The cost of AI, Scam Prevention, and Digitising Smell with Scentian Bio

Transcript is computer-generated and may contain errors.

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and privileged to have Jonathan Good, the co founder and chief executive of Scentian Bio, joining us again. How are you, Jonathan?

Jonathan Good:
I’m great, thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, thanks for setting aside some time to come back in. Maybe you can remind listeners where you fit into this big wide world of tech before we jump into the news and then we’ll come back for a deep dive into what’s happening in the Scentian Bio world.

Jonathan Good:
Absolutely. So, yes, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Scentian Bio. We’re a deep tech startup here in Auckland and we’re digitising smell and taste, so we’re giving machines a sense of smell.

Paul Spain:
This is so cool. This is so cool. I’m really looking forward to delving in more into that, Jonathan. So, yeah, great to have you back. Thank you again to our amazing show partners. So Spark, One New Zealand, 2degrees, Workday, Fortinet and Gorilla Technology. We just love their support of the industry as a whole and for keeping New Zealand Tech Podcast on the air. So thank you.

Paul Spain:
Well, let’s jump into the New Zealand news. First up, Health New Zealand’s moving to hybrid cloud infrastructure and it’s come out just in the last day or so. There’s been a little bit that they published previously. But in New Zealand we have the GETS platform where the government entities will put out what they’re looking to acquire and they’re wanting people to pitch for that business. And so what they’ve said on that platform is that they’re looking at multiple suppliers to help them migrate and modernize their legacy systems. And they’re talking about 12,000 servers, which is, I mean, this has got to be one of the biggest projects of its kind in the country and of being able to sort of migrate that older infrastructure into a more modern world, whether that’s with local hosting providers or into the hyperscale kind of cloud world. And yeah, I think, look, it’s exciting to see an entity that has probably, I guess, historically had, you know, some, some significant, you know, challenges from a technology perspective that they’ve got this roadmap that, you know, they’ve got government funding to, to, you know, invest in lifting their game, you know, modernizing, consolidating. And look, this is not going to be a, any sort of easy project, is it? Because as you know, they’ve got thousands of different applications, you know, across the country and, you know, there’s, you know, definitely a journey ahead for them, but the fact they’re getting out and, you know, getting underway to make this, you know, this move forward I think is pretty encouraging.

Paul Spain:
What are your thoughts, Jonathan?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think it’s great to see the investment in the digital side of health. You know, we tend to think about how health as hospitals and doctors and nurses, but it’s just as important these days to have the information accessible and protected and that’s really hard. I mean, it’s easy just to say 12,000 servers, but I think about where those are and the legacy that’s implicit in them. I mean, this is gonna be a pretty hard project, but a necessary one I think, for all of us and our wellbeing.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And look, yeah, you’ve made an important point around data protection and, and so on and you know, look, we’ve, you know, we’ve seen challenges in that area in the past and, you know, this becomes part of that journey forwards is, you know, modernizing and securing as, as we go. So, yeah, very, very hopeful for some good outcomes there and lots of, you know, opportunities for multiple. Probably quite a good number of organisations from the technology sector to participate in that in a range of ways. So, yeah, I mean, I think just pleasing that this is being funded and they’re getting on and gonna get on and do it.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, and hopefully sets a bit of a foundation for our next wave of health innovation as well.

Paul Spain:
Also, actually, I should mention just on the sort of the health innovation side, we’ve spoken to founders and co founders of tend, who provide general practitioner doctors clinics and online healthcare in New Zealand. You know, one of our innovative startups here, who just happened to have a brunch virtually next door to our office, but it was announced in recent days that they’re expecting or anticipating to acquire a chain currently owned by. Oh, is it Green? Oh, let me check. The chain is called the Doctors. So it’s a big, big chain of GP clinics in New Zealand and it’s owned by greencross. That’s what I was looking for. It was like missing word. So I think, you know, because of the scale of it, there may need to be some, you know, regulatory hoops to jump through.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, that, that caught my, my attention as well. They, you know, they’re really, they’re really scaling and, you know, through, through these acquisitions and you know, I think the, the outcome of that, you know, if it keeps heading in the directions that we understand they’re going in a way that, you know, could be quite transformative to how healthcare is delivered. To many of us around the country.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think they’re sort of nice bookends in a way. You’ve got the front end innovation where patients are interacting at their GP clinics and then this, you know, the hard yards in the background of, you know, the secure cloud migration of servers and applications that are providing the sort of critical hard services in hospitals around the country. And it’s kind of nice in a way that there’s investment going on at both ends.

