NZ Hi-Tech Awards 2024: Innovation at Its Best

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Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m Paul Spain and today we have coverage related to the recent New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards. This year, the awards evening was in Auckland and included 1300 attendees, celebrating the nominated and winning organisations and individuals who were selected from across the tech sector here and were recognised for their impressive contributions. Thanks to our show partners, of course, Spark NZ, 2degrees One NZ, HP and Gorilla Technology, for their support of the New Zealand tech podcast and for getting behind the broader New Zealand technology sector. Now, today we’re going to dive into two interviews with winners at the NZ hi Tech Awards this year. First up, let’s jump in and talk with Kelly Rummins, who is the chief marketing officer at Starboard Maritime Intelligence, who walked away as winners of two awards at the NZ Hi-Tech Awards for 2024, the Duncan Cotterell most innovative Hi-Tech software solution and the Punakaiki Fund Hi-Tech startup company of the year. Congratulations, Kelly, to you and the team.

Kelly Rummins:
Thanks, Paul. Yeah, absolutely. It was such a great evening and a great way to recognise all the hard work that the team have been putting in. It’s probably the best part of my job is sharing the work that the team have been doing and Friday was definitely a highlight for us.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, maybe before we sort of delve in too far. Yeah. You can share with us a little bit around, you know, what you do. What is this whole world of maritime intelligence that starboard is involved in? And, you know, what does it mean?

Kelly Rummins:
It’s probably good to start with our customers. So a lot of our customers are government agencies, border security teams, fisheries organisations, including intergovernmental fisheries organisations. So mostly analysts using starboard to help with their role in terms of analysing the maritime world, looking to combat illegal fishing, prevent biosecurity outbreaks coming into New Zealand and protecting vulnerable marine areas. So essentially, it is a geospatial platform. So it’s quite hard to do a recording without being able to show you what the tech looks like, because it obviously, visually is amazing being able to see real time analysis of our maritime world.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. And how did the business start initially? What’s the background story?

Kelly Rummins:
So we were actually started under a previous name under Xera, with funding from MV as a regional research institute. And that’s been a really important part of Starboard’s foundation. It’s kind of formed the unique team that we’ve got of 26, which is made up of remote sensing and data scientists, engineers, designers, and really has led to what starboard is now. The first prototype was built with MPI looking at detecting non compliant fishing vessels out in the Tasman Sea that might be targeting critically endangered southern bluefin tuna. So that was back in 2020 and it’s really been the basis for where starboard is now.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. And so you talk 26 people. Is this an entirely new Zealand team? New Zealand based team at this point we are.

Kelly Rummins:
We’ve got one recently recruited employee in Australia, actually a maritime domain analyst. So a really good, valuable member of the team as we move into supporting more customers, as we’re growing and we are looking to grow in terms of particularly sales, looking around North America, but for now, yep, fully New Zealand based, except for one in Australia and a fully remote team, actually. So not due to Covid, but actually by design. The team has worked remotely, acknowledging that that was the best way to build across New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Now talk to us a little bit around what is unique, around what Starvaught maritime intelligence are sort of doing maybe, you know, compared to others. And, you know, why you think you’re sort of, you know, gaining that traction, funding support and I guess have won these two awards. What do you think the standouts are?

Kelly Rummins:
I think a lot of it is to do with that team background and bringing those unique skill sets together. So from a data perspective, it’s an absolute huge amount of data that flows in in real time. So we’ve got 4000 vessel positions that come in every second and are being processed by algorithms, machine learning models and flagging maritime activity, like when vessels might be meeting at sea to move fish or behaving abnormally. So bringing all of that together from a tech perspective, but also from a design perspective and a huge focus on our users and their roles and being able to provide just an incredibly usable platform that is really, really fast with a huge amount of data that allows analysts to answer questions that might have taken them days previously in minutes, really.

Paul Spain:
Right. So sort of, you know, the competitive, you know, types of offerings that sort of are, are in the market that exist, they’re not as cutting edge, would you say, compared to where you’re at at the moment. Is that a part of it that maybe technologies that have been developed over a long period of time and not leveraging the newest innovations and maybe there’s always often that, I guess, element of Kiwi creativity that comes in as well?

Kelly Rummins:
I think that’s definitely the case. We’ve found that a lot of our potential customers and prospects are using systems that may have been built in house a long time ago. They are a bit legacy and all bigger companies where it is hard to move quickly and innovate and use the latest options in terms of using the cloud and what’s available to make really efficient, fast geospatial software, and just to bring in additional data sources as they come up. So a big part with starboard is not just the vessel positions, but bringing in satellite imagery as well. And those are really hard problems to solve. And the team are just being able to apply all the expertise across their different roles to be able to bring that together. Another really important part that we’re finding is our focus on supporting people in terms of collaboration. So as you know, the ocean is obviously a large part of it is a shared space, so enabling analysts to work together in terms of combating these issues that we’re seeing out in the ocean is a really important part of the design of the platform.

