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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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