Grounds Up by Caffeine Daily

This bite-sized episode of Grounds Up was filmed at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo on 18 September. It's the perfect length for a coffee break ☕

Court sits down with Tama Toki, founder and CEO of Aotea Energy, the Auckland company behind the AE-1 Smart Battery. The AE-1 is a 16 kWh home battery with a computer inside that buys electricity on the wholesale market when it's cheap and powers the house when prices spike. It launched across Auckland and Christchurch in September. Aotea Energy is also a finalist in the 0-$1M category of the inaugural Caffeine Prize.

Tama grew up on Aotea Great Barrier Island, where there's no national grid, and the company carries the island's name. He explains how a plan to run a cable to the papakāinga next door turned into a business with four parts that all have to work together: the battery, the electronics, the software, and a retail licence. He shares why Aotea builds its own batteries, what six-cent power looks like across its fleet, and why he thinks batteries in homes are a cheaper way to upgrade the grid than more poles and wires.

He also talks about staying resourceful, hiring former Tesla Energy operator Antoine Riboulon as COO, how a Starlink box shaped his thinking about exporting, and why Aotea is planning to raise next year. "We have no money, so we have to think."

This bite-sized episode of Grounds Up was filmed at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo on 18 September. It's the perfect length for a coffee break ☕

Court sits down with Jo Mills, co-founder of Fuel50, the New Zealand-founded workforce transformation platform that helps large organisations understand their people's skills and move talent to where it's needed. We recorded on the same day Phoenix Education Partners, parent company of the University of Phoenix, announced it had agreed to acquire Fuel50. The deal has since closed, and Jo is now Fuel50's CEO.

We didn't talk about the deal, but we did talk about what Jo is proud of and what comes next. She explains how Fuel50 went looking for an HR tech tool to bring home from expos in Chicago and Las Vegas, couldn't find one, and built it instead. She shares how US enterprise buying has changed, from a couple of decision makers to committees of 10 to 15 people, and how Fuel50 manages cash flow through long sales cycles.

She also talks about how AI agents are letting Fuel50 reach hospitality and retail workers who aren't at a computer, why she hires "for fit and passion and potential" rather than big names, and why the new jobs she's seeing AI create give her hope. "We can do great things from New Zealand, and we do it every day."

This bite-sized episode of Grounds Up was filmed at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo on 18 September. It's the perfect length for a coffee break ☕

Court sits down with Phoebe Harrop Meadows, partner at Blackbird, the trans-Tasman venture firm that closed its sixth fund at more than NZ$1.25 billion in August.

Phoebe explains how Blackbird decides to back someone before there's a product or even customers ("it's investing in the slope of learning and testing"), and tells the story of backing former Blackbird scout Hardy Michel before he'd settled on the idea that became Marloo.

She talks about why more than half of Blackbird's early-stage capital over the past year went to New Zealand-founded companies, what actually gets her attention when a founder gets in touch, and why founders should think hard about whether they need venture funding at all. "We're annoying," she says. "The clock starts ticking."

She also shares what makes a good venture investor, why New Zealand's small ecosystem keeps people honest, and why she's excited about people with deep domain knowledge building their own products for the first time.

This bite-sized episode of Grounds Up was filmed at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo on 18 September. It's the perfect length for a coffee break ☕Court sits down with Stephen Knightly, COO of RocketWerkz, the Auckland video game studio founded in Dunedin by DayZ creator Dean Hall."When you are an exporter, you must be world class," Stephen says. "But actually world class is the table stakes to compete." He chaired the New Zealand Game Developers Association for five years and has watched game development become a billion-dollar New Zealand industry that sells almost entirely overseas. He explains how digital distribution opened the door, and why the competition that came with it raises the bar for every team.He also talks about launching survival game Icarus on Steam, and why RocketWerkz wants a more direct relationship with its players. Its newest game, Kitten Space Agency, is free to play, funded by community contributions, and has a Discord full of people who work at space agencies. Stephen also covers building an in-house game engine, how AI coding has sped up the studio's pipeline ("definitely not vibe coding"), and why staying paranoid keeps a studio innovative.

This bite-sized episode of Grounds Up was filmed at the inaugural NZ Tech Expo on 18 September. It's the perfect length for a coffee break ☕

In the first of our NZ Tech Expo specials, Court sits down with Sacha Judd, co-founder of Lume.

Lume is a new digital format for music that combines the best parts of vinyl and streaming. You buy an album, and it comes with everything the artist wants to share alongside it: demos, alternate versions, B-sides, behind-the-scenes video, and handwritten lyrics. 80% of the net revenue from every purchase goes back to artists and rights holders.

The plan was a New Zealand test market. Then a deal with APRA AMCOS meant Lume could sell worldwide from day one. Sacha talks about a launch day spent chasing an in-app purchase approval, taking 10% of New Zealand music unit sales in the first month, the quarter of buyers who've already come back for a second album, a vinyl bundle with Auckland pressing plant Holiday Records, and the John Butler Trio release that starts Lume's push into Australia.

She also shares how years of writing about fandom shaped the product, and why the right idea made her break her rule about never starting a company.

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.