Paul Spain:
It is, and I think it’d be interesting and we probably should do sort of look at a way we can sort of survey listeners a little bit for some of their experiences in different areas. Because I know, you know, for myself when I look at, say, dealing with a general practitioner, that the technology mechanisms sort of surrounding that primary care has not been very good in New Zealand, shall we say, in the past. So, yeah, it definitely interests me and I happen to be in the camp that sits under the doctors as that’s, that’s, you know, so I’m one of their, one of their customers or patients. And so I’m, you know, I’m very curious what the uplift could be there. Now Spark are tackling impersonation scams with a verified call feature to, you know, I guess, you know, cut off or help people understand the difference between a genuine call from them as a telco, as a technology provider and the scam calls. And they’re one of those organisations who in the past have had people impersonating them and calling up and saying, hey, calling about your Spark account and, and so on. And of course these things have happened across, you know, multiple areas, you know, telco banking. A couple of nights ago I received one on the, on the immigration front.

Paul Spain:
Now, they had the wrong person. Cause I was, you know, born in New Zealand, but of course they do these things on mass. And the message was that there was an issue with my visa. And you know, I can imagine if you’re, if you’re someone who’s, you know, who’s new to the country, you don’t have citizenship and you’re getting a kind of an urgent robot call, there is a chance, depending on when it hits you, that you might respond to that and think that it’s actually legitimate. So this capability that they’re launching, I think could have broader implications than just, just when it comes to sort of differentiating legitimate calls from say, your telco. Now, I’ve had a go at trying this out and I haven’t quite got there yet. So my experience, or what I Can share is to turn on this verified call functionality, you have to have the Spark app installed and you’ve gotta go in and tick a couple of boxes. One of those boxes gives the app access to the contacts on your phone.

Paul Spain:
Because what they do is when you’re receiving this call, and I’m looking at it through the iPhone lens, because that’s where I’ve been testing it so far I haven’t tried on Android yet. Possibly that would have worked for me. But on. On the iPhone, what it does is it pings through electronically. When Spark are calling you, they ping the app on your phone and then update. This is. This is my understanding. I haven’t had this fully verified, but this is what it looks like.

Paul Spain:
They update the contact card for Spark matches the number and maybe it changes it back again after the call, but it changes it to say, hey, this is a verified call. And it includes on that screen that comes up what they’re calling about as well. So that versus just a unknown number or just saying Spark cause they’re in your contacts. Sounds to me like a really good approach. And if they could roll that out across the board, then brilliant. But to make it work, you do need to turn on access to your contacts. Now, for me, sort of cyber security, data privacy, zero trust, I didn’t want to do that. But in iOS you can allow access to specific contacts, which is what I did, and possibly that’s not the right way to do it.

Paul Spain:
Also, I can understand there will be your average user who’s not deep into their technology. They may be uncomfortable giving access to their contacts, but not want to muck around with the results. So that might be that there’s some iteration that Spark can do on this front to achieve the right outcome. But it does seem to me like, hey, this is another positive in terms of removing or reducing a particular attack vector.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I mean, scams are certainly a huge challenge. So it’s nice to see people working on trying to reduce the risk there. I guess I’m millennial enough. I don’t like answering the phone.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, it was interesting because I was interviewed this morning on yeah Herald’s show and I got exactly the same kind of, you know, from the interviewer was I was like, oh, this is another person that actually doesn’t really answer the phone. So, you know, to them they’re like, how’s this relevant? You know, it wasn’t quite that extreme. But there is that aspect right, where we’ve got kind of different patterns now in terms of where phone Actually fits into our worlds. Yeah.

