John saw the need for a seamless SaaS platform for commercial training providers: automating all the processes for promoting, selling and delivering courses. John talks about starting out with sweat equity, spending a lot of time with customers to design the product, always appearing as a global operation even when they were working from his house, and how rewarding it has been to build a company of 60 people processing $500m p a which has trained over 7m people around the world. 

www.arlo.co 

Kea Aerospace’s mission is to improve life on Earth using insights from the stratosphere. Solar-powered, remotely piloted stratospheric aircraft will fly continuously in the stratosphere for months to collect frequent high-resolution aerial images. Mark became fascinated with space a long time ago, and was the co-Director and seed investor of Rocket Lab. In addition to building Kea Aerospace, Mark has been instrumental in establishing an aerospace tech hub in Christchurch. 

www.keaaerospace.com 

Forbury provides commercial real estate investment modelling software to customers in the UK, Australia, Singapore, Japan & New Zealand. Scott joined the founder, Steve Surridge, to build the business, with Steve focussing on new products and Scott building the team. He talks about how important it is to focus on the people who will deliver your business outcomes, and how Covid was an advantage for them and has accelerated expansion into offshore markets.

www.forbury.com 

John Penno and Maury Leyland started Leaft Foods to create a new food system by capturing the most abundant protein on the planet - Rubisco from green leaves. Leaft integrates with existing farming systems, extracting the Rubisco from common forage crops & producing a high-quality silage feed as a co-product.  This reduces the total nitrogen loading in the farming system & lessens the carbon footprint of farming while producing products that taste good with high nutritional value. 

www.leaftfoods.com 

Spice is a founder & CEO of Marsello, a smart marketing platform for smaller retailers. Marketing is really hard for these businesses. The Marsello platform has strong reporting & analytics. Retailers can run targeted marketing with data-driven automation, email, SMS, loyalty programs & social media and measure the impact of them. Thousands of small and medium-sized retailers and hospitality operators around the world are now using the Marsello platform. 

www.marsello.com 

Tim is the founder & CEO of Runn.io, a resourcing and capacity planning platform. Tim previously co-founded SilverStripe, whose open-source content management system is used by thousands of organisations worldwide. He started Runn because of the frustration of being able to get company-wide visibility across sales, projects and the people needed to deliver them. Runn has employees and customers around the world, including very large companies. 

www.runn.io

Socialites is a full-service social media agency that helps organisations thrive in the dynamic digital world by using social media to bring a brand’s DNA to life, creating communities of loyal customers. The Socialites Group has grown by acquisition. It runs multi-language, multi-platform campaigns across Asia, Europe, Australasia, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.  

www.socialites.co.nz 

Max founded Lumin to create a better way for people to annotate and collaborate on PDF files. He bootstrapped it to 30M users based on ad revenue, then made a very rapid switch to being subscription funded – in just 2 months! Lumin now has 80M users and 80 staff around the world and many documents are being signed every second. Max’s vision is to solve the pain of digitally managing, signing and sharing documents. 

www.luminpdf.com 

Izon Science isolates & analyses nano-biological particles. Its products are sold for medical R&D in 50 countries. A step change in the size of Izon’s business will be driven by one of its customers taking a product currently in testing to market – such as a cancer test. Izon has 50 staff in NZ, the USA & France. Hans talks about funding a company when it’s cash negative, getting focused on marketing and continuing to innovate to find the product-market fit. 

www.izon.com 

CerebralFix is an international game development studio which games for large international companies. Its talented team of more than 70 developers, artists, and designers work tirelessly to bring their games to life: from brainstorming new ideas to coding, testing, and polishing the final product. Tim talks about the challenges of staying current while technology is changing so rapidly. 

www.cerebralfix.com