The Business of Tech, hosted by leading tech journalist Peter Griffin. Every week they take a deep dive into emerging technology and news from the sector to help guide the important decisions all Business leaders make. Issues such as cybersecurity, retaining trust after a cyberattack, business IT needs, purchasing SaaS tools and more. New Episodes out every Thursday. Follow or subscribe to get it delivered straight to your favourite podcatcher. @petergnz @businessdesk_nz Proudly sponsored by 2degrees Business!
New Zealand’s startup scene loves a good success story, but few have moved as fast – or gone as deep – as Wellington energy software venture Factor. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Factor co‑founder Jessica Venning‑Bryan to she and co-founder Simon Pohlen assembled a team with serious domain expertise, built a specialised energy pricing platform, landed major customers offshore, and sold to NZX‑listed utility software company Gentrack in barely two years. The exit, announced in May, was valued at $24.9 million with a $10 million earn-out tied to hitting $17 million in annual recurring revenue within three years. Gentrack funded the acquisition out of its cash reserves. Venning‑Bryan doesn’t sugar‑coat the journey. She talks candidly about the “fastest and longest” two years of her career – the tension between capital efficiency and ambition, the stress of fundraising, and the constant questioning of whether the team was moving fast enough or in the right direction. If you’ve ever wondered what startup life really feels like beyond the glossy pitch decks, this conversation delivers the unvarnished reality. Deep domain experience pays off What makes Factor’s story compelling is how textbook “problem–founder fit” looks in practice. After a decade inside the energy sector at Flick Electric and Flux Federation, Venning‑Bryan and Pohlen knew, in forensic detail, the headaches utilities face trying to price complex commercial and industrial energy contracts. Instead of accepting that clunky, generic enterprise software was as good as it gets, they built a true SaaS product – APIs for everything, rapid deployment, and integration into the messy legacy systems that dominate energy, banking and healthcare. The episode also digs into how Factor uses AI, including time‑series LLMs like Amazon’s Chronos. What this episode reinforces is that deep domain knowledge can be the most powerful startup advantage you have. It also reveals why API‑first SaaS remains a winning strategy in conservative, regulated industries, and how to think critically about AI’s role in high‑stakes forecasting and pricing. Most importantly, Venning‑Bryan’s story is a nudge to anyone sitting inside an industry, staring at a persistent pain point: if you understand it better than anyone, why not be the one to fix it? Tune in to The Business of Tech this week to hear how Factor went from energy headaches to a $35 million exit – and what that playbook might mean for your own next move. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Australian fintech pioneer and serial entrepreneur Dom Pym knows a thing or two about starting companies and scaling them into market-leading players. This week’s episode of The Business of Tech dives into Pym’s extraordinary journey, from bootstrapping niche financial platforms to building one of Australia’s most popular digital banks – Up – and then reinventing himself as one of the region’s most active startup investors. Pym’s path into fintech started long before “fintech” was a buzzword. After a whirlwind early career working with Fortune 500 giants, he went on to build a grain exchange platform that digitised how Australian farmers sell their product, followed by Pin Payments, an all‑in‑one payments service that expanded into New Zealand, Asia, the UK and the US before being acquired. That set the stage for Up, the app‑based bank that hacked its way through regulatory and infrastructure hurdles to become a breakout success with younger customers and a major strategic asset for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank. Now, post‑exit, Pym is channelling that experience into backing others. As Australian Investor of the Year, he’s supporting funds and startups via his family office, and pushing for more secondary deals so founders don’t have to wait a decade for liquidity. In The Business of Tech, he explains his investing philosophy, why he doesn’t obsess over unicorn valuations, and how he thinks about risk in an era dominated by AI and software. Pym is heading to Auckland in September to deliver a keynote at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo, New Zealand’s new flagship gathering for founders, investors and corporate leaders. If you want a preview of the themes he’ll bring to the stage – and a candid assessment of where New Zealand tech needs to lift its game – check this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio or in your podcast app of choice. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
New Zealand isn't exactly famous for producing automotive brands, but FTN Motion is trying to change that. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, the company’s co-founders Luke Sinclair and Kendall Bristow recount how a backyard BMX hack led to them creating one of the country's most distinctive electric vehicle startups. That was almost a decade ago, when two mechanical engineering graduates from Waikato University strapped a motor and battery onto a BMX bike in Pukekohe, before electric motorcycles were even a mainstream concept. That scrappy experiment sparked an idea: a new vehicle category sitting between an e-bike and a motorcycle, built for the 20 to 30-kilometre urban commute. The result is the Street Dog, a retro-styled café racer that channels the romance of classic motorcycles while running on electric power. I spent a day test-driving the new Streetdog 50 on the streets of Wellington, enjoying a smooth ride on a bike that’s easy to get to grips with. This version doesn’t require the rider to have a motorcycle licence, so will appeal to people who want a bit more flexibility getting around town than an e-bike provides. Rather than chasing a futuristic look like many EV makers, FTN Motion doubled down on nostalgia and craftsmanship, betting that riders want something that feels like a classic, not a gadget. That bet is paying off, particularly in Wellington, a city custom-built for the bike's use case, with concentrated inner-city roads and no need to touch the motorway. At the heart of the co-founders’ success are relationships and networks. Luke and Kendall reveal how a chance conversation at a barbecue led them to Wellington incubator Creative HQ, how a single media column penned by professional director Mike “MOD” O’Donnell generated their first hundred pre-orders almost overnight, and how those early wins snowballed into relationships with Wellington’s Angel HQ and engineering veterans from Rocket Lab and Dyson. FTN Motion has resisted the industry's urge to over-engineer the user experience, deliberately skipping apps and unnecessary tech to keep the focus on the ride. And as the company eyes expansion into Australia, the US and beyond, Luke and Kendall get candid about what it actually takes to manufacture vehicles in New Zealand, why scaling slowly has been their secret weapon, and how they plan to stand out in a global market increasingly crowded with cheap electric alternatives from China. Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio , Apple , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Queenstown has long been associated with jet boats, ski fields and postcard-perfect mountains. But if veteran entrepreneur and online travel heavyweight Roger Sharp has his way, the resort town’s next big export won’t be adrenaline, it will be software. Sharp, who has spent decades at the cutting edge of online travel with companies like Webjet, Lastminute.com.au and WebBeds, is on a mission to diversify Queenstown’s tourism‑heavy economy by turning it into the southern hemisphere’s go‑to hub for travel technology. His vehicle for doing that is Technology Queenstown, which has a 20‑year plan to grow a billion‑dollar tech economy in the region, lifting tech from 1.5% of local GDP to as high as 15–20%. Travel tech conference as a catalyst In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Sharp makes the case for why a town built on tourism must now become equally famous for tech. Next week’s Web in Travel (WiT) conference, which Sharp secured the rights to host, will see a who’s who of travel innovation descend on the lakeside town, including senior leaders from airlines, hotel tech, payment platforms, online travel agencies and B2B marketplaces. For Sharp, hosting them is about giving Queenstown critical mass and visibility as a testbed for new travel technologies. He tells me how he’s been building the scaffolding needed for a true cluster, convincing Queenstown Resort College to teach data and machine learning, coaxing the University of Otago to establish a digital tech campus, as well as recruiting a roster of long‑term corporate backers from Accenture to Genesis Energy and One NZ. Learning from tourism towns He’s borrowed lessons from North American mountain towns like Bend and Boulder, which successfully layered high‑value tech jobs on top of lifestyle economies. But this isn’t a Silicon Valley clone play. Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating “a two‑class society” where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London. Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The National Party is aiming to introduce legislation for its proposed social media ban for under‑16s before November’s election. The move, replicating a ban already in place across the Tasman, might look like a neat political fix – but it is far more likely to fail, backfire and leave our kids and critical infrastructure less safe. That’s the stark warning from veteran tech consultant and internet governance expert Daniel Spector, my guest on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech. Spector, a long‑time KiwiFoo stalwart and current Internet New Zealand board member standing for re‑election, argues that prohibition‑style policies are the wrong tool for the job. We don’t stop teenagers drinking by banning alcohol. We won’t stop them using TikTok and Instagram by declaring them off‑limits either. Wait for the VPN boom Instead, Spector says Australia’s under‑16s ban is already doing something unintended but entirely predictable – upskilling teenagers in VPNs, masking tools and hacking techniques, as they learn how to route around clumsy age‑verification systems and facial recognition. In his view, New Zealand is on track to copy a model that not only won’t protect children, but will produce a more technically adept generation of young hackers while entrenching a surveillance architecture dressed up as “child safety”. We examine the deeper question politicians are mostly dodging: why are we attacking the demand side – who can log on – rather than the supply side of harm, like infinite scrolling, rage‑bait design and hyper‑targeted advertising? Spector highlights recent US court moves that treat addictive features such as endless scroll as “defective by design”, putting liability squarely on Meta and Google, and argues this is the direction New Zealand should be watching - and even replicating. A golden age of hacking Spector also lays out why Anthropic’s Mythos and similar cutting‑edge models are likely to usher in a “golden age of attack hacking”, systematically hunting for vulnerabilities in decades‑old code. Criminal groups will get them eventually, and board directors – with the potential to soon face personal and even criminal liability for cyber breaches – are nowhere near ready. We talk zero‑knowledge proofs, digital identity, data sovereignty, and why outsourcing our safety to offshore tech giants and hurried bans is a dangerous illusion. You can hear the full discussion with Daniel Spector on The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes A Modest Proposal for the Orderly Dissolution of New Zealand. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn The verification layer did say 'yes'. Well... once . - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn #DigitalSovereignty: A personal professional crisis. And a national one, too. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn NCSC got nation-state grade AI. Now what? - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Australian startup Heidi Health has become one of the most visible examples of AI actually shifting the dial on healthcare productivity – and New Zealand is at the forefront of that story. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Heidi co‑founder Yu Liu about the company’s journey from student training tool to AI “care partner” for clinicians, and its audacious goal of doubling global healthcare capacity. Heidi didn’t start life in the emergency department. Yu and his co‑founders first built Oscar, a chatbot that helped medical students practise exam skills – essentially simulated patients for training bedside manner and clinical questioning. Oscar was useful, but the startup team struggled to find students willing to pay for it. In 2019, Liu and his co-founders, Dr Tom Kelly and Waleed Mussa, pivoted to tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare – the hours clinicians lose every day to documentation and administration. Widespread use in emergency departments That created Heidi Scribe, an ambient AI scribe that sits in on consultations, listening to the conversation and producing high‑quality clinical notes tuned to each hospital’s templates and workflows. Clinicians were quick to adopt it. Liu describes doctors using Heidi in every consult and calling the founders directly when it went down, because they no longer wanted to go back to typing everything themselves. In New Zealand, that enthusiasm has translated into national‑scale deployment. Health New Zealand is rolling Heidi out across all emergency departments, with clinicians in places like Hawke’s Bay cutting documentation time per patient from roughly 17 minutes to around four minutes. Heidi, which has now raised around US$100 million across several VC-backed fundraising rounds, blends frontier large language models with specialised, region‑local models trained on clinical language and medication names, hosted in‑region to satisfy data sovereignty requirements. That’s how it pushes accuracy toward the near‑99 per cent threshold clinicians need to trust AI‑generated notes, says Liu. Heidi wants to transform assistive AI into something closer to infrastructure. From scribe to evidence-gatherer Heidi doesn’t retain recordings of conversations, and while many doctors create transcriptions on their smartphones or laptops, the Heidi Remote is also available – a mobile recorder doctors and nurses can carry around clinics and hospitals for easy recording that doesn’t rely on an internet connection. The company is already moving beyond transcription. Heidi Evidence surfaces relevant clinical research and guidelines at the point of care, while Heidi is expanding into pre‑chart summaries, referrals and spoken commands that trigger real actions in electronic health record systems. The aim, says Liu, is to let doctors focus on diagnosis and human connection, and let AI handle everything else. In the episode, we dig into Heidi’s founding story, its rapid uptake in New Zealand’s public health system, and the governance and privacy questions that come with putting AI in the consult room. Tune in to the full conversation with Heidi Health co-founder Yu Liu on The Business of Tech, available wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Another New Zealander has joined the global AI big league. Auckland-raised engineer Jeff Hawke is now co‑founder and chief technology officer of Odyssey, a Palo Alto‑ and London‑based frontier lab that has just raised an eye‑watering US$310 million at a US$1.45 (NZ$2.55 billion) valuation – making it one of the world’s hottest AI “world model” startups. On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Hawke about how he went from tinkering with autonomous forklifts in New Zealand to helping shape the next era of artificial intelligence from Silicon Valley and Shoreditch. Odyssey isn’t building another large language model. The company is focused on “world models” – AI systems that learn from sight and sound to understand how the real world works and then simulate it. Instead of spitting out text, these models simulate the real world, allowing robots that learn like humans, and games that feel like living worlds. Amazon to power Odyssey’s models Global investors are piling in. Odyssey’s Series B is led by US fund Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD, GV, EQT, IQT and other heavy hitters on the cap table, plus a who’s who of Silicon Valley angels. Amazon Web Services has also signed on as Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, betting that its Trainium AI chips can give the lab an edge in what is rapidly becoming an arms race for compute. For Hawke, it’s the latest step in a deep‑tech odyssey. After studying mechatronics and computer science at the University of Auckland, he cut his teeth at a local autonomous forklift startup before heading offshore. Stints in the US and at the Oxford Robotics Institute led to him becoming the first technical hire at UK autonomous‑vehicle company Wayve, working alongside Kiwi founder Alex Kendall as they grew the company to a multibillion‑dollar valuation. In our conversation, Hawke explains why he thinks world models are the missing piece of the AI puzzle, how Odyssey plans to move from a “GPT‑2 era” of world simulation to its own ChatGPT‑style breakout moment, and what this means for robots, jobs and the balance of power between tech companies and governments. We also look at what his success says about New Zealand’s tech ecosystem – and why a new generation of Kiwi founders is quietly wiring itself into the very top tier of global AI. You can listen to the full interview with Jeff Hawke on The Business of Tech, available now on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
China is racing ahead in artificial intelligence and robotics – and New Zealand risks being left on the sidelines if it doesn’t pay close attention. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to two Kiwis who’ve just had a rare front‑row seat on China’s AI boom – Auckland-based ElementX co‑founder and chief technology officer Ming Cheuk, and Christchurch AI engineer and consultant Blake Harkness. They’ve returned from an AI discovery tour organised by the AI Forum and the New Zealand China Council that took them inside some of China’s most advanced AI labs, hyperscale cloud providers, hospitals, banks, councils and robotics manufacturers. What they describe is a country where AI has moved well beyond pilots and proofs of concept and is now deeply embedded in everyday life and industrial processes. The AI hospital In healthcare, they visited a single hospital serving around five million patients a year, where AI chatbots handle initial triage in multiple languages, imaging tools cut the time to analyse scans by 80%, and robots in the pharmacy automatically pick and dispense prescriptions. Everything is done with the scan of a QR code. For a country like New Zealand, grappling with an ageing population and over‑stretched health services, it’s a glimpse of what fully scaled AI-enabled care could look like. They also met with frontier large language model labs and firms building China’s own AI tech stack, often with a strong open-source ethos. Models that can be deployed on customers’ own infrastructure – even as part of sovereign AI arrangements – are central to China’s strategy, allowing overseas organisations to adopt Chinese AI without sending data back to Beijing. It’s a clever way to sidestep geopolitical mistrust while still extending technological influence. On the robotics front, Ming and Blake toured factories producing humanoid robots and agile robotic “dogs” that are already off‑the‑shelf tools for search and rescue, asset inspection and industrial maintenance. The sheer number of robotics companies, and the