Jonathan Good:
And the trouble I guess is that the scammers are following us everywhere. I mean, yeah, I had a pretty good WhatsApp attempted scam come through for my recent hotel booking actually and it was interesting. They’d obviously passed together a whole bunch of interesting information about me to make something urgent and compelling and I guess that’s the dangerous environment. So that sort of macro message of just being suspicious I guess is the number one thing we need to.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Was this the booking.com situation? So it does seem we haven’t covered in detail but does seem as though booking.com either the platform or the software that individual hotels are running somewhere in that mix there have been compromised if not. And I had exactly the same discussion with somebody over the weekend who had seen enough oddities going on in their device. Their partner was messaging me saying oh can, you know, can, can you give us a little bit of a vice ball on this situation? There’s a concern that my, you know, partner’s devices has been, you know, has been compromised. And it was, it was, it was actually, it was really interesting for me to kind of, you know, just hear this from a, you know, I guess a non technologist, everyday person that have seen so many different oddities going on within they’re just, just within their phone that they were panicked that, that they’ve been, you know, actually hit and you know, I was able to go through the whole list kind of, you know, one by one. Oh, you’re seeing this because, you know, Apple’s changed something. Oh you’re seeing this because of, you know, XYZ and yeah, probably the, the, the one where there was actually a real issue would be their booking with bookings.com and it was a genuine issue but it wasn’t because their direct device had been compromised would be my take. But boy, the world’s getting complicated, isn’t it?

Jonathan Good:
It sure is, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, good on Spark for what they’re doing here. I think across the telco landscape we’ve seen considerable work that’s gone into be, you know, blocking scam texts and calls, you know, very.

Jonathan Good:
Some of the stats from that the

Paul Spain:
numbers were huge, huge numbers. Yeah, you know, like yeah, there was

Jonathan Good:
I think millions of calls they’d blocked over the course of the past year.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, if you stack it all up and then we’ve seen you know, Samsung who, who are looking for numbers that have been kind of reported as kind of scam type numbers. So that goes in. So you know we, we really are seeing Some, you know, some industry wide efforts to reduce that and I, I think the impact is dramatically reduced on what it could be. But there are still issues as, as we’ve both experienced in different ways. So yeah, yeah now Workday have expanded out their um, AI powered work, um, day go platform into Australia and New Zealand. So just thought I’d, I know, you know we’ve had them on the show and they’re, they’re a show partner but sometimes what happens, you know, with platforms is the, you know, the bleeding edge of innovation happens somewhere else in the world and especially you know, when it comes to areas, you know, like payroll and finance and it doesn’t necessarily, you know, get so quickly to New Zealand. I mean I think for zero customers New Zealand sort of is, sits in a pretty good place because it’s still a lot of development and focus from New Zealand. But yeah, I thought that was just encouraging to see.

