Techmatics turned a YouTube tutorial into a frontline security robotics export business

From under the house to the front line

Some of the best businesses start with someone complaining. In this case, a building inspector told Ravi Sanyal he was sick of crawling under houses. Sanyal’s response, as he told the NZ Herald, was disarmingly simple: “His exact words were, ‘I wish there was a robot that did that.’ And I just said to him, ‘I’ll make you one,’ and then I went on YouTube to see how to make one and did it … and fast forward [to] 2026, we have a company, and we have a team of people making them.”

That company, Techmatics Robotics, was founded in Christchurch in 2016. A decade on, its Cerberus-X robots are used by NZ Police in New Zealand and Australia. That distinction matters. This is not a grant-fed innovation pitch dressed up as a business. It is a company that started with a customer and a problem, and grew by solving more of them.

What the robots actually do

Techmatics machines are built for the jobs no one wants to send a human into first. According to the company’s material, deployments span the NZ Police Armed Offenders Squad for surveillance in hostage and high-risk situations, Corrections NZ for under-vehicle contraband inspections at prisons, Biosecurity NZ vehicle inspection at the Port of Auckland, and airport vehicle entry gates for aviation security. Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry uses them for biosecurity work too.

The common thread is danger and scale. Agencies are not trying to replace officers. They are trying to work out when and how to put them into environments that keep getting more hostile.

An arms race at the border

The demand is being driven by a straightforward reality. Criminal groups are getting more sophisticated, and the agencies chasing them need to match the pace. Paul Campbell, Customs assistant comptroller of maritime operations, put the driver plainly to the Herald: the main pressures are “the scale and complexity of the maritime environment, and the way transnational, serious and organised crime groups continue to exploit international supply chains and conceal drugs on or around vessels.”

The numbers back him up. In 2024/25, Customs prevented 9.3 tonnes of illicit drugs from reaching communities and intercepted 9 tonnes of illicit tobacco valued at $17.7 million. The Customs Annual Report 2025 is explicit that criminal groups are investing in their own technology to monitor shipments and avoid detection. When the other side is upgrading its kit, standing still is not an option.

The spending wave behind the sector

Government money is now flowing toward exactly the capabilities companies like Techmatics build. In May 2026, Customs Minister Casey Costello announced a $70 million Budget 2026 investment in maritime capabilities, including three remotely controlled underwater vehicles for Auckland, Tauranga and Lyttelton. Customs maritime manager Robert Smith summed up the efficiency gain: “We can drop one of these things overboard, do a vessel in about an hour and then move onto the next one.”

The deeper opportunity sits in defence. The Strategic Industrial Base Statement on Uncrewed Systems, released in March 2026, earmarked $50-$100 million for uncrewed maritime vessels and $100-$300 million for long-range remotely piloted aircraft inside a broader defence plan. In October 2025, then-Defence Minister Judith Collins made the export logic explicit, noting it is “harder for our New Zealand Defence tech businesses to be able to sell into overseas markets like Australia or the UK if they don’t have a New Zealand Defence Force brand on them as well.”

Not a one-off

Techmatics is part of a genuine cluster. In November 2025, then-Prime Minister Christopher Luxon pointed to Wellington’s Starboard Maritime Intelligence as a homegrown surveillance success now monitoring subsea cables in the North Sea and being used by the US Navy on North Korean sanctions compliance. Starboard raised $23 million in private funding. Tauranga’s SYOS Aerospace, whose chief executive Sam Vye called robotics “a capability step change” in October 2025, made the shortlist for the UK Ministry of Defence’s Project NYX.

The catch worth watching

The defence strategy that underpins much of this optimism is not flawless. In October 2025, defence commentators criticised its vagueness, with one dismissing it as “36 pages of waffle” and another warning that without mandated local preference, New Zealand was “only asking nicely.” Those cautions apply to the document, not the companies. Techmatics has already won contracts on merit in competitive markets, including Australia. The strategy will decide how big the opportunity gets. Whether Christchurch robots become a real export industry or a promising footnote now depends on the government converting glossy statements into procurement that actually favours the firms it keeps praising.

Sources

• The rise of the robot front line: How Christchurch-made machines are changing security, policing and border protection (2026-08-21)
• Customs unveils underwater tech to combat smugglers (2026-05-22)
• Strategic Industrial Base Statement: Uncrewed Systems and Uncrewed Counter Systems (2026-03-20)
• New Zealand Customs Service Annual Report 2025 (2025-06-30)
• Homegrown maritime surveillance platform may help in fight against meth – Prime Minister (2025-11-13)
• Government unveils strategy for the defence industry (2025-10-04)
• Military and civilian aerospace sectors benefit each other – dronemaker (2025-10-06)