The Business of Tech

Two days into the job, Roman Reyhani was confronting a $231 million question: how does New Zealand turn clever science into businesses that deliver lasting value here?
The founding chief executive of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology joins this week’s episode of The Business of Tech to explain his approach.
The institute represents a pivot towards high-tech research and commercialisation. But its funding has largely been redirected from other parts of the science system, rather than added to the pot.
That increases the pressure to deliver. Can a stronger commercial focus succeed without weakening the research pipeline feeding it?
From genocide prosecutions to Silicon Valley startups
Reyhani’s route to the role is unusually varied. Raised in Auckland, he began in international law, including an internship with the prosecution team at the United Nations tribunal investigating Rwanda’s genocide.
California offered a different way to make an impact. He established a legal practice and worked with technology startups, gradually moving beyond legal advice into strategy and business development.
Six years at Boston Consulting Group’s venture-building arm, now BCG X, followed. His teams helped major companies create products and businesses, recruiting people and taking technology to market rather than leaving clients with presentation slides.
Now back in New Zealand after more than two decades overseas, he wants the institute to bring an investor’s discipline to research funding.
“It’s not just here’s a chunk of money and a handshake and good luck to you,” he says.
Instead, funding would follow “stage gates” milestones with money shifted away from projects that aren’t progressing.
The institute’s territory sits between promising laboratory research and technologies mature enough to attract private investment. Bringing companies and investors alongside earlier could help bridge that expensive gap.
Applied AI is a big opportunity.
Then there’s the question of who benefits. Reyhani wants New Zealand to retain more value when taxpayer-backed technologies succeed, whether through financial returns, research facilities, skilled people or new businesses.
On artificial intelligence, he sees opportunities in applying existing models to New Zealand datasets, including agriculture and health, rather than competing head-on with the world’s biggest model developers.
It’s an ambitious brief for a modest budget by international standards. The challenge is choosing where New Zealand has a genuine edge, then backing it without confusing commercial discipline with impatience.
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Andfoods isn’t trying to win the plant-based food battle in the supermarket aisle. It wants raving fans in Asia’s busiest kitchens.
The New Zealand startup is turning black gram, also known as black mung bean, into whipping cream. Its pitch to chefs is that dairy-free shouldn’t mean settling for second best.
On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, co-founder Alex Devereux explains why winning over the person holding the whisk could be a smarter business than chasing shoppers.
Devereux learned the food service trade at Fonterra, supplying ingredients to businesses where taste, consistency and price determine whether a product earns its place in the fridge.
After leaving dairy for technology roles, an invitation from Icehouse brought him to Massey University’s Riddet Institute. There, he and fellow Fonterra alumnus Leon Clement tasted a plant-based whipping cream that stood out.
“We knew the markets, we knew the dynamics and what customers were looking for in that kind of product,” he says.
The science tackles an awkward problem: beans taste like beans.
Replicating the taste and texture of dairy
Riddet researchers developed a fermentation process that strips out those sharp flavours while retaining black gram’s natural creaminess and ability to foam. Combined with coconut oil and other ingredients, it becomes a cream that, Devereux says, delivers dairy-like taste and texture.
There’s a practical selling point, too. He says the whipped cream holds its shape longer in hot conditions, a useful attribute for cakes and desserts in tropical markets.
But clever science doesn’t automatically win kitchen space.
Andfoods employs a chef in Singapore to demonstrate the product alongside its distributor. The aim is to talk chef to chef, showing how it performs rather than delivering a sales pitch.
“Chef-led sales is the most effective way to win this type of business,” Devereux says.
Get the product right and customers tend to stick around, without the marketing bill needed to build a supermarket brand.
Andfoods has secured Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands as a customer, with Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand on its expansion list.
Its model also departs from the familiar Kiwi export recipe: retain research and intellectual property here, but manufacture in China, closer to customers.
Having raised $4 million, Andfoods is seeking another $7m to fund growth, with culinary cream and cold foam products in development.
The ambition isn’t simply to replace dairy. It’s to become the cream chefs choose.
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The people building the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems promise extraordinary gains. They also warn those systems could escape our control.
That is the ethical fault line running through this week’s episode of The Business of Tech.
My guest, New Zealander Peter Barnett, works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California. The University of Otago physics graduate develops governance plans aimed at preventing catastrophic outcomes from advanced AI. He previously worked on technical AI alignment, the difficult job of making powerful systems act in line with human intentions.
This conversation is a topical one.
OpenAI is facing fresh turmoil over its approach to safety. Three recently fired safety and alignment researchers claim they were punished for challenging the company and working with outside evaluators. OpenAI rejects that account, saying they mishandled sensitive information and breached its trust.
David Robinson, one of OpenAI’s senior safety figures, has also resigned. The former author of safety reports accompanying major model launches says the company’s culture is “broken” and the industry is not being nearly careful enough. He just sat down for a podcast interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, which makes for fascinating viewing.
These departures expose the moral dilemma at the centre of the AI boom.
Worrying emergent traits in AI
The companies racing towards more capable models say the technology could cure disease, lift productivity and create enormous wealth. But they face fierce competition, huge investor expectations and a geopolitical contest framed around beating China.
Every incentive rewards speed. Caution risks handing the advantage to a rival.