Paul Spain:
Workday aren’t leaving us behind down here. And other topic on the local front is 2 degrees have put out their Shaping Business Study 2026 report. We’ll have a link to it in the show. Notes on. I was at the event this morning but it happened to be down at NZME where they run their annual event and they have a sort of panel discussion to delve into the highlights. Yeah, I would recommend folks go and have a look at that. If you are interested in the broader picture of what’s happening and what the sentiment is out there from a business perspective, I think fair to say, you know, when you look at the report that, you know, the optimism which had kind of, you know, looked like it had turned, you know, upward last year. That’s.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, the data’s not kind of showing quite the same this year, unfortunately. However, the sentiment does seem to be stronger for I guess newer organisations rather than the older ones. And there was a strong focus still on investment in AI and technology for business. I think that’s encouraging that people understand that hey, that’s an important way forward regardless of what’s happening. Leveraging tech, it makes a lot of sense.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think the sort of overall, I mean I saw international volatility turned up for the, the first time as a sort of key concern and obviously the context has shifted quite a lot and yeah, it’s kind of nice to see that people are realizing that technology can play a role in that rewiring and how we respond. And it’s not a case of sitting still and waiting for the world to be different. It’s about sort of taking the Opportunities that exist in the world where we’re living in.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And there were a couple of interesting comments that came through. Mark Callender, who’s the Chief Executive at 2 Degree, you know, he commented on one particular way that he’s using agentic AI and he said he’s created agentic AI versions of all of his board members, which, you know, I think got a few laughs across the room. People are like, you what? And, you know, he explained it like this. When, you know, when he’s got to prepare for a board meeting, if, if he actually can put, you know, those, you know, board papers in front of, I guess, you know, an AI that kind of understands the different, you know, perspectives of his board, then, you know, he can actually be nudged to think about the sort of questions that they’re likely, you know, to ask when they get around the boardroom table or they’re, you know, into their meetings. And that, you know, allows him to maybe be more, you know, more prepared for the meeting, which I think, hey, that actually, that sounds like a good use case. Right? It is quite clever. I like it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And there was another comment also in regards to this was the, the chief executive of Warren and, and, and Mahoney here in, in, in New Zealand. I think it’s John, John Coop. And when, when, you know, he, he was asked around, well, where does Agentic AI fit into, into your business? At 2 degrees, sort of saying, hey, we’re, you know, we’re experimenting with a whole lot and we’ve got a range of, you know, AI tools. John’s comment was that, that they’re really expecting their software vendors to build agentic AI into their platforms. And so, you know, I don’t think that’s a, that’s a head in the sand approach. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a smart approach too. And I think, you know, each organisation, depending on where they sit, you know, have to, you know, have some sort of a plan when it comes to, you know, how we’re going to leverage this technology in, you know, positive and appropriate ways.

Paul Spain:
And I don’t think that means that they’ve, you know, shut everything out in terms of their AI usage. But it is very much, hey, the big lifts for them will come from, you know, the software that specific, you know, to them, I guess as, as a leading architectural firm, they’re relying on some pretty grunty software that helps them with building their plans and so on. And I think there probably will be Some significant uplifts in that area over the years ahead.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I mean it seems like it could be a really smart strategy. I think you don’t have to look for innovation by doing it yourself. You can absolutely look for it from your vendors and. Yeah, and something like architecture where presumably the ability to edit and adjust some of the concepts and evolve those designs, I mean those probably building pretty well on some of the sort of leading Global Frontier Labs models. And yeah, that’s not necessarily the innovation you want to be doing yourself on your team, but you want to be as much as possible running with the latest tools. And so maybe the obligation there is just to try and find vendors and make sure that your existing vendors are embracing the technologies to add the functionality.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know, you know, within the fields that I work we’ve definitely sort of seen a mix of things where it’s, let’s come up with something sort of bespoke for a particular purpose. But in a lot of cases there are, you know, there might be completely new off the shelf tools that sort of fit into the mix or, or they might be existing vendors who are building in those new capabilities. The last one I’ll mention is Nicola Taylor. She is a co founder of Tax Traders and Taxi. So they’ve got some interesting and very successful businesses there and they build a lot of technology themselves to create their own innovations. And her comment was that they’re now at a point where something like 80% of the code that they cut is agentically created or AI created for them. So that they’ve gone through what sounds like a really interesting journey in their case from the days where, you know, they just wanted to get in and get their feet wet and try these things out and you know, they’re probably less productive than what they had been previously.

Paul Spain:
But you know, now a point where, you know, they’re seeing really, really significant, you know, performance improvements in terms of, hey, they want some new capabilities, they’re able to deliver that stuff, you know, at a pace that they weren’t able to do so before. Also I like, you know, hearing that they’ve, they’ve not reduced their, you know, they haven’t let anyone go on their software development front. It’s actually just that they can now move a lot faster than what they were, you know, doing previously. So yeah, I think it’s important to, you know, to get these, these touch points and insights. I don’t know what you’re finding and whether you, you know, you’re building a lot of software yourselves. But does that sort of line up with things that you’re seeing?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think it does. I mean, we’re in the sort of newer company growing mindset. And so that’s a slightly different paradigm, I guess, than the sort of large established firms that are also canvassed in this who are reworking what they’re doing. The good part about building up from the start is that you don’t have the legacy and the challenges of transition. So I mean, we have, we have one amazing software developer on our team, but that’s kind of incredible to me. I mean, I had my first startup in social media and yeah, I mean we had a really sizable software team and what we can do now with one person is amazing. But yeah, I guess we’re in the business of building our business and growing our team and so we can just do that with these incredible tools sort of baked in, augmenting us, which I think helps with the adoption and helps with the impact.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s exciting. Now, a couple of things to touch on, I guess, more global topics. We’ve seen a bit of from varying directions. There’s things from inside. Uber is probably the one that sort of caught the most attention. But I guess the, you know, the heading is, you know, is AI now more expensive, you know, than using humans? And so we, you know, we’ve heard a few of these stories. In the case of Uber, I think they budgeted, it was something like three over, over three billion, you know, dollars. So that their, their, their, their dev, you know, their software development team could really utilize AI for, you know, for, for coding and you know, to give them this big uplift.