Kelly Rummins:
And it starts creating that network effect where you start seeing people recommending to others, bringing others into the platform to work on it together, because they know they can solve the problem better as a team.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s great. So what would be an example of that type of sort of collaboration? Is that sort of, you know, within one entity, or is this sort of interagency type of collaboration?

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah, definitely interagency. Inter countries as well, intergovernmental. So since for the last couple of years we’ve been involved in several multilateral operations across the Pacific, these tend to run sort of four times a year, and they really are about all the countries coming together. Shared assets, shared teams, shared learning and intelligence to uncover non compliance with the conservation management measures that might be out there, particularly around fishing to stop things and issues like shark finning, labor abuse by catch. So being able to support those with the tech, and those are huge learning opportunities for us. Every time we’re involved, we learn more and more from our users. It’s a really intense learning environment for them and us, and we can build that into the future development of the.

Paul Spain:
Platform as well, and talk a little bit to running with an entirely remote team. This is something that we’ve certainly seen over the last decade or so, but Covid obviously sort of changed the game for a lot of organisations in terms of how they would deal with remote teams. And I think there’s often multiple sort of aspects to it. You know, there are things that can be missed from not bringing people together, but you get some pretty interesting benefits where you want to draw in on particular skill sets and you can’t find, you know, all of those people, you know, located in one place. And it sounds like that that’s certainly been you know, one of the, one of the keys, you know, for you to this point?

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah, definitely. I think just the intentional way in which the remote team was set up has been an absolute foundation for it. It wasn’t because it happened because of COVID Everything we do. I’ve never really worked anywhere where the documentation has been so phenomenal. So when I joined three years ago, you could go, have they thought about this customer? Have we looked at this market? And every conversation is documented because it’s all, you know, it’s all on slack, it’s all in the Google Drive, so everything’s available. And I think it’s actually a huge asset being able to have all those conversations open and available to everyone so that learning is continually there. We do get together as a team a couple of times a year. We’re getting a bit bigger now, so we’re getting together less often as a full team and more the engineering team and key members getting together at different times.

Kelly Rummins:
And a lot of the focus of that is a little bit of work and a lot of spending time as a team getting to know each other well so that when we’re working remotely, you have that personal connection as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s so important, isn’t it? But it can, you know, some organizations, it can be really, really hard to do, especially where people have maybe spread out globally. So having a team that’s maybe not spread as far, certainly at this point in time, must make that a little bit easier to coordinate.

Kelly Rummins:
It definitely has. I think for the, for a few members of the team, there’s a lot of travel involved. So we very much are looking to grow starboard globally and there is a lot of travel and that can be, you know, it takes a lot of time and commitment, which is amazing from those members of the team. So I think that offshore support is going to be really helpful, helpful for that. But we’re really mindful of how we grow globally now and bringing that culture of, of who the team is, but also recognizing that in those different markets, they will know those markets and those cultures better than we will. So it’s quite an interesting balance as we grow the team.

Paul Spain:
Yes. So how do you see the opportunities in terms of growth over the years ahead and that potential too, to scale with folks in different markets and having the boots on the ground, as it were, in different places? How would you see that looking over maybe the next three to five years?

Kelly Rummins:
It’s definitely an active focus of where we’re at right now as a team, we’ve been quite light in terms of sales and marketing and business development. So we’re pushing that at the moment to grow. We’re looking at growth in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe as our key markets and also across different verticals as well. So I mentioned we’re working a lot with governments and into government agencies, which is cool, but it can be a bit slow in terms of development. They’ve, you know, they’ve got long procurement cycles that we need to acknowledge and work through. And so we’re looking quite closely at other areas, particularly asset monitoring. So looking at the potential for supporting subsea cables, development of, of offshore wind and other areas in the maritime space that need that protection and that visibility.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess there’s probably a lot of potential areas that you could go into. Must be a challenge working out exactly what are the best areas to double down on and maybe those ones to sort of wait a little bit as you, as you scale it seems like you’ve got a really strong technical team and I was looking at some of the roles of your folks. Fair bit of depth there with that sort of expertise, but I guess there’s only so far you can stretch the team as well. So that’ll have to grow over time too.

