its first year it reached about 145 New Zealand farms, and the conversation covers why manual checks fail, why no subsidies force ruthless ROI, and the plan for the UK, Ireland, the EU, and the US.
- Mastitis 101: why manual stripping fails at scale and how quarter-level conductivity catches it earlier.
- Adoption: about 145 farms in year one; near 5 percent in early regions.
- New Zealand edge: no subsidies, so ruthless ROI; practicality meets biomedical engineering.
- Macro: New Zealand is the number one dairy exporter; EU cell-count standards and antibiotic rules drive demand.
Companies in this episode
Bovonic, QuadSense, AgTech, dairy, mastitis, sensors, hardware, precision agriculture