The talent is real, the postcodes are not
A Stuff feature published this week profiles five New Zealanders quietly steering some of the most consequential technology companies on earth. Between them they lead businesses worth tens of billions of dollars. Not one of those companies is headquartered here.
That is a genuine source of national pride. A country of five million is producing founders at the leading edge of artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and developer infrastructure. It is also an uncomfortable question for anyone thinking seriously about New Zealand’s economic future. If the country’s most valuable tech export is increasingly its people, the value they create compounds somewhere else.
Who they are
Rotorua-raised, Waikato-educated Shane Legg co-founded Google DeepMind in 2010, the research lab whose work underpins most modern AI progress, and coined the term ‘artificial general intelligence’. Christchurch’s Alex Kendall, a Canterbury engineering graduate, co-founded autonomous driving firm Wayve, recently valued at NZ$15 billion after a US$2 billion round backed by SoftBank, NVIDIA and Microsoft.
Wellington’s Dave Ferguson, an Otago computer science graduate and former Google self-driving engineer, co-founded Nuro, now worth around NZ$10 billion. Christchurch’s Paul Copplestone co-founded Supabase, which raised US$500 million at a US$10 billion valuation in mid-2026, a five-fold jump in under a year, with tools used by Netflix, Meta, Shopify and Google. And Auckland’s Jeff Hawke co-founded London-based Odyssey AI, which secured US$310 million in a Series B before hitting a US$2.5 billion valuation, with Amazon, Google Ventures and the CIA’s In-Q-Tel among its backers.
Canterbury, Waikato, Otago, Auckland. The pipeline that produced these five is domestic. The capitalisation is not.
The sector at home is genuinely growing
This is not a story of a failing industry. The 2025 TIN Report put the technology sector’s total revenue at NZ$20 billion in FY2025, up 9.9%, with tech exports rising 12.4% to $15.31 billion, making technology the country’s third-largest source of offshore revenue behind dairy and tourism. Stats NZ’s 2023 supply survey found the software and IT services sector generated $14.5 billion in domestic sales, up 28% in two years and worth 3.7% of GDP. The TIN200 dashboard showed the top 200 firms now derive 76% of revenue offshore, up from 71% in 2018.
The sector is doing what New Zealand needs its economy to do. But the five founders above sit outside those numbers entirely. Their companies are funded by American, British and Singaporean capital and employ people abroad.
The capital chokepoint
Run down the cap tables and the pattern is stark. SoftBank led Wayve. Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC led Supabase. Odyssey’s round drew Amazon, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel. New Zealand’s Icehouse Ventures does appear in Odyssey’s backing, a meaningful signal that local capital can play at this level. But the scale available here for late-stage, high-growth companies is a fraction of what sits in San Francisco, London or Singapore.
Tech New Zealand’s 2026 manifesto, backed by 20 sector organisations, names the problem directly. Chief executive Graeme Muller warned that ‘our productivity is lagging, our talent is departing, and our infrastructure deficit is growing.’ Yet Muller’s framing is fundamentally about opportunity. He argued New Zealand could ‘move from exporting $17 billion a year of technology’ up to ‘$25 to $30 billion a year, and make it the largest exporter within a decade. Easily.’ The manifesto’s headline ask is that the NZ Super Fund allocate more late-stage capital into local tech firms, a direct acknowledgement of where the bottleneck sits.
The diaspora is an asset, if it comes back
The outflow is real but more nuanced than a straight brain drain. Treasury’s October 2025 analytical note found that by age 30 roughly 25 to 30% of each birth cohort is living overseas, with the New Zealand-born diaspora totalling around 915,000. Highly qualified people are most likely to leave, but also most likely to return. Among 40 to 44 year old residents in 2023, those with overseas experience made up 35% of residents but paid 42% of personal tax.
Meanwhile RBNZ data to March 2026 shows net migration remains positive, at 8,800 in the March quarter. But that headline number lumps the software engineer leaving for a London startup in with the seasonal worker arriving for harvest. It tells you nothing about the quality of who is leaving.
The five founders are the vivid version of that gap. New Zealand builds the talent, then watches the compounding happen elsewhere. Closing the distance between $15 billion in tech exports and Muller’s $30 billion is not a talent problem. It is a capital and ambition problem, and it is measurable. These five are the clearest illustration yet of what it costs.
Sources
- Stuff: Five Kiwis you’ve (probably) never heard of are dominating global tech (2026-07-04)
- NZ Herald: AI vibe coding startup Supabase, co-founded by Kiwi Paul Copplestone, raises US$500m at US$10b valuation (2026-06)
- NZ Herald: Kiwi founder Jeff Hawke secures $529m for Odyssey AI with backers including Amazon, Icehouse Ventures (2026-06)
- BusinessDesk: NZ co-founded world-builder Odyssey hits $2.5 billion valuation (2026-06-25)
- RNZ: New Zealand’s prosperity threatened by lack of cohesive growth policies, tech sector warns (2026-03-31)
- Treasury Analytical Note 25/10: Transnationalism over the lifecourse of New Zealand birth citizens (2025-10)
- 2025 TIN Report Press Release (2025-11-05)
- NZ Tech Sector Dashboard 2024 (2024-02)
- Stats NZ: Information and communication technology supply survey 2023 (2024-05-24)