The Business of Tech

The tech giants have become the infrastructure of modern life. They mediate how we shop, communicate, advertise, store data and increasingly use artificial intelligence. Yet the tools governments use to contain their power were designed for an earlier economic age. Professor Susan Watson believes we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place. An internationally respected corporate law and governance scholar, Watson is Dean of the University of Auckland Business School and Acting Dean of its Faculty of Law. Her new research asks whether the legal structure of the modern corporation itself has helped Big Tech become so dominant. Her starting point is the English East India Company, which was founded around 1600 and acquired permanent capital in 1657, growing from a trading venture into a private corporation powerful enough to rule territory and collect taxes. Watson sees an important parallel with today’s platform companies. Both created and controlled new forms of infrastructure while operating with privileges supplied by the state. A new form of capital Conventional competition law is largely concerned with markets, prices and consumer welfare. But many Big Tech services are free at the point of use. The real transaction involves data, which platforms can turn into a productive asset, using our behaviour to generate predictions, advertising revenue and further market power. Watson argues that data is not simply “the new oil”; it is a new form of capital. She introduces two useful concepts. “Recursive capital” describes corporations’ ability to own other corporations through potentially endless chains of subsidiaries. “Capital-constituting corporations” can identify something previously outside the market – behavioural data or even low Earth orbit – turn it into capital and lay claim to its future value. Reinventing how companies operate Her proposed response is more scalpel than sledgehammer. Platform owners could be prevented from competing against businesses that depend on their marketplaces. Governments could also reconsider when large corporate groups should be allowed to own subsidiaries operating within those markets. Users might even gain representation in platform governance, reflecting their status as something closer to digital citizens than conventional customers. The question becomes more urgent in the AI era. The companies developing frontier models also control much of the cloud infrastructure, computing capacity, data and distribution needed to bring them to market. With every incentive pushing them to move faster, Watson says the central concern is not AI itself, but who owns and controls it. In this episode of The Business of Tech, we explore how these extraordinarily powerful corporate machines were created – and why, having made them, we still have the power to remake them. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealand-founded robotics company Syos Aerospace is building autonomous aircraft, drone boats, ground vehicles and underwater robots from its Mt. Maunganui base In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Syos founder Sam Vye tells me how a conservation-drone project in the Galápagos helped inspire the creation of Syos, now one of the country’s most ambitious dual-use tech companies. Vye arrived in New Zealand in 2018 and worked in Yamaha’s unmanned-helicopter division before seeing an opportunity to apply drones to rural, agricultural and conservation work. His early venture, Envico Technologies, started with Cameron Baker, took on a project using drones to distribute pest bait in the Galápagos Islands. We need a bigger drone The pair realised that small electric drones could carry modest loads, while conventional helicopters remained expensive, complex and risky to operate. Their answer was to develop large uncrewed helicopters that could take pilots out of hazardous or costly missions. Syos was founded in 2021 and initially targeted civilian uses including agricultural operations, cargo and surveying. Its founding principle, Vye says, is “minimum viable capability” – build systems that solve real-world problems quickly and at the lowest possible cost, rather than loading them with unnecessary features. Going underwater The company’s trajectory changed sharply as the global market for uncrewed systems accelerated, particularly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Syos expanded from aircraft into multi-domain autonomy, developing vehicles across air, land and sea, backed by a common command-and-control approach. It later acquired Tauranga underwater-robotics company Bay Dynamics, adding subsea capabilities for applications ranging from infrastructure inspection to surveillance and offshore operations. Syos now has a substantial defence business. In February, the New Zealand Defence Force announced it would trial SYOS uncrewed systems across air, land and sea as part of a programme to develop its autonomous-vehicle capability. The platforms include uncrewed surface vessels, aircraft systems and a ground vehicle, along with training and technical support. In the UK, Syos has also advanced in Project NYX, a Ministry of Defence programme exploring drones that could fly alongside British Army Apache attack helicopters. The ethics of dual-use That military work raises important questions about the ethics of autonomous systems and the kind of defence exports New Zealand should support. Vye acknowledges that drones are “a scary thing” in a world of bad actors, but says the company works with allied customers and follows its own moral compass. We also explore whether New Zealand can build a credible defence-tech sector without compromising its values, and why drones, robotics and AI-enabled autonomy may become an increasingly important part of the country’s technology-export future. Plus, I recap the tech founders who won categories in the BusinessDesk CEO Index Awards, including supreme winner Sir Peter Beck, talking about the two most important roles a CEO has to play. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

