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Find out what’s happening right now in New Zealand’s business and innovation ecosystem. Learn about upcoming events, new corporate challenges, funding rounds, applications for incubators and accelerators, Scale-Up NZ updates, and industry news.
A dairy giant’s former factory is now home to a food company with sustainability at its heart – and it’s just been granted a million-dollar loan from the Government to keep up the good work. Kāpiti Sustainable Foods makes plant-based foods and meat alternatives, and in an announcement at the factory on Tuesday, Minister for Economic and Regional Development Stuart Nash said it would receive a loan of up to $1.25 million from the Government’s Regional Strategic Partnership Fund.
Eight food companies will share a total of $8.75m of government co-investment to support a transition away from fossil fuels, with a couple of recipients now successful in multiple funding rounds. Over the three rounds of the fund, the total signed-off for food firm investment comes to more than $46m from total funding of $68.7m across 53 projects. Warkworth’s capsicum growing joint venture Southern Paprika has been approved for $4,98m of investment from this third deployment of the GIDI for a project to reduce emissions by 70% through the installation of a 10MW Biomass heat and CO2 Capture Boiler.
Innovation and commercialisation de-risks government investment into health research If we learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s how critical it is that the world’s research, science and innovation (RSI) systems are able to move quickly to get health technologies to market. Innovators worldwide acted fast to bring new healthtech, like reimagined emergency ventilators, vaccines and testing equipment, to the market at a time when we needed it most.
New Zealand technology exporters have a new story to tell and new tools to tell it with following the launch of the New Zealand Tech Story. The story, which aims to create a compelling, consistent way of promoting New Zealand's technology capabilities to the world, was launched today by the government's Digital Technology ITP (industry transformation plan) and partners to a virtual crowd of around 800.
SaveBoard has the backing of a major logistics company and is selling into a market short on in-demand building supplies. But even its CEO says the low-carbon building materials startup can’t save the industry. For the last 10 weeks, every two-and-a-half minutes a factory in the Hamilton suburb of Te Rapa has been churning out building materials made from the sorts of plastic waste that our food, drinks, packages and mail come in.
Auckland technology company Soul Machines has raised US$70 million (NZ$105m) as demand for digital humans, from “celebrity twins” to artificial customer service reps, continues to grow. The company will use the new funding to expand its research into mimicking human intelligence, and its sales teams. Soul Machines currently employs more than 200 staff and co-founder Greg Cross said that was set to grow by about 50 per cent as it looked to recruit about another 100 to 150 workers.
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