So who decides when the danger is too great?
Barnett argues it cannot be the companies themselves. He says frontier AI developers are effectively writing their own rules and can loosen them when safety commitments obstruct progress. Independent audits, government oversight and limits on training more powerful models may all be needed.
His concern is not simply that people will misuse AI. It is that increasingly autonomous systems could learn to game evaluations, work around safeguards and pursue goals their creators did not intend. Safety researchers still cannot reliably predict everything a frontier model will be capable of before it is trained.
Barnett believes New Zealand can play a role. We do not build frontier models, but our nuclear-free history shows a small country can challenge powerful nations on an issue carrying global risk.
When insiders abandon lucrative careers to raise the alarm, maybe it's worth listening to them.
Listen to the full conversation with Peter Barnett on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or your podcast app of choice.
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In business, and in the innovation game, experience is valuable. But sometimes, not knowing how exactly things are supposed to be done can be a superpower.
This week’s episode of The Business of Tech celebrates three young New Zealand designers tackling problems that established businesses have overlooked, with fresh eyes, tight budgets and a willingness to ask basic questions.
Sophie West, the national winner of the 2026 James Dyson Award, (with around $10,000 in accompanying prize money), and runners-up Jos Williams and Aysha Jay are engineers and designers with big ideas – and small budgets. Their inventions address sustainable menstrual care, indoor air quality, and movement therapy for children with cerebral palsy.
Better period products
Massey University graduate West won with Arla Gen II, a compact device designed to clean and sterilise reusable menstrual cups and discs. It tackles an awkward barrier to adoption: boiling period products in a shared kitchen.
West surveyed 105 users and repeatedly tested how the device would feel, fit together and fit into daily routines. Her approach puts privacy and practicality alongside engineering, rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
Williams, a Victoria University of Wellington graduate, found inspiration while cycling beside a motorway, breathing traffic fumes.
His Windfilter harnesses something Wellington has in abundance. An outdoor turbine transfers rotational energy magnetically through a window to an indoor fan, drawing air through wool filters. No mains electricity or holes in the wall required.
It challenges the assumption that solving a problem always means adding batteries, electronics, or greater complexity.
Canterbury graduate Jay’s Path Finder is an adjustable device intended to guide crawling movements for children aged two to six with cerebral palsy, potentially reducing a task involving several therapists to one.
Learning to crawl
Working with the Centre of Movement, she observed therapy sessions rather than assuming she understood what children, parents and clinicians needed.
“I don’t know anything, so I need to go find out,” she says, describing the mindset behind her research.
Jay built her proof of concept with a budget of about $50, inexpensive components, and help from university technicians.
None of these inventions is a finished commercial product. Further testing, funding and development lie ahead. The graduates also describe a tough employment market, but a desire to stay in New Zealand and pursue their projects here.
West, Williams, and Jay now progress to the international award stage, with the top 20 international finalists announced on October 14 and the winners, chosen by Sir James Dyson, revealed on November 4.
Listen to the full interview with the Dyson Award winner and runners-up on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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New Zealand wants more from its science system – more startups, more export revenue and more high-paying jobs. But in the rush to commercialise research, are we putting the discoveries that fuel future breakthroughs at risk?
That tension sits at the heart of the latest episode of The Business of Tech, featuring Professor Frank Bloomfield, the University of Auckland’s deputy vice-chancellor of research and innovation.
With around 39,000 full-time equivalent students supported and generating $1.63 billion in revenue last year, the university is New Zealand’s largest and a formidable concentration of researchers, specialist facilities and emerging talent.
Bloomfield, a respected neonatologist, researcher, and former director of the Liggin’s Institute, argues that its role extends far beyond teaching students and publishing academic papers. A modern university should also be a talent engine, an innovation partner and an active contributor to the economy around it.
From basic research to world-beating product
Auckland has already produced innovation success stories. Wireless charging pioneer PowerbyProxi is a prime example, emerging from university research with the help of the university’s commercialisation arm, Uniservices, before being acquired by Apple. The challenge is to repeat that feat in areas where New Zealand has genuine capability, including medtech, space, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology and clean energy.
Bloomfield says there is no single switch that turns an academic discovery into a successful company. Intellectual-property rules matter, but so do entrepreneurial skills, early-stage funding, access to laboratories, industry relationships and support from people who know how to take an idea to market.
The university is trying to assemble that full pipeline through its Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, commercialisation company UniServices and a $40 million evergreen Inventors Fund. Its Newmarket Innovation Precinct is also bringing researchers and companies together physically, with about 38 businesses and 140 people based there at the time of the interview.
Scale, talent, and connections
But significant gaps remain. Auckland, and New Zealand in general, is still short of the scale-up capital needed to turn promising ventures into global companies. Universities, business, councils and central government are not always pulling in the same direction. Academic career incentives can also favour papers and teaching over building products or spinning out companies.
Bloomfield wants stronger innovation precincts, smarter immigration settings and incentives that help attract talent and keep ambitious companies here.
His strongest warning, however, is against pursuing quick commercial wins at the expense of fundamental science. The technologies being commercialised today often rest on blue-skies research conducted years or even decades ago.
Stop funding that exploratory work, Bloomfield says, and New Zealand risks draining the pipeline on which its future innovators will depend.
Listen to the full conversation on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.