pace at which they’re iterating on hardware and control systems, underscore how serious China is about becoming a global robotics powerhouse. The tech divide Yet geopolitics is never far from the surface. Export controls, national security concerns and shifting alliances mean much of this technology may never be directly available to Western buyers. Even so, Ming and Blake see real opportunities for New Zealand in partnering around open-source models, sovereign AI builds and targeted robotics deployments in sectors like infrastructure, manufacturing and agriculture. If you want to understand where AI and robotics are really heading – and what that means for New Zealand’s economy, workforce and policy choices – this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Listen to The Business of Tech on your favourite podcast platform, or via iHeartRadio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Government’s plan to cut 8,700 public sector jobs and save $2.4 billion has been framed largely as a brutal cost‑cutting exercise. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Hamilton‑based technologist Brandon Hutcheson argues it could instead be the catalyst for a once‑in‑a‑generation redesign of how government works – if we get the AI strategy right. He admits, that's a big "if". Hutcheson, head of quantum at Netherlands-based IT services firm HSO and co‑founder of AI specialist Aware Group, has published a detailed catalogue of 160 ways artificial intelligence could transform the public sector. The ideas range from obvious efficiency wins – such as shared AI‑enabled contact centres and common cloud HR and payroll platforms – through to more ambitious proposals like synthetic populations for policy testing and real‑time legislation impact simulators. Rather than starting with “who can we cut?”, Hutcheson wants agencies to map their processes into four buckets: fully automatable, automatable with a transition plan, partially automatable with permanent human oversight, and human‑only functions. That discipline, he argues, is missing today, with agencies scrambling to bolt on AI tools in isolation, baking in the next wave of technical debt and eroding public trust. The next wave of computing He’s particularly critical of the way the cuts have been communicated – telling public servants their jobs are on the line while expecting them to lead the automation of their own roles. In his view, the smarter play is to frame AI as a way to improve citizen experience, reduce low‑value manual work, and spin out new export‑focused ventures built on New Zealand’s deep public‑sector expertise. The episode also looks ahead to the next wave of computing that will sit behind many of these changes. Hutcheson has just returned from Microsoft’s quantum labs in Redmond, where the company is racing to build fault‑tolerant quantum machines. He explains what he saw on the ground, why quantum should already be on the radar of boards and CIOs, and how it could combine with AI to reshape industries that rely on complex simulations – from materials and manufacturing to agriculture and finance. For business leaders, technologists and policy makers, this conversation is a roadmap to what’s possible – and a warning about the architectural decisions we make now. Listen to The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When it comes to scaling high‑growth tech companies, AJ Tills has been in the engine room. As one of Uber’s earliest hires in New Zealand, he helped the ride‑hailing giant push through regulatory resistance and turn the controversial startup into a default verb for getting around town, briefly serving as Uber’s US and Canada marketing chief of staff in New York. Later, as chief marketing officer at Jamie Beaton’s startup Crimson Education, he helped the Kiwi‑founded edtech unicorn build a virtual high school and launchpad for students seeking entrance to top universities. He then went on to lead international growth for the world’s largest online wedding marketplace, The Knot Worldwide, spanning over a dozen countries Now Tills is back in New Zealand and backing a very different kind of disruption – this time in the unsexy but critical world of data storage. On the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Tills tells me about his new role leading the customer push at Exaba. This Hamilton‑based startup wants to change how enterprises store and protect their data. Exaba has raised almost $12 million in seeding funding – one of the largest in New Zealand – to deepen its local footprint and expand into Australia and the US. Rising from the ashes of Nyriad The company was founded by Dr. Stuart Inglis and Peter Boyle, former executives of Nyriad, which developed ultrafast, GPU-accelerated data storage technology, but was wound down in 2024 after failing to gain sufficient market traction. Tech entrepreneur Guy Haddleton, who had backed Nyriad, bought some of the company’s assets and doubled down on his support for Inglis and Boyle to create a company with a slightly different proposition. Exaba aims to exploit the data centre boom and shifting sentiment towards the dominant hyperscale public cloud providers. For the past two decades, the default move has been to throw everything into the big public clouds, from AWS to Azure and Google Cloud. That brought convenience and scale, but it also introduced spiralling storage costs, punishing egress fees, and growing unease about data sovereignty and security. Exaba is building a cheaper, local alternative. Its software runs on standard, commodity hardware and turns managed service providers into “local scalers” who can offer their own on‑premise or locally hosted storage to customers. The company claims it can be up to ten times cheaper than the hyperscalers for storage, with predictable pricing instead of nasty surprises when you try to get your data back out. Tills, who joined Exaba six months ago and serves as its chief customer officer and US president, goes into why data residency and sovereignty are suddenly board‑level issues, and how Exaba is building post‑quantum‑secure storage for a world where attackers can “harvest now, decrypt later”. We also explore how Tills is applying Uber‑era playbooks to win over managed service providers in the US and future‑proof their business models in the age of AI. Listen to the discussion in its entirety on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Starlink has quickly become the hero – and potential hazard – of rural broadband in New Zealand. In a few short years, Elon Musk’s low-Earth orbit satellite service has gone from curiosity to default option for many farms, small towns and remote communities that never made it onto the fibre map. It’s racked up 58,000 subscribers and generated around $100 million