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah, definitely. And we’ve been very lucky. We might have seen in the media recently with our first seed round of investment during I guess, what’s been a bit of a tricky time raising. So we’ve had amazing investors. Our lead investor, altered capital, Ice house Ventures, invest south Seoul Capital and Whakatupu Aotearoa Foundation, and one US based investor as well, with c ahead. So, yeah, we’ve been very fortunate in terms of their support and that’s going to really help us with that growth as well.

Paul Spain:
Yep. And that seed round was that. What were the numbers on that? I think I saw? Was it $5 million mentioned?

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah, $5 million.

Paul Spain:
That’s really exciting. And so I guess sort of delving into some of the key sort of technologies here. We’ve watched over a very short space of years and seen that the number of satellites that are in the sky, I think, more than doubled and maybe the last three years or so. It’s nuts to see all these sort of changes going on. What are the technologies that really make what starboard are developing possible?

Kelly Rummins:
Our main underlying tech or data sources is AI’s, which is essentially a receiver that’s put on most larger vessels, passenger vessels that are out there in the ocean as a safety so that they can navigate around one another. And quite some time ago satellite companies worked out that they can start picking up those signals. It wasn’t the original intent of AI’s. It’s really interesting. There’s not many areas where you can track vessel movement in such an open way. So that is one of the core components of starboard. But your mention of satellites, the remote sensing side of things. So a couple of sensors that we using quite actively are synthetic aperture radar.

Kelly Rummins:
We’re also looking at Earth observation through eo data and also radio frequency. There’s a few other sensor types, but we found those ones working quite well. Navigating that space is really interesting as new satellites get put up into space, working out processes for looking at low resolution wide areas to start with, and then potentially tipping and queuing so that you can follow up behind with a higher res satellite, for example, to actually see what vessel it is. So you might go, hey, there’s a vessel there, and then follow that up with a more detailed sensor to actually identify that vessel. Those are all things that are really developing at the moment. It’s pretty exciting. There’s more of the satellite companies, imagery companies bring online their APIs for tasking, so being able to integrate with those so that we can actually make that reality of the tipping and queuing a lot more automated. So, you know, in here, in starboard, in our algorithms, we’ve identified potentially what we refer to as a dark vessel.

Kelly Rummins:
It’s not reporting on AI’s and we want to know more about that. So that’s the future, I guess, of that, which is pretty exciting stuff.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess those dark vessels are ones that you can imagine governments are particularly interested in making sure they’re across. When it comes to ones that are sort of travelling across international waters and into different localities. What are the sort of, some of the typical situations that, you know, that you’re able to help with?

Kelly Rummins:
So definitely in the fisheries space, so a lot of the time, especially in the Pacific, they’re not actually always dark vessels. They’re not actually out there intentionally turning off their reporting devices. And the fisheries agencies across the country, Pacific have other means of tracking them as well. That is a bit more proprietary, but often it might be just understanding more about the compliance of those vessels. So who’s out there? You might see them on AI’s, then they might pop off for a bit, which is fine because they might not actually be required to be reporting based on their vessel size, but knowing that, yep, they might be meeting another vessel and actually seeing and observing that encounter with between those two vessels and the imagery to work out? Where are good areas for assets to go out? Where should the planes fly overhead? Where should the boats go out to potentially board those vessels and understand a bit more about are they complying with what are really detailed and well thought out compliance requirements to make sure that what all the vessels are doing in the area is the best thing in terms of the fishery?

Paul Spain:
Yep. And I mean, what is the satellite sort of imagery sort of look like today? What is that landscape in terms of satellite imagery and other sort of satellite based sensors? How much data do you have available, and how has that changed the picture over the last few years?

Kelly Rummins:
It’s quite interesting because you’ve got a few providers out there which are essentially free in terms of the imagery. So there’s sentinel one, for example, which is a synthetic aperture radar sensor, and that’s mostly a land based sensor, but it kind of skims the coasts, so it can be useful. But it is also fairly low resolution, so it doesn’t give you all that detail. Those are out there. And then we’ve got more of these commercial players coming on board where they might be providing much higher resolution imagery, but it could be quite costly. So you need to make sure that where you’re tasking that imagery is in the right place, in the right area and also understanding the orbits. So does this work over remote areas of the Pacific versus something that’s nearer to shore? So understanding all those elements, even where is the downlink station available so that we can get the imagery to the customer on time for the work that they’re doing? That’s another important element to understand. So it is kind of bringing it all together is when it works best.

Kelly Rummins:
And that is one of the roles that starboard can play. You know, we’re not a data provider. We don’t have the hardware. We’re agnostic to the data, so we’re happy to bring in any source that helps solve the problem. And I think more and more, that core platform piece where you can have all that data coming in alongside the AI’s information, the latest satellite information available to meet the customer problem is a good place for us to be going. And it’s not just the satellites either. So obviously we’re exploring more and more in terms of other sensing opportunities. Looking at.