Paul Spain:
And then they burnt through that entire budget in a few months. Right. And so yeah, we’ve, we’ve started in recent months so these stories that actually. Oh no, it’d be cheaper actually to get a human to do that than to get the AI to do it. And look, I think it probably is important to recognize that as with any technology, you can’t just sort of throw AI in and expect it to solve all your problems and always be the best in every situation. And I think when we go down that track, we potentially create all sorts of risks. And I think you have to go in, experiment and learn and work out, well, where is artificial intelligence going to give an uplift without bringing in over level of risk or problems? Be that risk of dehumanizing a customer experience or be it a risk of actually that you’re spending more than doing it conventionally, which in some cases May make sense from a pace perspective. Right.

Paul Spain:
If it allows your startup to move four times as fast, but it’s gonna cost a bit more than using people in a particular area, then you may say yes to that. What are your perspectives on this? Have you kind of seen any areas kind of popping up and the things you look at and thinking, oh yeah, that’s a wrong area to be applying AI to?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I mean, I guess we don’t think about it and there’s a direct comparison to human labor. I guess it’s kind of a slightly. Yeah, it’s a slightly interesting framing for the article. But I mean, I do think your comments exactly right. It’s about what are you trying to achieve here. The Uber comments were kind of interesting to me because it sounded like we’ve got 5,000 developers, we’ve let everyone use AI as much as they want, and then we’re sort of surprised that we spent lots of money on tokens. It was kind of missing what they were trying, what was the thing they were trying to do and what was the budget for and had they achieved all the budgeted outcomes in a few months and actually this was a great investment and they wanted to do more of it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, everyone could take the rest of the year off. You’ve achieved your goals, they’re expanding in new markets. But yeah, it sounds like there’s some missing pieces. There may be in terms of clarity and discipline. And this is without delving deep into the story.

Jonathan Good:
And this is before you think about the economics of the frontier labs providing these models where they’re. I mean, I think about how, how great it is that we’re getting these access to these models that, you know, Anthropic and co are spending a lot of money on.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jonathan Good:
And, and they’re not breaking even on them at the moment.

Paul Spain:
And then the, the other element on AI is United Nations University report that indicates, you know, that some significant real world environmental, you know, costs of AI, you know, looking at things like the, you know, energy hungry, you know, data centers, the impact of, you know, training models and ongoing sort of daily use as this, you know, is, you know, having a material impact from a perspective of, you know, carbon emissions and sort of impact on, you know, water and land use. So yeah, just I think important to be looking at the whole picture when it comes to these things. I think it’s easy for me anyway, as a technologist and futurist to always get sort of super excited around the, oh, we get this uplift, but we also need to sort of spin things around and always be looking at, well, what’s the flip side? If there are great positives, there’s usually something to sort of temper that with that we do need to, need to consider. So I think it’s important that that whole picture’s looked at.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think there’s also some pretty amazing innovation around that. I mean, just as a local example, I mean, ABB’s local Hawke’s Bay office have been at the forefront of designing new UPSs for data centers, doing absolutely amazing things, changing their power consumption. I mean, there are, I guess technology can provide some of these answers and some of the AI models are themselves actually reducing some of the energy footprint. And so, yeah, I think it’s not a static picture, but building in places that have more renewables and leveraging those is an advantage. And we should feel pretty good about what we’ve got in terms of our energy endowment here in New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
No, that’s great. Well, Jonathan, keen to delve in now to the Scentian Bio story. Of course we’ve had you on the show before, but not everyone will have caught that. So maybe you can just give us a breakdown of what Scentian Bio is all about.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, so we’re. So we’re digitising smell and taste and we want, you know, your phone, your computer, LLMs to be able to smell the world and animals, humans, we’re able to collect real time chemical information about the world around us through smell and taste. But at the moment that’s inaccessible in a digital realm. And we’re making little chips that produce real time chemical information. And that’s initially for the food industry. That’s where we’re starting out.

