Business startups to watch
The new year holds fresh opportunities for some local technology startups, each of which is poised for major growth in 2021. The New Zealand Herald’s Chris Keall goes through some of the startups to watch this year.
Winely
Lockdown pain — or at least beverages glugged to numb it — has been Winely’s gain.
The startup, founded by Abbe Hyde and Jacob Manning in Dunedin two years ago, makes a wireless sensor that checks the quality of wine during its primary fermentation. It feeds data via the internet of things and the cloud to Winely’s app.
‘‘Demand for our technology has exploded this year,’’ Mr Manning said.
Brits and Yanks in lockdown are chugging through more New Zealand wine than ever (exports were up 10% by value in the eight months to August), and Winely’s ‘‘smart wine’’ technology helps vineyards produce better product and cut out repetitive tasks.
Winely completed its first field trials in Central Otago in 2019, before expanding to other major wine regions in New Zealand, Australia, and California.
Winely’s founders bill their technology as a world first. Mr Manning said the idea for the startup emerged from ‘‘academic research on wine phenolics’’ (he has an MSc in plant biotechnology, Ms Hyde a master’s degree in management.)
‘‘We save our customers 610 hours a day for every 50 tanks they have, by removing the need to manually retrieve and run lab samples in the primary fermentation,’’ Mr Manning said.
It’s slow, laborious and even dangerous.
Winely, by contrast, ‘‘provides consistently accurate data, enabling the winemaker to make quick and easy decisions on interventions and additions’’.
The startup just raised $2 million in seed money, which will be used to ‘‘substantially increase manufacturing capacity to match demand’’, fund further expansion into Australia and the US and keep adding to a staff that’s already doubled to a dozen over the past year, Mr Manning says.
The pair have the outward appearance of a slackerhipsters, but their goal is global.
‘‘Winely is set to disrupt the $3.5 trillion fermentation market and is positioned to be the world leader in the Yeast 2.0, the emerging synthetic biology market,’’ the said.
And it has gained some serious fans in the tech and investment community. Backers of Winely’s $2 million raise included two Californiabased venture capital funds, Uncork Capital and Quidnet Ventures, and investors from two of Australia’s hottest software companies, Canva and
Atlassian, as well as usual suspects NZ Growth Capital Partners and Canterbury
Angels.
‘‘We don’t do sales or marketing. [It’s] not necessary and a waste of time,’’ Mr Manning said.
He won’t give any financials but says Winely’s customers already supply 77% of total wine volume in the US.
Product development is partly inhouse and partly via partnerships.
‘‘Our team are all experts in their respective fields and due to the complexity of the technology, we have headhunted most of the global experts as advisers to Winely,’’ Mr Manning said.
A project is under way with the Australian Wine Research Institute, while Winely is assessing partnerships with the NZ Winegrowersowned Bragato Research Institute in Marlborough and UC Davis (the University of California’s Davis campus), which Mr Manning describes as the world’s best wine research university.
Are Mr Manning and Ms Hyde wine buffs themselves?
‘‘Certainly we are,’’ Mr Manning said.
‘‘We often share our favourite wines from each region with our investors and adviser network — except they often mop up their inventory.
‘‘Currently, we’re drinking a Maori Point Pinot Noir from Central Otago. Absolutely delicious. Matt Evans, the winemaker, was one of our early advisers.’’
Mr Evans was a natural fit.
The US expat traded a career as an investment banking analyst at the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, then a product management role Silicon Valley’s Nvidia, for winemaking. At Maori Point (2016 Pinot Noir: $84) he mixes organic grape growing with sciencebased fermentation.
RocketWerkz
This year could be something of a makeorbreak year for gaming studio RocketWerkz.
Founder Dean Hall spent two years in the army before heading to Europe, where he worked as a games developer before returning to New Zealand to found his own studio — with multimilliondollar backing from Chinese giant Tencent, which now has a 47% stake.
In October RocketWerkz moved into the top two floors of the new PwC Tower at Auckland’s $1 billion Commercial Bay development, complete with a $5 million fitout to make the new digs look like a spaceship.
Rocketwerkz has had a steady output of games over the past two years, but its main mission has always been to create an Alist, blockbusterbudget multiplayer game — the kind of title that will have tens of millions around the world glued to their screens (in the manner of Path of Exile,
made by West Auckland’s Grinding Gear Games — now majorityowned by the busy Tencent after a $100 millionplus deal).
It now has a name: Icarus,
and a release date, or at least timeframe, and the first images are starting to be shared online.
‘‘Icarus, it is a scifi survival game where players explore a hostile alien world either alone or cooperating with their friends,’’ RocketWerkz chief operating officer Stephen Knightly said.
‘‘The game will launch in the second half of 2021, but will then continue to expand with regular updates and new ‘seasons’ of content for several years after that.’’
Kami
Lockdowns always held potential for online education players, but for Aucklandbased Kami, which was already enjoying global success, the figures have been phenomenal.
Chairman and chief revenue officer Bob Drummond won’t give detailed financials, but the big picture is one of explosive, profitable growth.
‘‘Our ARR [annual recurring revenue] grew 1000% over the past 12 months,’’ Mr Drummond said.
‘‘We’re now in the $20 million to $50 million range.’’
Staff numbers have doubled to 45 (and counting) since January, with no outside money, and no raise is on the immediate horizon.
There are now about 22 million teachers and pupils using Kami’s app in 180 countries to create more than 100 million documents a month.
A basic version of Kami is free, but a teacher can pay $99 a year for a premium version that allows them, and their pupils, to integrate Kami with Google Classroom and other education apps, and get priority support.
Kami also does bespoke deals with local and regional education authorities.
‘‘One customer alone, the Los Angeles Unified School
District, has 735,000 students using Kami. That’s as many students as in all the schools in New Zealand,’’ Mr Drummond said.
Like all good startups, Kami was created to solve a reallife problem.
Its eponymous product was developed when Hengjie Wang (today chief executive), Alliv Samson (now COO) and Jordan Thoms (CTO) were studying engineering at Auckland University in the 2010s, and wanted a better solution for taking and sharing notes.
Together they created Kami (the word means paper in Japanese), a tool for sharing PDF documents and annotating them with notes. Over time, it’s grown to accommodate many types of file formats, or even snippets of websites.
The trio were joined by Drummond who, like them, was an Auckland varsity grad — only he hit campus in 1979. After a tech industry career at startups including Plexure (where he was COO for five years), Drummond had become a professional investor and director — and was wellplaced to help with seed money.
Others in for a big 2021
Auckland startup Formus Labs, in the midst of its commercial launch, is using artificial intelligence to make orthopaedic surgery a bit less like carpentry.
Mark Rocket — New Zealand’s other rocket man — is developing an unmanned solarpowered aerial vehicle that will fly for months at twice the height of a commercial airliner.
Backed by telecommunications richlister Malcolm Dick, Datagrid wants to build a giant $700 million data centre in Southland — which would take advantage of the cold climate, and use a whack of the power generation freed up by the closure of the Tiwai Point smelter. And, yes, like Rio Tinto, he’s angling for cheap power.