in revenue last year, delivering broadband access via satellite with a self-install version that has amassed many raving fans. In a country where the “last 5–10%” of connections have always been the hardest and most expensive, Starlink looks like the magic bullet. But in the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Alex Stewart – the 21-year-old founder of Greater Wellington wireless ISP WombatNET – suggests we risk ceding sovereignty to one or two US companies when it comes to rural connectivity. Stewart’s company is one of dozens of small, regional wireless internet providers that have spent the past decade building towers, stitching together backhaul and hand-holding customers who were too far from the cabinet, tower or fibre trench to interest the big players. Now, those same operators are watching customers churn to Starlink at a rapid clip, undermining the economics of infrastructure that taxpayers helped fund. Too much of a good thing? Stewart argues this isn’t just a competitive problem. It’s also a resilience problem. In the interview, he explains how some rural communities now rely on Starlink for almost everything: home and business broadband, school connectivity and even the backhaul that keeps local mobile towers online in emergencies. If Starlink suffers a prolonged outage, changes its commercial terms or decides New Zealand is no longer strategic, large swathes of rural connectivity could be collateral damage. What’s most startling is what Stewart discovered when he went digging into the Government’s thinking. Through 28 Official Information Act requests to ministries and regulators, he found very little evidence of cohesive , forward-looking analysis of these risks, despite international warnings about monopoly, displacement and sovereign risk in satellite broadband markets. In our conversation, Stewart lays out how spectrum policy and lack of capital are boxing local wireless ISPs into a corner, why he believes current policy settings are accelerating a de facto monopoly, and what a more balanced model, including wholesale satellite access and better use of existing rural infrastructure and radio spectrum resources, might look like. Listen to the full interview with Alex Stewart on The Business of Tech on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the data centres of Silicon Valley or the cloud regions dotted around the world. It is heading into orbit, hitching a ride on satellites and space stations in a way that could transform defence, climate monitoring, disaster response – and the balance of power itself. Starcloud, Google's Project Suncatcher, SpaceX V3 Starlink satellites, and Axiom Space represent the first wave of the orbital AI race. When SpaceX undertakes its initial public offering (IPO), as early as next month, its valuation will depend to a large extent on how much credibility its plans to put data centres in space are deemed to be. In space, solar panels can supply constant energy to power the chips running high-capacity AI workloads. But that's only part of the reason why tech companies are scrambling to put data centres in space... This week on The Business of Tech, I talk to Wellington‑based enterprise architect and AI governance specialist Andreas Hamberger, whose new book Space Mafia explores how quickly “orbital AI” is moving from sci‑fi to infrastructure. Drawing on three decades in enterprise tech and a deep background in logic and ethics, Andreas argues that putting high‑capacity AI into space opens up an accountability gap that our laws – and our institutions – are nowhere near ready for. Heaven or Skynet? On the upside, orbital AI promises what Hamberger terms a “heaven vector” where satellites analyse live sensor data to spot tsunamis in the Pacific, track major polluters in real time, and give us a planetary‑scale view of climate risk. Done well, it could become an engine of equity, giving every country access to insights that used to belong only to superpowers. But there’s a darker “Skynet vector”. Space is, in practice, a legal grey zone. When companies start training models and running inference beyond the reach of terrestrial copyright, privacy and weapons laws, who are they accountable to? In Space Mafia , Andreas shows how orbit could become the ultimate jurisdictional escape hatch, a place to crunch stolen data, generate “kill lists”, or run ethically dubious experiments with almost no legal friction. In our conversation, we dig into four real‑world case studies, from data‑centre constellations through to human‑genome work and defence systems that blend orbital AI with hypersonic weapons. Andreas explains why small countries like New Zealand, one of a handful that has space launch capability thanks to Rocket Lab, are unexpectedly central to this story, how new regulations here and in Europe might bite, and what boards, architects and founders should be doing now to close the accountability gap before it’s too late. Listen to my full conversation with Andreas Hamberger in episode 150 of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes Space Mafia: The Battle Between an Accountable "Heaven" and an Unfettered "Skynet" in Orbital AI Space Mafia - the documentary - Andreas Hamberger SpaceX and Google Are in Talks to Launch Data Centres in Orbit - Wall Street Journal Data Centres in Space: A Pipe Dream, or AI’s Next Big Thing? - Wall Street Journal See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Opportunity Party is attracting growing support from young tech professionals, scientists, and startup founders, demanding bolder, more evidence‑based leadership. That’s according to Opportunity party leader Qiulae Wong, the businesswoman, climate leader and mother who will lead the party into the election in a bid to crest the 5% popular vote threshold needed to see the party in a position to support a coalition government. On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I sit down with Wong to discuss her party’s plan to lift New Zealand out of its low‑productivity rut by putting innovation at the centre of economic policy. You’ll hear how the Opportunity Party wants to double R&D investment from around 1.5% of GDP to 3% – finally putting us in the same league as other advanced economies – and pair that with much stronger support for commercialisation so ideas don’t just die in the lab. We also dig into how greater competition in highly concentrated sectors like supermarkets, banking and energy could free up capital and lower barriers for new, tech‑driven challengers. Gold standard AI rules A big focus of the episode is artificial intelligence and the weightless tech economy. Wong explains why New Zealand needs “gold standard” AI rules that are tight on outcomes but open for innovation, so founders can build globally