What if space was not simply a place to launch satellites – but a factory floor for making things that cannot be produced on Earth? That is the bet being made by Auckland startup Outlier Space, which has raised around US$7.35 million (NZ$12.3 million) in pre-seed funding to build reusable spacecraft that carry customer payloads into microgravity, operate them in orbit, then return them safely to Earth. Its first mission is booked for 2028. The premise is straightforward, if technically formidable. In orbit, a spacecraft is in continuous freefall, creating a microgravity environment in which the familiar force of gravity no longer dominates. Molecules, crystals, cells and materials can therefore behave in ways that are not possible in an Earth-bound laboratory. That holds incredible appeal to pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms and advanced-materials manufacturers. Microgravity can allow purer crystals to form, produce novel structures and open paths to materials and medicines that simply cannot be created – or cannot be created as effectively – on the ground. Bringing the results home In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Outlier founder and chief executive Jamie France describes the company as an “anti-gravity chamber” for customers. They provide the proprietary manufacturing equipment and process. Outlier supplies the capsule-cum-satellite that allows access to the extraordinary environment of orbit, then brings the results home. The opportunity is becoming more urgent as the International Space Station – the world’s most important microgravity research laboratory – approaches retirement. Commercial replacements are on the way, but France believes there is a major role for autonomous, uncrewed spacecraft designed for manufacturing and research missions where astronauts are not required. France has the background to take on that challenge. He spent 15 years working with Emirates Team New Zealand, helped create Air New Zealand’s Skycouch, and spent almost a decade at Rocket Lab – from senior vehicle engineer on Electron to global director of the launch vehicle programme. Most recently, he sat on the board of FTN Motion, advising the founders as they scaled up production of their electric motorbikes (see episode 160 of The Business of Tech). France’s career has been defined by teams willing to tackle difficult problems from first principles. At Rocket Lab, he says, the high-stakes peak-performance mindset of an America’s Cup campaign was not an occasional event. It was simply “a Tuesday”. Outlier is now assembling its own team in Auckland, already numbering more than 20, to build a spacecraft capable not only of operating in orbit but also surviving re-entry and getting valuable payloads back into customers’ hands. In this episode, France explains why space manufacturing is really about gravity, how a new form of a cancer drug could change treatment delivery, and why New Zealand’s deep-tech future may depend as much on audacity as engineering skill. Listen to The Business of Tech for the full conversation with Jamie France, available 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.

The engineer who helped make GitHub Copilot a global force is building its open alternative from Christchurch For millions of software developers, GitHub Copilot was the moment artificial intelligence stopped being an abstract promise and became a practical colleague. Suddenly, AI could sit in the coding environment, suggest the next line, explain unfamiliar code and help turn an idea into working software. It changed expectations of what a developer tool could do, and opened the door to a new generation of AI coding agents. Igor Costa was there as that shift gathered pace. The Brazilian-born, Christchurch-based founder of Autohand held senior engineering roles across Microsoft, GitHub and AWS, and played a pivotal role in the development and deployment of GitHub Copilot. It is an experience that gave him a close-up view of the potential of AI-assisted software development and of the trade-offs that come with putting powerful capabilities in the hands of a small number of global technology platforms. Now Costa is building an alternative from New Zealand. His startup, Autohand, is developing AI agents designed to take on more of the repetitive, time-consuming work involved in building and maintaining software. It also treats software as constantly evolving code that refactors itself automatically, avoiding going out of date and becoming a security risk. But the company’s proposition is not simply that AI should write more code, or work faster. It is that businesses should retain control over the technology doing that work. That is why Autohand has embraced open source, releasing its code and building around open-source models. For Costa, the issue is one of sovereignty as much as capability. A company using AI to understand its systems, access its codebase and act across its engineering workflow needs to know where its data is going, how its tools behave and what degree of control it can retain. The market for AI coding tools is becoming crowded, well-funded and increasingly dominated by proprietary platforms. Costa’s bet is that a different model can succeed: powerful AI agents that are transparent, adaptable and deployable in ways that suit the organisations using them. In this episode of The Business of Tech, Costa talks about the formative years of GitHub Copilot, why he chose to build a company from Christchurch, and why he believes the next phase of software development will be shaped not only by what AI can do, but by who owns and controls it. It is a conversation about code, autonomy and the possibility that New Zealand can play a meaningful role in building the AI tools of the future. Listen to the latest episode of The Business of Tech with Igor Costa, founder of Autohand, 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.

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.