Paul Spain:
Yep. So, and what you just held up,

Jonathan Good:
this is one of our chips for

Paul Spain:
those that are, you know, listening to the audio, which tends to be most of our audience. What Jonathan is holding up is a little gadget that I’m trying to put it in. Non technical. To me it looks like a kind of a solid state drive or something.

Jonathan Good:
It does look a bit like a USB stick or something.

Paul Spain:
Or a USB stick or a stick of ram. But there’s an element there where you’re able to. Yeah,

Jonathan Good:
this tiny little bit embedded in the plastic that’s about the size of my fingernail.

Paul Spain:
Right, right.

Jonathan Good:
And yeah, this is a liquid sensor, this version. And so the idea is you. So this comes to our first use case. So we’re working with some of the world’s largest food and beverage companies and they want to check the quality of their ingredients.

Paul Spain:
Right. So this is one of those problems that you can, you can solve is to make that cause how does that compare with using Scentian Bio’s technology and what they would have been doing previously?

Jonathan Good:
Yes, I mean at the moment people want more natural ingredients. So the food supply chain is oriented around trying to consume more milk, horticultural products. I mean all of these are great inputs into, into the food supply chain. But what happens in reality is they turn up at a food manufacturer, they take a sample and they send it away to a lab and it runs on a big giant mass spec machine in a lab and it takes at least an hour and a half to actually run the sample. But the logistics of getting it to and from means generally the results come back the next day. And the consequence of that with perishable food is by then you’ve already made something. And so that’s why as consumers we observe in the food industry recalls and there’s a lot of food waste from write offs and there’s a lot of rework in terms of manufacturing. So those are all the things that exist today as a consequence of the sort of slow information flows from these big analog machines.

Jonathan Good:
And what we’re doing is we’re making these small chips that can be used anywhere. So at the truck dock where a load’s coming through, you can literally take a sample of a new batch and check then and there the quality of that sample. And so before you run production, you’re confident about what you’re using and you can put food to its best possible use.

Paul Spain:
And can you share with us what specific sort of product areas that you’re seeing sort of the most interest being in New Zealand. You already mentioned milk. Is that an area or is it more the more manufactured sort of products that need to go through this type of check?

Jonathan Good:
Yes. We have pilots underway with seven leading global food and beverage companies. So a couple here in New Zealand and then predominantly in the US and there we are, we’re working on more specialised food ingredients. So we’re starting out with sort of high value food products that are then used in a lot of other products. And so the flow through impact of those being off spec or having taints or contaminants is really, really damaging. And so we’re spotting particular known contaminants in those samples. That’s the current highlights.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. And so you would see that over time this will help those businesses to not have so much sort of, you know, waste and to catch issues sort of sooner. So this, you know, ultimately has, has kind of Flow on in multiple directions to, you know, safety for, you know, for consumers in terms of the products they consume. But also, you know, obviously some good, you know, financial benefits of catching these things early as well.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah. And it’s, I mean, this is a product for everyone. So in the, in the food context, you know, we’re starting out with, with some of the largest firms who we can, you know, build our expertise with. But ultimately, you know, our chips are, are inexpensive. They don’t require any, any capex. You know, there’s no big machine, there’s no lab. And so this is something that, you know, in that spirit, every food manufacturer could be using and so it can be ubiquitous. Yeah.