Kelly Rummins:
We recently ran a webinar with Saildrone looking at their technology. So they’re the unmanned vessels out in the ocean. So some really interesting other tech coming up as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And what are you seeing on that, on that front with the. With the unmanned you know, vessels we’ve heard, you know, lots of little bits and pieces over the, over the years, but you’ve probably got a much better viewpoint on it than most of us in terms of, you know, what’s, what is actually, you know, happening on that front sort of autonomous and, you know, so on vessels that are, that are not what we’re used to over previous.

Kelly Rummins:
Decades, yes, they’re out there for long periods of time. It’s always quite amazing to have a look at them in starboard when they’re reporting on their AI’s. So they’ll be out surveying seamounts to understand the bathymetry. They’ll be out there potentially detecting vessels as well that may not be reporting on AI’s. And then they’ve got their, their cameras on board so that they can record it, record the vessels that are out there. So yeah, they’re definitely out there and they’re doing a lot of work similar I guess to the satellite providers where working to bring all the data sources so that it’s as useful as possible for the customer doing that analysis piece. And then of course, the more data you get, the more complex it gets and the more the algorithms and the analysis becomes really important.

Paul Spain:
A really, really interesting area. Anything else that you think folks might be interested in knowing, knowing to fill out the broader picture?

Kelly Rummins:
I guess one of the main things is just the team a little bit around. I think when we accepted our award, they said our unique approach and our fresh approach to leadership as we went up on stage and we are a bit different in that way. It has really been a team effort to get started for where we are. It’s not your usual startup story with the founder. What makes it so special is it’s a really passionate team. We’ve got this focus on ocean protection and just this desire to build the most comprehensive view of the maritime world to help our customers.

Paul Spain:
That’s brilliant. And if you were to sort of look, and I don’t. How long have you been involved in starboard at this point, Kelly?

Kelly Rummins:
Just coming up three years.

Paul Spain:
Okay, so you’ve been there for a good chunk because when did things kick off?

Kelly Rummins:
Zero was a wee wee while ago, but really starboard in that first prototype was about four and a bit years ago.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Right. So, you know, I guess, you know, I’m curious what you’re aware of in terms of, you know, what have been the sort of the harder challenges to, you know, to have to face because I think, you know, often the best and most interesting sort of learnings with, with startups and businesses are those tougher things to have worked through any that you can share?

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah, I think starting out as the research institute and having that overall mission, but then needing to work towards commercializing things and working out actually where are we going to find product market fit? What is the role? So that approach to prototyping with one customer was a great way to start and then what next? We’re looking to work with government agencies, kind of getting into a tough sales cycle there. It’s not an easy procurement process. What can we do to stand out or make that possible for people to actually buy starboard? So that’s been one of the biggest challenges, but I think it’s also our biggest opportunity because we are providing something that’s much more innovative. We’re in a new space, software as a service. I went to southern SAS not that long ago and they talked about how the market’s quite evolved now and it’s quite a challenge and there’s a lot of competitors out there. When you’re operating more in the government space, it’s a little bit more early days. So it’s an opportunity for us, but it’s a sales challenge for us as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I can imagine those longer sales cycles bring their own challenges and pressures in terms of, I guess, the offerings that you’ve put in the market. I often come across organizations, especially in the startup space, having to pivot from one thing to another before sort of landing on the on the right things. How has that sort of played out? Sounds like there’s probably quite a range of opportunities available, but probably quite important to be focusing on those that aren’t going to take too long to yield some positive results from.

Kelly Rummins:
That’s definitely a big focus for us. We’ve got a clear path in the sort of fisheries maritime domain awareness sector and those customers and we’ve built an amazing base of awareness and what is a fairly niche market globally. It’s pretty great role when you’re doing the marketing and you get to focus on something that’s niche but all over the world. But yeah, looking at those additional markets. So we spend a lot of time working out where we might have additional product market fit. Where is it going to work? Pretty much an ongoing conversation that we have every day and that’s where we have landed on asset monitoring. Feeling like it’s a good plan. We have one customer in that space, so we know there’s a bit of product market fit, but we’re really in that learning phase.

Kelly Rummins:
So spending a lot of time talking to people attending conferences, hosting webinars to start to understand more about the sector and what the opportunity is. It’s looking good, but, yeah, lots to learn. Still.

Paul Spain:
Exciting. Exciting. Well, yeah. Congratulations on this double win at the NZ Hi-Tech awards and on the recent seed round. How do you think those two things sort of play into the next phase of, I guess, of life for Starvard?

