Two years after a Dunedin teenager turned her own medical frustration into a business, the commercial muscle behind it is still being supplied for free. Tubie Time, the patterned medical tape startup founded by Olivia Adie, is getting voluntary promotional help from Ignite Consultants, a University of Otago student consultancy led by project manager Lachie Muir with consultants Sophie Hull, Lewis Garden, Maddie Trolove, Isobel McKewen, Ben Lomax and Liam Walters.
The students deserve the credit they are getting. But a venture this far into its life still relying on unpaid help for its marketing tells you something uncomfortable about how hard it is to get a small health product from good idea to proper business in this country.
A real product born from real need
This is not a vanity project. In 2024, Adie, then a 17-year-old Queen’s High School student, founded Tubie Time through the Young Enterprise Scheme. She lives with chronic illnesses including abdominal vascular compression syndrome, which require tube feeding and a central line, and she needed hyper-fix tape to hold that equipment in place.
The options were poor. Hospital tape was plain white or patterned for small children, while overseas alternatives were expensive and slow to arrive. So she used her school’s sublimation printer to make checkered, floral and animal designs, selling at cost and donating one unit to Dunedin Hospital or care facilities for every unit sold. Demand came from across the country. She went on to become the scheme’s 2024 class ambassador and sat at a table with then-Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the Business Hall of Fame that September.
That is product-market fit found the honest way, through lived experience rather than a pitch deck.
Goodwill is not a growth strategy
The problem is what comes next. A cost-price, buy-one-give-one model generates goodwill, not margin, and without margin there is no budget for marketing, distribution or regulatory work. Free student consultancy fills the gap admirably, but it is episodic, unpaid and tied to the academic calendar. Most businesses at this stage would be buying that function in.
This is a familiar pattern. Angus Blair, managing partner of deep tech fund Outset Ventures, tells founders to prove customer demand cheaply before raising, and says New Zealand investors will back early risk once demand is shown. Tubie Time has arguably done the first part. The leap from there to funded execution is where small health ventures stall.
The sector has been warning about this for years
The ecosystem’s own data has been flashing amber. The 2024 TIN healthtech report found export revenue had more than doubled to $2.62 billion over a decade, but just $67 million was raised in 2023 across roughly 200 companies. Dr Diana Siew of Medtech-iQ Aotearoa said at the time that level of capital was “not sustainable”. The same report found early-stage firms were underfunded relative to Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The translation layer that helps ideas become companies has also thinned. A May 2024 submission from the Consortium for Medical Device Technologies noted the MedTech CoRE had spun out two to three companies a year and created 76 jobs between 2015 and 2019, before it was “unfortunately been defunded”. The government’s response in Budget 2024 was a $2.7 million a year research translator programme for three years, a modest fix due to lapse around 2027.
None of this is new. A 2014 University of Auckland study of early-stage device founders found a “tenacity to survive and an urgency to secure funding”, with persistent gaps in commercial expertise and funding stability. More than a decade later, the same words fit.
Even the bigger players are scrambling
Further up the ladder, the story barely improves. Gaiatech’s anaesthetist co-founder says “we’ve had a few times where we didn’t have enough money to last to the next month” while trying to scale beyond its first customer. In August, Dunedin-founded Neumic Therapeutics flew to Silicon Valley to pitch for US$1 million, a sum that should not require a long-haul flight.
What it would take
The answer is not more grants. It is a deeper pool of small, patient private cheques, angel networks willing to back low-margin consumer health products with proven demand, and tax settings that reward that risk. A renewed, outcome-tested translation programme after 2027 would help at the margins.
Tubie Time may never be a Fisher and Paykel, and it does not need to be. But a country that wants more frontier firms should worry when one of its most compelling young founders is still running on volunteer hours. The students have shown what the business can do with help. The question is who pays for the next stage.
Sources
- Otago Daily Times: ‘Amazing’ voluntary work by students helps promote medical tape startup (2026-11-08)
- Otago Daily Times: Enterprise brings colour to lives (2024-08-22)
- The Post: The rise of the medical entrepreneur (2026-10-24)
- Otago Daily Times: Dunedin-founded med tech startup off to Silicon Valley to pitch for $US1 million (2026-08-26)
- TIN: 2024 NZ Healthtech Report (2024)
- iStart: Healthtech export growth, but investment concerns (2024-08-15)
- Treasury: Submission to the Productivity Commission Frontier Firms inquiry from the Consortium for Medical Device Technologies (2024-05)
- Health NZ: Meeting with Minister Hon Costello and Diana Siew (2024-09)
- University of Auckland: Characterising Early-Stage Medical Device Commercialisation in New Zealand (2014)
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