NZ Growth Capital Partners

Nexus is back for 2024! The Nexus Summit supports early and mid-career commercialisation professionals across Aotearoa, New Zealand. Whether you are new to commercialisation, a seasoned veteran, or somewhere in-between, join us for a day of speakers, panel discussions, and workshops focused on innovative commercialisation models. A huge thank you to our Nexus Summit sponsors in 2024: KiwiNet KCA - Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia Ltd NZ Growth Capital Partners Also, a big shout out to this year's amazing organising committee for their work behind the scenes to pull this together: Deanna Barwick (Otago Innovation Limited), Kyla Lee , Ella Moffat (Massey Ventures), Mick Riley & Charlotte Vandermeer (The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited), Emily Mason (Wellington UniVentures), and Stephen Lo (UniServices).

🎉 Exciting News! 🎉 We are thrilled to announce that InfinityStudio.AI has successfully raised growth capital from consortia of investors including NZGCP’s Aspire Fund! This investment marks a significant milestone in our journey to enhance our offerings and better serve our ever-growing customer base. This new infusion of capital will enable us to accelerate the development of additional features that our clients have been eagerly anticipating, ensuring that we continue to provide the highest value via Aperion Engineering Studio. We are incredibly grateful to our dedicated team whose relentless hard work and innovation have made this achievement possible. Their commitment to excellence drives our success every day. A special thank you to Emil Schroder Sam Butler from Aspire for believing in our vision and supporting us. “It is a privilege to be supporting Rekha and Sjoerd in bringing Infinity Studio to the engineering industry. We view them and their team’s combination of technical expertise and detailed sector knowledge as key reasons why we’ve invested. Geotechnical engineering is fundamental to the large industrial sectors of public infrastructure and construction, and we believe Infinity Studio are looking set to significantly change the status quo of how this crucial work gets done” Looking ahead, we are more excited than ever to reach new milestones and continue our mission of delivering unparalleled value to our customers. The future is bright, and we can't wait to share this journey with all of you! Sjoerd van Ballegooy James Lyth Siobhan Peacock Scott Maunder Walter Lim Jerry Lei Josh Hunt Brydon Burnett Ryan Moody Mark Lister Gavin Baird Graham Foote Annabelle Xu Steven Marsh Felix Hernandez Vieyra Sam Simmons Adrian White Kay Lee Barend Bootha Alex L. Michael Harrod #Startup #Investment #Growth #Innovation #Teamwork #GeotechnicalSoftware #Automation #InfinityStudio

Most start-ups fail The last of my learnings (for this week at least) from my recent trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, brilliantly organised by NZTE and Invest New Zealand hosting #TeWakaHourua2.0 and activating the Active Investor Plus (AIP) Programme in San Francisco. In my opinion, this is probably the area of the biggest cultural difference between start-ups/VC in the US vs. NZ and one that we really need to address. We all logically know that the vast majority of start-ups will fail and we hope that we have backed one of the few very big winners that will more than make up for those losses and have the biggest impact on the world. Yet still we seem to be surprised when companies we believed in fail. We know the logic and the stats, we live that every day. So let's stop beating ourselves (or the founder) up about it. Let's look to learn from the mistakes and pick ourselves / the founders up and go again. When we invest, we are backing the founder(s) to succeed and we genuinely believe they have something special about them. We all know founders try their best but it is an incredibly long and hard journey and factors both within and outside their control can determine the ultimate success or not. So, if a start-up fails, let's not all jump on them and complain, let's adopt the US mentality and support them in their next endeavour. Obviously, this is qualified by our learnings and you shouldn't throw good money after bad. But generally, just because their company failed, if we still believe in them and their abilities, we mustn't write the founders off just because their last endeavour failed. In fact, there is so much evidence that serial founders outperform first time ones that we should look to support them in finding a better company / market / timing fit and back them again. Start-up success is a rare and wonderful thing but sometimes a great founder needs a couple of attempts to find the right fit / timing as well as a good amount of luck – let’s be honest about that and embrace it. Onwards… NZ Growth Capital Partners Dylan Lawrence, Georgia Mills, CA, NZTE, Prue Halstead, Bridget Unsworth Angel Association New Zealand, Jack McQuire Icehouse Ventures, Mitali Purohit Nuance Connected Capital, Nadine Hill, Hugo Fisher, Kate de Ridder Bridgewest Ventures NZ, Mark Vivian Movac, Angus Blair Outset Ventures, John Kells GD1 (Global From Day One), Carl Jones WNT Ventures, Guy Royal, Kieran Jina Pacific Channel, Renata Hakiwai HTK Group

Don't be a tourist but always ask for directions (or help with your start-up or VC fund) These are today's takeaways from my recent trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, brilliantly organised by NZTE and Invest New Zealand hosting #TeWakaHourua2.0 and activating the Active Investor Plus (AIP) Programme in San Francisco. One of the most common themes that we came across (and something I am really appreciating after my trip) is “don’t be a tourist”. If you want to enter or raise money in the US, go there! Spend time on the ground to build connections and deep relationships and soak up the confidence of others (see yesterday's post). Yes, we can still build companies in NZ and maintain research teams here. But, when you’re ready to scale you really need to be in your target market. Yes it’s more expensive but the depth of talent and the ability to build deep connections more than compensates for that. We (investors and start-ups) also need to “hustle” more, we need to be better at it and work with more intensity when it comes to building relationships and don't be afraid of asking for help (often). Americans aren’t embarrassed by asking for help. The reality is everyone we spoke with was genuinely keen to help but often finds that Kiwis follow-up initially and then go quiet. The US counterparts will keep asking questions, asking for help, leveraging these relationships and networks. This was highlighted by Start Up Genome last year – Kiwis are good at building networks but not good enough at asking for help. We can change that. I know that we find this hard (I certainly do) but we have to get used to being “uncomfortably excited” about what we do – part of that is putting ourselves out there and asking for help. It’s amazing once you do it, how receptive people are. Finally (for today at least), think about your personal and company branding i.e. how we are representing ourselves to potential investors and customers. Do the homework on who you want to meet, attend conferences they're speaking at, and build relationships well before you're asking for that Terms Sheet! For more insights, check out Invest New Zealand's page, and those of the various other investors that had the privilege of attending; NZ Growth Capital Partners, Dylan Lawrence; Georgia Mills, CA, Prue Halstead, Bridget Unsworth Angel Association New Zealand, Jack McQuire Icehouse Ventures, Mitali Purohit, Nuance Connected Capital Nadine Hill, Kate de Ridder, Mark Vivian, Movac, Angus Blair, Outset Ventures, Guy Royal, John Kells, GD1 (Global From Day One), Carl Jones WNT Ventures, Kieran Jina Pacific Channel, Hugo Fisher, Lachlan Nixon Motion Capital, Renata Hakiwai HTK Group