Kelly Rummins:
Yeah. As I said, it’s probably the best part about being the CMO is getting to tell the story of the team and I think it’s just been a really great moment for everyone to stand back and go. We’ve gone from how do we commercialise this? Is this going to be a real business? To. We’re definitely a real business. We’ve got an amazing product that’s being recognized in New Zealand. We’ve got lots of opportunity ahead of us. So, yeah, it’s fantastic to kind of wrap up at that point and go, this is recognition for all this work. This is not just us kind of going, yeah, we’re great.

Kelly Rummins:
This is the industry recognizing all the hard work from the team.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, congratulations to the whole team and all the best for the journey ahead. And we’ll look forward to hearing a little bit more, maybe a bit further down the track with starvation growth and progress.

Kelly Rummins:
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Ok, thanks, Kelly. Well, I’m sure you found what starboard maritime intelligence do to be quite fascinating. Now let’s hear from Matthew Sells, the chief executive of Novo Labs, who impressively were winners of three New Zealand Hi-Tech awards for 2024, the aware group most innovative deep tech solution, Bramac most innovative Hi-Tech hardware product, and the Kiwibank most innovative Hi-Tech solution for a more sustainable future. Great to meet you, Matt. Thanks for joining us.

Matt Sells:
Thanks for having me on, Paul, look. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Big congratulations. Huge win for novo labs at the NZ Hi-Tech awards.

Matt Sells:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
How are you feeling?

Matt Sells:
Everyone’s been buzzing over it for all weekend. We obviously had Mark and Andy up at the awards dinner to receive the awards, but then on the. On the company chats, everyone was watching it at home as well and it was really good to see. Everyone was really excited about it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. And I guess often the sort of nature of being involved in a startup that you’re not necessarily around and able to attend these things. You were travelling yourself.

Matt Sells:
Yeah, no, we actually just got back from a trip over to Europe. There’s a really large conference over there called itat, which is the largest water wastewater conference in the world. So we were actually, timing wise, not the best for getting to the awards dinner, but we were over there doing the expo there and then meeting some really large players in the industry afterwards, which was really good for the company.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, let’s dive in. Tell us, what is it that you do if you can break it down into simple language for those of us that aren’t experts in your area of technology?

Matt Sells:
Yeah, I’ll give it a go. But no, it’s, the main thing that we’re trying to do is clean up wastewater or hard to treat liquids. We use a technology called uv disinfection. And so that’s been around for decades, which you have these uv lights, which are sort of like fluorescent tubes, and typically what you do is you’d submerge them into the liquid. And so they’ve been doing that for decades, and it works really well when the water’s clean. So drinking water systems will often have uv disinfection on them. What we do instead is that we take those lamps out of the liquid, and then we create a thin film down the bottom. So if you can sort of imagine, like a sunbed with the lamps above, and then instead of someone laying in the sunbed, we shoot this thin film of liquid out underneath.

Matt Sells:
And so what that means is that we can achieve uv disinfection of really hard to treat liquids. So if you’re imagining, like, wastewaters and things like that before it’s discharged out into the environment, you want to remove the pathogens, it often be quite hard because of colored compounds or solids or things like that. But we find that we can get sort of market leading disinfection in those liquids that you wouldn’t normally be able to do.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, brilliant. And how do you go from having that idea to commercializing it? And, you know, how far along that journey are you?

Matt Sells:
Yeah, so it is a long process. And I came in near the end of the research part. Just starting into the commercialization out of Massey University, Andy Shipton, who’s the chief technical officer, he’s the inventor of the technology. He was a professor out at Massey University and was working on that for about 1015 years. So quite a long, long time to go from the idea to an actual product, and then the next stage is then going, okay, cool, we’ve got this really great product, or a really great idea. How do we turn that into a product that is then commercially viable? And so we’ve been doing that for about the last three years. So it spun out of Massey through massive incurs, which is their commercialization arm, and then we had some local investors come on board DDL and then most recently climate venture capital fund come on to really help with the commercialisation and taking that out, but it’s quite a long process of doing that and it’s a fun sort of stage to be on, but a lot of hard work from the team to really take it out there to the world.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I can absolutely imagine. So in that journey at the moment, can you tell us around how big your team is, the sort of people that you’re. And the sort of people you’ve got on the team?

Matt Sells:
Yeah. Yes, we’re about ten people. We’ve got five, six full time, six full time staff for part time. And it’s quite a different mix of people. We have a lot in the research and development side, which is probably right if you’re taking the tech out of the university and really trying to commercialize it. We’ve got some staff in R and D who are looking at next products and improving what we currently offer. And then we’ve got two full time staff in the workshop to actually build these units and then get them out. And we have our business development manager Jordan, who came on recently because, yeah, you can build the tick, you can develop it, but you still got to actually get it out to market.