competitive AI products here rather than in London or San Francisco. We talk skills, education, and the critical thinking needed to make sure AI boosts productivity instead of hollowing out jobs. We also unpack how the Opportunity Party plans to pay for its policy agenda. Its newly released tax policy includes a 1.75% land value tax, a universal citizens’ income and compulsory “KiwiSaver 2.0” savings. Qiulae argues this package is designed to shift money out of speculative property and into productive investment, while helping fund a serious uplift in R&D and a faster clean‑energy transition. Rounding out the episode, we explore a 25‑year energy strategy, ways to bring Kiwi tech talent home, and how citizens’ assemblies and digital voting could revitalise our democracy for a generation that lives online. Has Opportunity got a chance? Recent polls have the party hovering around 3% of the popular vote, shy of the level needed to get its candidates into Parliament. But these are unprecedented times, with younger voters in particular looking for bold leadership. The momentum may be on this minor party’s side. Listen to the full conversation with Qiulae Wong on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Market research has long been a privilege of the big end of town. Got $50,000 and six weeks to spare? Great, you can know what your customers think. Everyone else? Good luck. That model is being dismantled, and a New Zealand startup is doing some of the dismantling. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I sat down with James Donald, CEO of Auckland-based Ideally, fresh from closing a $16 million Series A that values the company at $100 million. Ideally is one of three AI-centric New Zealand startups to hit that psychological valuation milestone in the past month – a sign that our fledgling AI start-up ecosystem is gaining momentum. James is a former Shell engineer turned serial founder whose previous company, Yonder, was acquired by a US travel tech firm. Now he's turned his sights on a $40 billion slice of the global market research industry – one where 90% of spend still flows to people-heavy agencies like Kantar and Nielsen. His pitch: AI can do what took those agencies weeks to do, in hours, at a fraction of the cost, and with results in the hands of the people inside a company who actually know what questions to ask. The pros and cons of synthetic data In our chat, we get into the heart of what Ideally is doing differently. One of the most interesting debates in AI right now is the rise of synthetic data – building artificial personas to simulate how real people would respond. James makes a pointed argument: when the stakes are high, and you need genuine nuance, synthetic just isn't good enough. We also dig into what James calls "living data" – the idea that consumer insight shouldn't die in a PDF buried in SharePoint, but should be a continuously growing, queryable understanding of your customer base. And we talk about the SaaSpocalypse – that February moment when hundreds of billions were wiped off the value of software companies worldwide. Ideally sits squarely in that story: an AI-native challenger gunning for the market share of legacy research platforms and expensive agencies alike, with a usage-based pricing model designed to turn in-house marketers into researchers, rather than leave it to outside consultants. This is a great example of how AI is being used to shake up long-established industries. The Business of Tech is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
New Zealand is quietly dismantling the productive base that built its prosperity – and we’re doing it without anything resembling a plan. Over the past decade, the country has shed around 20,000 manufacturing jobs while the sector’s share of GDP has steadily eroded. Factories producing everything from pulp and paper to frozen foods and wood products have scaled back or shut down entirely, including household names such as Wattie’s and McCain. For regional centres like Westport and Kaitāia, each closure is an economic shock that ripples through the whole community. The blow would be blunted somewhat if we had a plan B to revive manufacturing and offer employment prospects in the regions. But we don’t. Some economists and industry leaders now openly talk about the “deindustrialisation” of New Zealand. Manufacturing is responsible for roughly 60% of our exports and employs close to one in ten workers, yet it has slipped down the priority list in Wellington. Other countries – Australia, Singapore, the UK and the US among them – have modern industrial strategies and long-term Industry 4.0 programmes. New Zealand, by contrast, shelved its industry transformation plans and has yet to articulate what kind of manufacturing base it wants to have in 10 or 20 years. Energy costs sit at the heart of the problem. For many manufacturers, electricity and gas now rank among their top 2 - 3 operating costs. The rapid push to electrify process heat, combined with volatile spot prices and an uncertain gas transition, has left some plants badly exposed. At the same time, manufacturers face chronic skills shortages, conservative lenders demanding personal guarantees for capital upgrades, and resource consent processes that add cost and delay to even straightforward investments. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I’m joined by Christchurch-based manufacturing expert Sean Doherty to delve into what’s gone wrong – and what can still be salvaged. Beyond plug-in AI fixes After a 30‑year career that includes a long stint at Rockwell Automation and leading the advanced manufacturing programme at Callaghan Innovation, Doherty has had a front‑row seat to thousands of technology and productivity projects. He’s blunt about the structural issues and the policy vacuum, but he also insists manufacturers are not powerless. Rather than chasing silver bullets or “plug‑in AI” fixes, Doherty argues for a disciplined focus on small, practical productivity and efficiency initiatives: getting real‑time data off the factory floor, tightening basic management practices, and investing in people alongside machines. In a tough, high-cost environment, those incremental gains can spell the difference between slow decline and a credible growth story you can take to the bank – and, collectively, between a country that drifts into deindustrialisation and one that chooses to rebuild its industrial backbone. Listen to the entire episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes Factories in retreat: inside NZ’s deindustrialisation crisis - The Post Sean Doherty on LinkedIn Aotearoa’s Industry 4.0 Journey - Callaghan Innovation report See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Artificial intelligence isn’t coming to the