Andfoods: Beans, cream and kitchen dreams

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 s…

Is the AI Race Out of Control?

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, work…

Small budgets, big ideas: Meet NZ’s Dyson Award stars

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 ov…

Inside Auckland’s innovation engine

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 T…

AI’s next test: turning pilots into productivity

Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems. Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dream…

Big Tech’s power problem is bigger than antitrust

The tech giants have become the infrastructure of modern life. They mediate how we shop, communicate, advertise, store data and increasingly use artificial intelligence.  Yet the tools governments use to contain their power were designed for an earlier economic age. Professor Susan Watson believe…

The drone builder making waves in defence tech

New Zealand-founded robotics company Syos Aerospace is building autonomous aircraft, drone boats, ground vehicles and underwater robots from its Mt. Maunganui base  In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Syos founder Sam Vye tells me how a conservation-drone project in the Galápagos helped…

Blackbird’s billion-dollar bet on founders

Australasian venture-capital heavyweight Blackbird has closed a record $1.25 billion sixth fund – and its New Zealand general partner Phoebe Harrop Meadows says Kiwi companies are central to its investment strategy. The fund, described by Blackbird as the largest venture-capital raise in ANZ histo…

The anti-gravity business

What if space was not simply a place to launch satellites – but a factory floor for making things that cannot be produced on Earth? That is the bet being made by Auckland startup Outlier Space, which has raised around US$7.35 million (NZ$12.3 million) in pre-seed funding to build reusable spacecra…

Wayne Brown’s tech plan: look to Asia and ditch the AI fluff

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is about to turn 80 – and is still plainly more interested in the next deal, the next big export market and the next practical problem to fix than in winding down. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, Brown delivers a typically uncensored account of how he thi…