Matt Sells:
So he came on recently to do that and then we’ve got some part time staff to assist with all aspects from office to workshop to R and D. Fantastic.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, it’s always that challenge, isn’t it, as you’re growing in terms of who’s going to wear what hats and there’s so many different hats to wear. I’m sure it must, you know, be interesting for you with, you know, you’re officially the chief executive, but I’m sure you do a lot of things right now.

Matt Sells:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot of hats to wear, which is classic for a startup that sort of. I think it doesn’t really matter what startup company you’re in, you’re always wearing a lot of different hats, which makes it exciting though, because every day is different and you’re always doing, doing different, different tasks. But, you know, it was only a couple of years back that we had two staff out at a shed in Massey University and there was Mark Kiley, our chief engineer, who really knowledgeable guy and wearing many different hats. Well, he knows everything from the fabrication side to the control coding side and everything in between, and awesome at being able to take a problem and then solve that and produce a quality product out at the end. But then, yeah, it’s sort of the more people you get on, the less hats you have to wear, but you still have to have quite a big coverage of all the different areas which. Yeah, I don’t know, I think that’s the fun and challenging part, is that you have to sort of COVID a whole lot of bases and try and understand everything.

Paul Spain:
Oh, well, sounds like you’re managing to juggle it pretty well based on the award wins, that’s for sure. Now, there’s always the financial aspects of any organization, and at some point you, even as a startup, you’ve got to look after a couple of things. One of them is who’s going to fund you to get started, and then sooner or later, the commercial sort of sales opportunities and so on. Maybe walk us through a little bit on where you’re at on both of those fronts.

Matt Sells:
Yeah, so we are selling units into the New Zealand market right now and we’ve actually had really good success with that so far. The hard thing with the new technology is that particularly when we make quite bold claims of what we can do with this new technology, that people in the uv space, you wouldn’t normally think that we can achieve the disinfection on the liquids that we do. So what we found is that running trials on sites was a really good tool to sort of show what we could achieve. And that really did help with getting those initial early sales where we can actually take a unit to the site, run their liquid through, get the. Get the treatment that you need, and then sort of show them the numbers that they’d get if they bought a full scale system. So with that sort of approach, we’ve managed to get a few sales into the New Zealand market. There’s not that many large uv sales in New Zealand at all. And so you have to start looking to go further abroad.

Matt Sells:
And that’s really where, when you’re starting to go further abroad, you need to get more staff on and that means that you need more capital to be able to actually do all that stuff. And so recently we had climate venture capital fund come on board with the whole idea to take it from a New Zealand business out further abroad. And a lot of time this year already we’ve been spent over in Australia developing that market. And we’ve got a couple of trial units actually going out over there later on this year, which is really exciting. Into municipal space and into industrial.

Paul Spain:
Oh, brilliant. And can you talk at all to the level of investment that you’ve had to date, Matt, in terms of what level of investment you’ve attracted.

Matt Sells:
Yes. So we actually, because we’ve been selling units into New Zealand, we haven’t had to go out for a large amount of investment. So we recently closed a round for just over a million dollars with CVCF. And, yeah, that’s enough to get us over into Australia, get those trial units over there, and then also start looking to get further abroad from that as well. And then it’s just a matter of how quickly, how fast sort of thing you want to take it to the globe. And then when you start looking at going into Europe and into the US, then making sure you balance the sort of capital raise required to do that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it looks like an incredibly exciting opportunity. The scale of the market globally must be sort of eye watering. I’m picking this is not something that’s a small market at all, is it?

Matt Sells:
It’s a massive market and it’s also not going away. Anytime. There’s always going to be a need for water and wastewater treatment, because you’re always going to need to drink water, and then you always have wastewater product coming out the end. But then even further beyond that, you’ve got the likes of processed liquids inside factories, any liquid that’s sort of used in a factory. So that could be for conveying product across, like a floating product down the line, or it could be like machining fluid, all of that sort of thing. And then a whole other area is food and beverage as well. And we’ve got a really good product for the food and beverage industry because sugar in particular, absorbs uv light really well, which means that it’s really hard to uv treat. And so our whole product, supercritical uv, is designed to treat low clarity liquids.