New Zealand public sector – it’s already here. AI is shaping everything from your tax bill to how quickly police process crime reports. And right now, it’s happening in a way that’s fast, fragmented and largely hidden from public view. On the latest episode of The Business of Tech , I talk to BusinessDesk journalist Cécile Meier about her multi‑part investigation into the use of AI across government – an investigation built on a trove of Official Information Act responses from major agencies. What she found is both encouraging and unsettling. Real efficiency gains and cost savings There are genuine wins. Police have slashed processing times for lower‑severity crime cases from eight to ten minutes per file to as little as one to three minutes using an AI‑powered workflow tool – a saving estimated at 18,000 hours and around $1 million a year. Inland Revenue is using AI in its debt collection models, helping secure tens of millions of dollars in payment arrangements in just weeks. ACC and others report large productivity gains from Microsoft’s Copilot baked into everyday tools. But scratch the surface, as Meier has, and the story gets a lot more complicated. There is a public‑service‑wide AI framework governing how these tools should be deployed, but it is not binding. Agencies have guidlines for adoption but are largely left to design their own pilots, measure their own “time saved”, and often rely on the very vendors selling them AI to prove the return on investment. Quality, error rates and real‑world impacts on citizens barely get a look‑in. The AI deployment divide Her reporting also exposes a stark divide. Some agencies – IRD, ACC, Police and DOC – are forging ahead, training thousands of staff and embedding AI deep into decision‑support systems. Others, like Oranga Tamariki and Corrections, are so wary of the risks that they’ve blocked external AI tools and confined usage to tightly constrained, low‑stakes tasks. All of this is happening under the same loose, non‑binding guidance. AI tools are stumbling over te reo Māori and Māori legal concepts, raising obvious concerns about bias and fairness. There's growing reliance on a handful of US tech giants to supply and measure government AI, and a rising wave of “shadow AI”, as public servants quietly use banned tools on personal devices because they’re simply too useful to ignore. Listen to The Business of Tech for the full interview, and hear how AI is quietly rewiring the state, often without the scrutiny it deserves. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes 'Slippery slope': Concerns millions spent on AI may not be delivering for public - BusinessDesk Light rules, high stakes: Agencies push AI into frontline work - BusinessDesk Government AI spending hits $20.2m with real cost likely far higher - BusinessDesk See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Big organisations love to talk about innovation. They set up labs, hire “transformation” teams, and run hackathons. Yet inside many companies, the best ideas still die in PowerPoint decks or get buried in cautious business cases. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Gravity cofounder James Boult, an innovation specialist who has spent years inside large New Zealand organisations, watching this play out in real time. Boult’s verdict is that most corporates are structurally set up to smother genuinely new ideas, even when the will – and the talent – is there. Boult’s core advice is to treat every significant new idea as if it were a venture‑backed startup inside your organisation. That means giving it a dedicated budget, a finite runway, clear deliverables, and hard stage gates where the project must “earn” the right to continue. No more quietly funding side projects from the core P&L. No more open‑ended experiments that drift for years without real customers. The gatekeepers and the fear factor Instead, project owners should be forced to pitch for the next tranche of funding just like founders fronting up to investors. That shift, says Boult, changes behaviour overnight. Teams become sharper on the problem they’re solving and far less likely to hide behind internal politics or legacy metrics. The episode also digs into the human side of corporate innovation – the “gatekeepers” who can make or break new ideas. These people aren’t cartoon villains. They’re often acting out of fear about budgets, risk, or their own roles. Boult explains how to identify them early, understand their motivations, and design an innovation process that works with – rather than around – those emotional realities. For frustrated “intrapreneurs” who feel like they’re “going mad” inside a big company, Boult offers a practical playbook for testing startup thinking without immediately quitting the day job. And for senior leaders, he lays out why outsourcing innovation, spinning up venture arms, or re‑branding old projects as “agile” won’t work unless the underlying incentives and governance change. If you work in a large organisation that talks a big game on innovation but struggles to ship anything truly new, this episode is required listening. Listen to The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Forget soy, pea, or lab-grown meat – the next frontier in sustainable food might just be hiding in plain sight. Specifically, in the leaves of everyday plants growing across New Zealand’s farmland. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Ross Milne, the CEO of Rolleston-based startup Leaft Foods, which has pioneered a breakthrough technique to extract and process Rubisco, a naturally occurring protein found in every green leaf. Scientists have long known Rubisco’s potential, calling it the “utopia protein” for its rich nutritional profile and low environmental footprint. What’s been missing until now is a practical way to isolate it for use in food and animal feed. From milk to leafy greens Milne, a former process engineer who worked for some of the world’s largest food companies, saw an opening for innovation back home in New Zealand, teaming up with Leaft Food founders John Penno (Synlait Milk co-founder) and Maury Leyland Penno. Leaft’s approach promises not just a powerful alternative to traditional protein sources, but a clever circular system where farmers can use the high-protein byproducts as feed supplements, boosting productivity while cutting emissions. The engineering ingenuity allowing Leaft to extract sufficient quantities of Rubisco is what caught the eye of global investors in 2020, when Leaft raised US$15 million in a Series A round. Among Leaft’s backers is Khosla Ventures, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for betting early on world-changing green technologies. Low-impact protein Working mainly with alfalfa crops in the Canterbury region, Leaft harvests and processes the leaves, extracting the protein which is sold to food suppliers and which features in Leaft Blade, the company’s line of nutritional products. The leftover leaves are used by farmers for supplementary feed. “The interesting thing about [Alfalfa] from a grower point of view is it regrows straight away,” Milne told me. “So about six weeks later, for example, we're back in that same paddock harvesting it again. And we just constantly do that. It's a perennial which stays in the ground for multiple years.” As the world races to find scalable, low-impact protein sources, Leaft’s innovation could place Canterbury at the center of the solution. For Milne, it’s a mission to transform the food system from scratch. Listen to the entire conversation on The Business of Tech podcast to find out how this Kiwi startup is redefining what we eat, how we grow it, and why the leaves in your backyard might hold the key to feeding the future. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes Developing a new plant-based protein - Science Learning Hub An IPO could be on the cards for Leaft Foods one day - BusinessDesk NZ green protein producer sprouts new deal with Asian food giant - RNZ Leaft protein boosted from ground up - Farmers Weekly See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
New Zealand drivers are about to discover a whole new way of paying to use the roads – and for most, it will be a shock. For decades, petrol and diesel motorists have funded the transport network through fuel excise quietly folded into every litre at the pump - currently a 70c tax. Soon, that largely invisible tax will give way to something much more visible – paying per kilometre under an expanded road user charge (RUC) system. On the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Dunedin-based entrepreneur Adam Johnston about what may be the biggest shake-up to transport funding in 50 years. Light vehicle owners who have never had to think about RUC before will be pulled into a regime that currently applies to heavy vehicles, diesel cars and electric vehicles. Petrol vehicles currently make up around 55% of the national fleet. Instead of passively paying when you fill up, you’ll be actively buying distance in advance, tracking your odometer, and keeping on the good side of Waka Kotahi. A new marketplace for RUC payments That sounds like a recipe for confusion and admin overload, especially in a cost-of-living crisis where drivers are already stressed about the price of petrol and diesel. But this shift is also opening the door to a wave of innovation. As the government hands more of the RUC system over to private providers, a new marketplace will emerge around how you pay to drive. It will likely be in the form of apps that let you buy and manage your RUC from your phone, real-time dashboards that show how much you’ve used, and even telematics devices that automate the whole process by reporting your mileage in the background. Payment platforms will sit in the middle, clipping the ticket on every transaction. Start-ups and incumbents alike will compete to become your go-to RUC retailer, bundling services and perks to win your attention and loyalty. Johnston and his co-founder, Briyarne Pascoe, both former Delivery Easy workers, are among the entrepreneurs racing to shape this new ecosystem. Building on their RUC Hub project, a free-to-access platform that tells you everything you need to know about road user charges, they saw an opportunity to make a complex system more transparent and user-friendly, while preventing the market from devolving into a cosy oligopoly. The pair plan to become a retail player in the emerging RUC ecosystem. In the episode, Johnston explains the trade-offs between better digital experiences and the extra transaction costs that could quietly inflate what you pay overall. This episode unpacks what’s coming, how your relationship with your car and your wallet is about to change, and the tools that could make surviving the new RUC era a little less painful. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week on The Business of Tech, I talk to Inspired Education founder Nadim Nsouli to explore a bold experiment in AI‑driven schooling that will reach Auckland primary students from 2027. Inspired Education operates seven ACG private primary schools in New Zealand, including five in Auckland, focusing on personalised learning. A new learning programme, Inspired Edge Academy, compresses the traditional core curriculum – English, maths, science, computing and languages – into three highly structured, interactive hours each morning. Afternoons are turned into a lab for real‑world skills: financial literacy, entrepreneurship, public speaking and problem‑solving. Underpinning it all is an adaptive AI learning system that changes questions and pathways in real time, depending on where each child is struggling or racing ahead, making progression based on mastery rather than age. AI can personalise learning Nsouli told me that Inspired has already invested tens of millions of dollars in technology across its 125 schools, using platforms like Century Tech to personalise homework and classwork for 95,000 students. In some subjects, students using these adaptive tools have lifted assessment scores by the equivalent of a GCSE grade boundary in just six weeks. Nsouli walks through what this looks like for an eight‑year‑old: short 20–25 minute learning blocks, small clusters of students regrouped by mastery for each subject, a teacher‑to‑student ratio of about 1:8, and AI dashboards that show educators exactly where to intervene. The philosophy behind the empire Nsouli also tells Inspired's origin story. He left a successful private equity career after a personal tragedy, the death of his daughter Lyla, who died in 2012 at age 3 from a rare, aggressive brain cancer. It was a turning point in Nsouli’s life, inspiring him to build a global group of premium schools that now employ 15,000 staff and educate 95,000 students on six continents. He sees the use of AI as “digitally native but human‑centred”. Smartphones are banned in all Inspired schools globally, teachers remain central, and technology is used where it can clearly outperform paper – in adaptive practice, feedback and assessment. What it means for New Zealand From 2027, the Edge model will appear in Auckland’s Inspired schools, after an early access launch in London, with the potential to spread faster where parent demand is strongest. We also discuss whether AI‑powered mastery learning will widen the gap between private and state schools or eventually filter through to the public system as costs fall and evidence grows. Listen to the conversation with Nadim Nsouli, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