Jonathan Good:
And then, and then there’s the other platform opportunities where we see chemical information being useful. But this, you know, we’re starting out in this $8 billion food quality market.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. And you, you’ve secured $7 million in pre series A, in a pre series A, you know, funding round. I’m curious to, you know, to hear a little bit about, you know, that, that journey and you know, what, what were the, what, what was that like to, you know, to go through and you know, any, any tips for, you know, for listeners that are, you know, maybe on their own journeys with their own startups or, you know, even, even. Yeah, feedback for, for those on the, on the VC sort of side. Yeah.

Jonathan Good:
So we’ve closed a $7 million pre Series A round. It was led by Icehouse Ventures and with strong support from Cultivate Ventures, DYDX, Toyota, K1, W1 Booster. And we. Yeah, I guess we. Yeah, I mean, fundraising is one of those things as an entrepreneur that’s always demanding. I mean, you’re out there telling people about what you’re making and they’re asking hard questions and, you know, attempting to sort of cross check and. Yeah, and so I think, I mean, what was it like? It was a lot of conversations. And you know, I think for me, a strange part of me really likes fundraising because you talk to a whole bunch of incredibly smart people and they ask really good questions and in doing that you learn more about what you need to be conscious of.

Jonathan Good:
What are the risks that you should be managing, what are the opportunities that you weren’t considering? And yeah, I think for us, that fundraising journey, over the course of six months, I talked to a huge number of people and felt like we’ve really sort of strengthened and learned about what we are trying to do, what the path for that looks like. And. Yeah, and then ultimately, you know, had fantastic support from folks to do that.

Paul Spain:
And in terms of, you know, part of it obviously is talking and, you know, sort of sharing the story, the potential that you see in it. But I’m presuming there’s also a fair element of sort of behind the scenes due diligence in terms of, you know, numbers and data and so on. You know, how challenging is, you know, is the sort of the to and fro on those sorts of things to kind of, you know, land on the numbers and get people across the line. Because I think a quick chat with you, it’s pretty easy to be convinced, like, wow, this is a really exciting area to be involved in. But ultimately at some point you have to land on evaluation and how much money that you’re raising at a given point. How do those pieces look?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think there’s. Yeah, I mean, there’s sort of a few bits in there. I mean, on the sort of financial forecasting and the sort of due diligence. Yeah, I think those are always things that are the hard and you do them at a moment in time. And then as the sort of fundraising and the round progresses, there’s this need to sort of rework and revise those as. Yeah, I mean, literally you just live through time and in a startup that’s very material. But yeah, I think it also relates back to this point I was making about feedback because smart people who’ve seen a lot of other startups provide useful input and you realize, oh, we should be planning to invest more in that, or maybe our growth assumptions are slightly wrong here. I guess I’m really attuned to trying to make it more of a dynamic process.

Jonathan Good:
I think one of the things that in my mind entrepreneurs can do wrong is that they can try and make it this sort of moment in time. Investment memorandum or something. And it’s like, here it is. And like it or not, whereas to me it’s more of a joint endeavor with the folks that I can enlist to believe in what we’re doing. And then ultimately at the end there’s the sort of valuation discussion which is always the, the darkest art of all. But yeah, sort of somehow comes out, I think, from the sort of set of discussions. Then ultimately, you know, when someone issues a term sheet that, you know, sort of starts to set the tenor for where that can be landed.

Paul Spain:
And compare that with maybe your experience in the US having, you know, founded in the us, gone through Y Combinator and doing this in New Zealand. I mean, there’s a reasonable difference between, you know, fundraising in Silicon Valley versus in Auckland.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think, Yeah. I mean, first off, I mean, things take a little bit longer from here. I mean, in the Bay Area, obviously, you can very, very quickly connect with a large number of very, very, yeah. Of folks with very deep pockets, whether that’s angels or VCs, and, you know, those folks are very interested here as well. And so, I mean, we have significant US presence in our round, but that, I think there’s just a slightly different expectation of the level of relationship and that takes a little bit longer. But, yeah, I mean, I think it’s also. The world’s changed a fair bit as well. And at the moment, there’s obviously the sort of AI hype cycle that sort of sets the context for our fundraising as well.