Matt Sells:
And that’s exactly what you find that a lot of food and beverage space. And so that’s something that the R and D team are looking into now, is how can we take our product that’s really good at wastewater treatment and then use that in the food beverage space, which just opens up a whole other market. But it’s massive. When you start looking at the global sort of stage for that, it’s billions of dollars. There was actually just a large acquisition from two global uv giants, Avoqua and Xylem. And Xylem acquired of Oakwood for $7.5 billion. So, you know, like, that’s just massive sort of numbers that you’re looking at.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep. Yeah. That’s definitely the bigger, bigger end of town. So I guess it gives you something to sort of set your sights on. Do you have kind of a long term view in terms of how much Runway there is, what the opportunity is, you know, longer term in terms of selling it, just building it into a large entity on its own, and the sort of areas that you could expand into. Because I guess you’ve got that challenge that probably all of us have is what to focus in on, what to double down on.

Matt Sells:
Oh, definitely. There’s a lot of shiny things that get your attention. You go, oh, we could do this, we could do that. But then you’ve really got to know what your key points are, what your key strengths are, and really focusing on those areas, because it is very hard when all these different opportunities are around, and it can be challenging sometimes to keep on track with what you’re really trying to do. Our sort of long term goal was to develop this out further. We have a technology that’s globally patented and is really good at that local space that no one else can do. So we were over at that large water conference, and we had the big players in the uv space coming over and looking at this product from a little company in New Zealand. We had these global water giants coming over and going, wow, we’ve never seen anything like this.

Matt Sells:
This opens up places that we can’t currently treat. And so it’s really sort of, how big can we get before. Before we’re so big that these guys just go, yeah, there’s such a strong market there that we need to get a piece of that as well. And so to do that, you’ve really got to develop and show that market potential. And it’s an exciting sort of space where if you’ve got already this interest from these massive global companies, that we’re still a small company out of New Zealand, and then going, well, we get into Australia, we get into Europe, we get into the US, and the potential is just huge.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep. And are you offering something that you would end up licensing or how does that tend to look?

Matt Sells:
Yeah, there’s a few different ways that we’re looking at doing it. The most common one is the distributor agreement, where we actually manufacture in New Zealand still. And then. Then we just have local distributors in those different countries, different regions. And, you know, that’s quite common for these other global uv companies as well. There’s one company that has agents in every single country, but then the next two, they all have just distributors who do that local work for them, and then they manufacture and sell that product through them. What we end up doing is probably going to be similar to what they’re doing if they’ve been around for a really long time doing that, but definitely right now we’re looking at local distribution to help with that, sales and marketing and service support afterwards.

Paul Spain:
Brilliant. So I’m picking that means you’re going to be hiring more people in the future. If there are folks that are listening in and think, oh, this sounds like something I’d be interested in. What sort of people do you be expecting to hire? What sort of roles?

Matt Sells:
So currently we have a lot of engineering sort of staff in the company, and what we’d really be looking at for the future is getting more sales and marketing staff, because when you’re going out to all these different countries, you do need to have quite a few people in the place on the ground, people with a background in water, wastewater treatment. I don’t know if there’s that many in the area. There seems to be quite a shortage of staff in that space, but that’s definitely a positive right now because when you’re trying to figure out where this product can fit in, you really need to know the entire process. So it’s not, not like a standard sales process. You need to understand how it fits into their current operation. But yeah, I’d say moving forward, our next few hires are definitely going to be into the sales and marketing space.

Paul Spain:
And what would you say have probably been your biggest challenges to get to this point?

Matt Sells:
The challenge keeps on changing. There’s always a new challenge that comes around the corner. Getting the first couple of sales is always a really big thing before that. That’s obviously getting a product that works. And then now sort of our challenge is getting the right people on board so that we can take this out further. And I guess that’s part of the startup. You solve one of those challenges and then there’s another challenge that comes up straight after that, and it’s just constantly trying to keep on top of all of them, but that would be sort of the progression of how it’s worked so far.

Paul Spain:
Yep, yep. That’s making sense. So really where to from. Where to from here, matt?

Matt Sells:
Yeah. So big push into Australia for the rest of this year. That’s really the next market that we’re trying to enter into. And we’ve already had lots of great interest coming out of there. And as I said earlier, a couple of trial units should be going in later this year, which is awesome for the team to get that in. Just over in Europe, talking with a whole lot of different people over there and the interest coming out from distributors from all sorts of countries in Europe and further was really. Yeah, I know. It was good to see.

Matt Sells:
And it’s just trying to find who are the right people to partner with for that distribution. But really we want to take this technology developed in Palmerston North Massey University and really get that out to the globe because it’s such a great technology. It solves the problem that everyone wants clean water, everyone wants clean wastewater. We don’t want to be polluting the environment. How can we actually get this technology out there? So it’s making a difference and, yeah, that’s sort of. Sort of the end goal is going well. Yeah, how can we do that? Brilliant. Yeah.

