Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw founded Serko in Auckland in 2007, after selling an earlier travel-tech business together in the 1990s. Nearly two decades on, Serko is a New Zealand-listed company (NZX and ASX) that powers corporate travel technology for some of the world's biggest brands, including Booking.com for Business, across 180 countries.

In this episode of Grounds Up, recorded at Serko's new Parnell headquarters, Serko House, Darrin talks with Court about what he calls Serko's third or fourth reinvention: building a company to go global from a tiny domestic market on day one, rebuilding for the US in the mid-2010s, absorbing 700,000 new companies onto its platform mid-Covid, and now building Serko.ai, AI technology designed, deliberately, to put its own existing product at risk.

He also talks capital raising discipline, the nearly four-decade partnership with co-founder Bob Shaw, and the culture principles that had them giving staff 40 percent of the company on day one.

Barney Chunn graduated with a degree in philosophy and English, sent out CVs, and heard nothing back. "It was the market sort of telling me I was unemployable," he says. "So I had to go and create a job." That job was CONQA, a construction quality assurance platform he ran for close to a decade — and now it's Drumbeat, a PR and comms platform built inside Auckland venture studio New+Improved.

In this episode, Court sits down with Chunn to talk through why traditional PR retainers price out the high-growth companies that need coverage most, and the assumption he had to get over before starting Drumbeat: that a PR agency's network was the real product. "It's not as true as we were led to believe," he says — in his experience, journalists don't need a personal introduction if the pitch is right.

Also covered: New+Improved's three-part process for validating new ventures, how they built Drumbeat's founding team with co-founders Aaron Croft and Fallon Savery, how his upbringing in a creative and entrepreneurial family led him down this path, and what's next as Drumbeat grows.

When Martin Hacon first heard what Cullbeck's technology could do, his reaction was disbelief: "This is bullshit. No one can do what these guys are claiming." He's now the CEO, and Cullbeck has just closed NZ$20 million in funding, including a NZ$15 million capital raise believed to be the largest first raise ever recorded for a New Zealand deep-tech company.

In this episode, Court sits down with Hacon to talk about the hydrogen ironmaking process that turns an 8-hour-plus blast furnace reaction into one that takes under two and a half minutes, replacing coal with hydrogen so the only byproduct is water. They cover his 40 years in steelmaking, what it will actually take to move the technology out of a Victoria University of Wellington lab and onto a demonstration plant site next to NZ Steel's Glenbrook facility, and why Hacon insists Cullbeck isn't selling green iron: it's cheaper iron that happens to be very green.

Also covered: the funding round (Outset Ventures, 2040 Ventures, Motion Capital, and others), the foundational customer agreement with an Australian energy company, and Hacon's case for why Cullbeck will be NZ's next big global tech story.

Climatetech is about more than sustainability. It's energy, industrial decarbonisation, sustainable food systems, and a dozen sub-sectors in between, held together by one idea: these are businesses that make money by cutting carbon.

In the first episode of Grounds Up, Court sits down with Ralph Chang (Partner, Motion Capital) and Holly Beals (Lead, Aurora Climate Lab at Creative HQ), the two people running New Zealand's main pipeline from early climate tech idea to investable company. They talk about Motion Capital's investment thesis ("make it cheaper to save the world than to destroy it"), what actually happens inside a climate tech accelerator, and the funding gap that stalls deep-tech companies right before their first commercial plant gets built.

Also covered: Zethos's zinc dust process undercutting galvanising costs by half, Factor's exit to Gentrack, and why one 2024 report named climatetech New Zealand's fastest-growing tech investment category, ahead of software.