Jonathan Good:
And yeah, I think that also just creates an environment where investment in. And we’re using AI and we’re building for AI, but we’re a little bit less traditional than the typical AI. And I think that also just makes the cycle time a little bit longer. But, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think whether it’s here or the US, there are a lot of VCs and angel investors who are looking for what the next most exciting opportunity is. And in the sort of bio AI space that, that we’re in, there’s a, There’s a lot of emergent opportunities. So we’re kind of excited to be part of that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And I, I, It’s a bit looking, looking recently a little bit about, you know, the, for those that are, that are maybe feeling like, oh, I’m kind of in the, in the, in the category that, you know, maybe I could, I could and should consider some angel investing. Any tips that you can share from your side for those that are maybe interested in getting their feet wet from

Jonathan Good:
that perspective in terms of looking to invest.

Paul Spain:
Yeah,

Jonathan Good:
I mean, I think angel investing is, there’s a hard craft to learn, but I mean, it can be an incredibly fun one too. I mean, I’ve personally made some angel investments and think about that as a. Yeah, it’s not in a pure financial approach, I would say, and I think that’s an important part of the domain because it’s at a very, very early stage. It’s very hard to, to build

Paul Spain:
a

Jonathan Good:
broad enough portfolio, I guess, to be able to generate the expected outcome. And so you have to expect you’re going to have some other subset of the distribution. But I mean, I think being engaged and being part of building a business is incredibly exciting. And I think for folks who have the means and the energy, it’s not just about the, the capital that they might be able to contribute. But I mean, we’ve been really lucky in our progress to this point to have some fantastic early investors who’ve been able to make the connections and provide the introductions that have laid the groundwork for what we’re doing.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah, I think it’s certainly a pretty important part of the picture and I guess that would vary, you know, in New Zealand in terms of how it would fit together versus say, you know, in the Valley a little bit too there. You know, different types of networks and so on. Okay, that’s great. And always, always curious around the, you know, the hard stuff. What would you say has been the, you know, the biggest challenge that you’ve had to deal with, you know, to date?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think. I mean, at the end we’re taking incredibly innovative technology and we are turning that into a product that is used to manage risk. And so this sort of commercialisation focus on reliability and performance, I think that’s the hardest challenge of what we’re doing. Making sure that when we’ve shipped one of our chips that we’re incredibly confident that it’s going to deliver to the customer’s expectation. But that’s the exciting stuff too, right? That takes it from being this interesting possibility into real world impact. And you know, the cool part I think is as a, you know, as a team, we’re really, yeah, I think we’re feeling really positive from seeing this journey that we’re on towards a product that customers are using and making decisions on. And you know, some of our pilot customers are talking about like the implications that it has for them and that’s.

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, it’s super material, which is in the scale of the companies that we’re working with is really cool.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. Well, that’s great. It’s been exciting to delve in a little bit more to what’s happening in the sentient bio world. Jonathan, if anyone’s wanting to get in touch, what’s the best way to do that?

Jonathan Good:
Yeah, I mean, just either ping me on LinkedIn or email me jonathanenentiumbio.com Definitely. Always open to ideas, comments, whatever folks think would be interesting and looking for what. I mean, it’s maybe worth just mentioning. I think we are ultimately a platform opportunity and we talked quite a lot about the food part, but we are in some early collaborations and some other areas about where chemical sensing can be useful. And if folks are listening to this thinking in my industry, this could be really interesting. I’d definitely be interested in talking further about that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. Good stuff. Well, thanks for coming on New Zealand Tech podcast again and of course, a big thank you to our show partners to Fortinet, Workday, One New Zealand, 2degrees Spark and Gorilla Technology. If you’ve been watching the video, do make sure you’re subscribing or following on your favorite audio platform. We are these days across, you know, probably most of the places you could look from YouTube Music and Spotify through to, you know, Apple podcasts and smaller platforms. Of course, if you’re listening to the audio, you know, make sure you do follow us on the likes of YouTube as well because we do have that sort of mix of audio and and video content. Well, thanks everyone for listening in and we’ll catch you again on the next episode. And thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Good:
Thanks so much.