We are looking to back bold and courageous founders with big dreams and innovative ideas - using technology to build highly scalable and fast-growing businesses. Together, we will help support Kiwi start-ups become world-class companies.

What we look for when reviewing start-ups for potential investment.

• MARKET:   

  How big is the target market and how fast is it growing? What do the competitors / market dynamics look like? Our review of this is often very nuanced and we want to understand how the product and approach will address the market and how big the addressable market is for the specific product or offering, not just the broader market as a whole.

• PRODUCT:   

  Is the product differentiated and do customers want / value that? Is the product defendable from competitors following suit? Will the product be commercially viable? For more technical products, we also want to understand the feasibility of the product and the development milestones and its timelines.

• PEOPLE:   

  Generally, the biggest driver of whether a company will succeed (although without the above two factors, this makes it very difficult). We look for driven, ambitious founders who have the resilience and self-awareness to ultimately drive success. Founders need to be able to hire good teams and lead them and in the early-stages are likely to have to do everything from building desks to solving hard-technical problems through to selling their product (and the opportunity to investors). This changes over time as founders develop their product, build bigger teams and enter new markets or geographies, we therefore assess the team each time we look at an investment in relation to where it is currently and where it is going over the next few years.

• ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL + GOVERNANCE (ESG) CRITERIA:

  We care a lot about the purpose behind the business and won’t invest in companies that are making a negative impact on society, people, animals or our planet. We also think it’s important to have good checks and balances in place and will review governance requirements for the stage of the company.

• DUE DILIGENCE APPROACH + COLLABORATION

  In general, we will work with the investor leading the funding round and our due diligence process may include a site visit, reference checks (by talking to customers/distribution partners/ suppliers), talking to industry experts within our network and review due diligence data room materials, etc. We will, wherever possible, look to work collaboratively with other investors to avoid duplication and to share knowledge between the investor group. We don’t pretend to know everything so will seek different viewpoints and call on people in our networks wherever we can.

• INVESTMENT RETURNS:

  Finally, we weigh up the risks and the potential returns (including the timeframes for potential returns) and assess whether the potential return outweighs our view on the potential risks and uncertainties. This is clearly very subjective, so we generally look for a large margin of safety aka very big potential returns, especially as so much is unknown at the early stag