Confidence and humility can co-exist This was one of the many key takeaways from on my recent jam packed immersion trip to the San Francisco tech and venture space which was amazingly well organised by InvestNZ and NZTE. I was representing NZGCP’s Aspire seed fund and Elevate venture fund alongside a number of NZ VC firms as we met with founders, VCs and tech giants in the home of Venture Capital. I also managed to add on a few meetings with fund of funds investors too and attended an AI conference (one of the 100 occurring each month in SF). On AI, it is incredible to meet so many founders working in this space and see how the US is dealing (or not) with the hype and lightning speed changes as Gen AI is moving faster than any other technology advancement we have ever seen before. There are so many takeaways from the trip that I’m still processing it all, even my summarised notes of all the sessions run to pages. For me, this was as much a personal journey as a learning one – there were so many inspiring people that we met and the number and scale of the success stories was eye opening. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that despite working in the tech sector for a long time in the from the UK to Israel to NZ, this was my first trip to San Fran and Silicon Valley that wasn’t as a tourist (more on this later). I am so grateful to have met successful kiwi founders who are making their mark on the global stage, with multi billion dollar raises and exits between them including Nuro.ai, Allbirds, Substack, PredictHQ (amongst others) and even the brains behind Facebook Marketplace. We met household (at least in the US) names from the VC industry including Bessemer, Khosla, Google Ventures, Altos, DBL (Double Bottom Line), DCVC, Lower Carbon Capital and many others. One of my biggest takeaways and I know this might be contentious, is that despite all the billions of dollars these funds are investing, the huge amounts of money the start-ups are raising and the enormous success they have delivered, there was no arrogance. Us Kiwis are known for our humility but I saw that in spades too from the Americans we met during my trip. What we’re actually missing is confidence, this is the trait that sets us most apart from our US counterparts. Being confident about what your vision is and you and your teams’ ability to deliver on that and change the world is something we have to embrace. And it is the early-stage investors like us that have to help instill that into our founders. We and founders need to study up on what best in class founders sound like and talk more about what we are going to achieve than just what we have accomplished so far. This doesn’t mean we have to lose the humility that Kiwis are famous for, in fact this is one of the key values that overseas markets see as one of our competitive advantages. Yes, confidence and humility can co-exist! More lessons learned tomorrow

Ratu Mataira spoke with Francesca Rudkin Newstalk ZB about our work here at OpenStar. OpenStar Technologies is working on the Levitated Dipole concept, the less common approach for building a fusion reactor. This design takes inspiration from Earth's magnetosphere, ensuring safe, stable plasma confinement. Ratu breaks down the fundamental nature of the technology, what inspired his journey, and how OpenStars unique approach is bringing us closer to transforming a dream of the future, into present day achievements. #fusion #cleanenergy #levitateddipole #newstalkzb #plasma #physics

Meet Captivate Technology, on a mission to fight the global climate crisis! 🌍🔥 They aim to revolutionize carbon capture with their MUF-16 technology, which captures and separates carbon dioxide from industrial processes and power plant emissions. Once separated, the carbon dioxide can be utilized beneficially or stored permanently. Their goal? To reduce carbon footprints and slow down global warming. 🌱 Manager of Business Development Nigel Campbell shares their story. Stay tuned as we bring you more coverage on our other finalists! #PepsiCo #GreenhouseAccelerator #PepsiCoGHAC2024 #sustainability #startups

🚀 Exciting News! 🌟 We're thrilled to announce that Even Capital and NZ Growth Capital Partners, are backing PAM - Personal Admin Manager, an innovative personal admin manager app developed by Wellington-based entrepreneur Nicole Retter. PAM was selected from the twenty women-led startups that recently completed the Electrify Accelerator programme delivered by the Ministry of Awesome. Electrify is uniquely tailored for women startup founders and is supported by leading investors, the government, and startup enablers across the country. PAM aims to lighten the mental load of family admin by acting as your family’s personal assistant, leveraging AI to streamline daily tasks. With support from Even Capital and NZGCP, PAM is set to revolutionise how families manage their busy lives. Check out the full story at https://buff.ly/3xx5vQM and learn more about PAM at www.mypam.nz. Together, we're empowering women-led innovation in New Zealand's startup ecosystem! Thank you to our partners for their unwavering support of New Zealand women founders - Callaghan Innovation, NZ Growth Capital Partners, WellingtonNZ, Kiwibank, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, LegalVision, Even Capital, GD1 (Global From Day One), Blackbird, Movac, Punakaiki Fund, Dot Kiwi Ltd, DWS, LUMO Digital Outdoor, Caffeine Daily NW Group and SwayTech