The Business of Tech

Australasian venture-capital heavyweight Blackbird has closed a record $1.25 billion sixth fund – and its New Zealand general partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows says Kiwi companies are central to its investment strategy. The fund, described by Blackbird as the largest venture-capital raise in ANZ history, underscores the firm’s rise from a small Australian startup investor into one of the region’s most consequential backers of technology companies. Having backed the likes of Canva, Halter, Marloo, and Partly, Blackbird has structured the new fund into two roughly equal pools: about $600 million for investments from pre-seed to Series A, and a similar amount to support companies later in their growth.  That allows it to write the first cheque when a company is little more than a proposition, then retain firepower to keep investing as the business scales. The Goldilocks fund In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Harrop Meadows explains why the unusually large fund is not simply a bigger pile of money chasing startups. “It’s a sort of Goldilocks size,” she says, large enough to invest across a company’s life, but still built around identifying exceptional founders at the very beginning. That is a marked contrast with the conventional division between early-stage venture funds and later-stage growth investors. The model is finding fertile ground in New Zealand. More than half of Blackbird’s new early-stage investments over the past year have been in Kiwi-founded companies, although Harrop Meadows stresses that measure is by number of companies rather than dollars invested.  Harrop Meadows, who grew up in New Plymouth, studied law at the University of Otago, before heading to London to work at Bain & Company, then in growth-equity investing ahead of joining Blackbird in 2021, says New Zealand is like a “Galápagos island of ideas”, where founders often start companies not because startup status is fashionable, but because they have encountered a problem they feel compelled to solve.  Listen to the full conversation with Phoebe Harrop Meadows on The Business of Tech, available on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is about to turn 80 – and is still plainly more interested in the next deal, the next big export market and the next practical problem to fix than in winding down. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, Brown delivers a typically uncensored account of how he thinks Auckland should use technology to drive economic growth. He has little patience for glossy AI rhetoric, power-hungry data centres, or Wellington bureaucrats telling him what to do.  “The government doesn’t know how to grow the economy, so I might as well do it,” Brown told me fresh from a morning visiting startups as part of the Council’s 100 Days of Startups programme, which sees him shine a light on one of the city’s startups each day in the run-up to Startup Week in October. Brown says the city’s business people told him Auckland was lacking leadership on tech, despite it being home to around 60% of the country’s startups. He established the Auckland Innovation and Technology Alliance a year ago as a public-private partnership to foster collaboration across Auckland’s tech ecosystem. Better, cheaper, faster Brown draws on his engineering background and the lessons he collated in his 2007 book The Five Minute MBA to set a simple test for government, council and entrepreneurs alike. What is the problem you are fixing – and can it be solved better, cheaper and faster? Auckland, he says, needs more firms able to turn local capability into global businesses, particularly in areas that play to New Zealand’s strengths: medtech, agri-tech, and biotech. And he wants them to look beyond familiar markets in the US, UK and Australia. Brown argues the bigger opportunities lie in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Latin America – markets where Auckland’s diaspora communities, city-to-city relationships and sector expertise could give companies an edge. His assessment of the political scene as the general election approaches is brutal. Brown describes the party-political offering as an “unappetising smorgasbord”, rails against bureaucracy and corporate welfare, and questions New Zealand’s reflexive alignment with America on trade and technology. He’s particularly sceptical of the current data centre boom that Auckland is playing host to. “If they want to come here, what will you do for us to have your f**king boxes here? It’s not the other way around.” He has even less time for artificial intelligence. Expect strong language, challenging claims and plenty of eyebrow-raising takes. This is no polished mayoral interview. It is Wayne Brown, in full: opinionated, impatient and with his own firm ideas on how to make Auckland the tech centre of the South Pacific. Listen to the full episode streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

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.