Matt Sells:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Look, I mean, I think it’s really exciting to, you know, to see, you know, technology like this come out of New Zealand and, you know, be able to have that sort of positive impact, you know, environmentally, not just across the country, but across the world. Are you seeing that there’s, you know, there’s that sort of growing willingness to invest in things that, you know, are going to help from an environmental perspective? Is that kind of, you know, stepping up with the organizations that you’re talking with?

Matt Sells:
Yeah, it definitely is. And it’s sort of every. I know every year there’s more and more push to have cleaner environment. We can’t keep on pumping stuff out and expecting everyone to be perfectly fine. I think health issues are becoming more and more of a concern for people and then looking at ways, well, how can we prevent that from happening? As an environmental engineer, that sort of is what you want to see. You want to see people actually going, well, hey, we can’t do that. We should be doing better. How can we do better? And it can be quite expensive.

Matt Sells:
And this sort of offers a good way of at least getting rid of that immediate human health risk, because the immediate risk is pathogens getting out into the environment. And if you can disinfect it, make sure it’s clean before it goes out, then people can be swimming in the rivers without having to worry that they’re going to get safe. That’s why when, when we were patenting the technology, places like India and China, where they don’t have the best track record with wastewater discharge, well, this gives them something where they can go, well, hey, we can install something like this, and then we’re at least not polluting the rivers that the community just down the road is going to be taking the water out from.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s incredible. So maybe you can just sort of walk us through one of those use cases. What that sort of story might look like either something that you’re already doing or, you know, one of those. One of those future situations and how that might look with. With your tech in play and. Yeah, how that would work, what, you know, what is being treated and you know how it operates.

Matt Sells:
Yeah. So typically you either have, like an industry or. Or a municipal domestic wastewater treatment plant, and you collect all the water together and then you go, okay, well, what do we need to do to actually achieve some level of cleaning it up before it’s then discharged out into the environment? And so that could either be discharge into a river or stream, irrigation onto land or ocean outfall. That’s the three typical places where you’d be looking to discharge. Each of them have their own sort of requirements of what you should do before you discharge that out. And so that could be removing the organic material or removing the nutrients or removing the pathogens. And so depending on where you discharge, depends on what you actually need to do. But if you’re irrigating, if you’re discharging to waterways or discharging out into the ocean, you don’t really want pathogens getting into those places.

Matt Sells:
And so what you’d normally do is you’d have some other treatment upfront which can take care of the nutrients or the organic material, but then right at the end, before it’s discharged out, that’s where you normally look at having a uv system. And so what we offer is a way of achieving that disinfection without needing to spend a whole lot of money upfront. So if you’ve got a community that doesn’t have a lot of money, they’ve already got some form of treatment, we should be able to put our system at the end of that and at least achieve disinfection.

Paul Spain:
Brilliant. Oh, that’s great. Anything else that you wanted to add before we. Before we wrap up?

Matt Sells:
Matt, need to thank everyone who’s helped us so far on this journey. So massive inches, who obviously got us started, then DDL who came on board. That was really great help to get us going in New Zealand, and then most recently, climate venture capital fund, who their big push to get us overseas and get the technology out there and then. Yeah, like the team that I work with, it’s great being able to have such awesome people who really, they love what they do. And it’s when you come into work and you’ve got a team that’s all fizzing and excited and, you know, like with the awards night last Friday, and then everyone was watching it at home as well. Like, that was really cool to see. It’s more than just a job, right. It’s something that people actually want to come and do, which is awesome to see, so.

Matt Sells:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably it. From what I’ve. From what I’ve got.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Really exciting to chat today and, you know, really get a. A bit of an overview and taste of what Nova labs are up to. And we’re really excited to see how the journey progresses from here. And I think that what you’re achieving, obviously, is going to be a real inspiration to others. Just one last question. If I was to ask you why you think you. You did so well at the awards, anything that’s sort of really standing out to you in terms of the feedback and so on.

Matt Sells:
Yeah, I think when you got a technology that is actually doing good out in the world and people can really go like, yeah, we need clean water and this is something that can actually achieve that, I think it’s quite a tangible thing that people can. Can grasp onto and, yeah, I think that’s really what it is. We’ve got a great tech, a great team and people can actually see that and go, yeah, this is going to go out and do really great things around the world.

Paul Spain:
Well, I hope you really enjoyed that show and incredible what our tech companies are doing and achieving, both locally and around the world. Before we wrap up, course, a big thank you to our show partners to One NZ Spark, 2degrees, HP and Gorilla Technology for their support, both of the New Zealand Tech Podcast and of course, the broader tech and innovation ecosystems here in New Zealand. Alright we’ll catch you on the next episode. That’s Paul Spain, signing out.