Top 10 Emerging Tech Startups in New Zealand in 2026

New Zealand’s technology startup ecosystem is entering 2026 with renewed momentum. Startup investment reached NZ$754 million across 166 funded deals in 2025, representing a 61% increase in total investment and a 14% increase in deal volume compared with the previous year. Venture and early-stage investment also reached a record NZ$687 million in 2025, highlighting a growing pool of capital for companies capable of developing globally relevant technology from New Zealand.

The country’s emerging technology companies are increasingly diverse, spanning artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, agritech, aerospace, hydrogen, cybersecurity, enterprise software and digital research. That diversity is particularly visible among the startups featured here.

Some are building AI systems for sales teams, security operations and workplace conversations, while others are developing autonomous agricultural machinery, reusable spacecraft and advanced hydrogen components. The ten companies below are not presented as a ranking. Instead, they represent a selection of emerging New Zealand technology startups whose products, technology, funding, commercial traction or international ambitions make them particularly worth watching during 2026.

10 Emerging Tech Startups in New Zealand in 2026

1. Ideally

Ideally is an Auckland-founded market-research technology company using AI and real consumer feedback to help brands understand customers and make product and marketing decisions faster. Founded in 2023 by James Donald, Josh Nu’u-Steele and Brendan Cervin, the company was built around the idea that traditional research is often too slow, expensive and difficult to use during the creative process.

Ideally’s platform allows brands to test ideas, messages, products and campaigns with real consumers while those ideas are still being developed, rather than waiting until after a product or campaign has been finalized. Its customer base already includes major organizations such as Google, Burger King, Nando’s, DoorDash and Treasury 

Wine Estates, with more than 250 brands and agencies using the platform globally. Ideally has also developed products such as Canvas, which provides a live view of consumer categories and demand, while its broader platform uses AI alongside human consumer data to make research more continuous and accessible.

The company reached a major milestone in April 2026 when it raised NZ$16 million in Series A funding led by Shearwater Capital, with participation from Altered Capital, Icehouse Ventures and Ecliptic VC. The round valued Ideally at more than NZ$100 million and is supporting international expansion, particularly in the United States, as well as deeper AI capabilities.

With its combination of real human insight, AI and rapid research workflows, Ideally is attempting to transform an established global industry while demonstrating that sophisticated marketing technology can be built from New Zealand and scaled internationally.

2. NextWork

NextWork is a New Zealand-founded education technology company focused on helping people develop practical technology and AI skills through hands-on learning. Founded in 2023 by Amber Winton, the company initially built its platform around cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure and Salesforce before shifting toward the rapidly growing demand for AI skills.

Its approach differs from conventional online education by emphasizing practical projects, personalized learning and evidence of what learners can actually build rather than relying solely on course completion or certificates. NextWork’s platform allows learners to work through real projects, create portfolios and increasingly use AI to generate or adapt learning experiences.

The company has grown rapidly, reaching more than 190,000 learners across approximately 190 countries, according to the company’s 2026 updates. Funding has accompanied that expansion. NextWork raised US$4.45 million in a 2026 seed round led by Shakti VC, with participation from Cake Ventures, GD1, Blackbird Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, Phase One Ventures and Phase One-related investors and angels. The round valued the company at approximately US$24.4 million and supported its international expansion.

The company also relocated its headquarters from Wellington to Austin, Texas, in March 2026 while retaining its New Zealand roots and technical talent base. Its central thesis is becoming increasingly relevant as AI changes the skills employers need and makes traditional credentials easier to obtain without necessarily demonstrating practical ability. By emphasizing projects and verifiable portfolios, NextWork is positioning itself around a potentially important shift in how technology skills are learned, demonstrated and evaluated.

3. Watchful

Watchful is an Auckland-founded AI security company developing autonomous monitoring technology that enables security teams to detect, understand and respond to threats using existing camera infrastructure. Founded by Joshua Parsons in 2022, the company grew from Parsons’ experience in policing and private security, where he identified the limitations of relying on human operators to continuously monitor large numbers of cameras.

Watchful’s platform uses computer vision and AI agents to analyze video feeds, identify potentially significant events and assist or automate responses. Rather than requiring customers to replace their existing camera systems, Watchful is designed to work with existing infrastructure, potentially reducing deployment costs and avoiding hardware vendor lock-in.

The company currently operates across New Zealand, the United States and Australia and says its systems process more than 32 million images each week across three sovereign Agentic Security Operations Centers. Watchful raised NZ$4.65 million in its first major seed financing in 2024, with Blackbird Ventures leading the round and earlier investment from Icehouse Ventures, while Callaghan Innovation provided a NZ$400,000 R&D grant supporting automation and AI development.

The company subsequently introduced fully autonomous monitoring capabilities, allowing its technology to move beyond simply flagging suspicious activity toward taking more direct action under defined security workflows. With security operators facing growing camera volumes, labor pressures and demand for faster responses, Watchful is pursuing a significant opportunity in applying agentic AI to physical security. Its international expansion also demonstrates the potential for New Zealand-developed AI technology to target much larger global markets.

4. Agovor

Agovor is a New Zealand agritech robotics company developing compact autonomous electric tractors and smart attachments for vineyards, orchards, berry farms and other row-based growing environments. Founded in 2022 by Richard Beaumont and Simon Carroll, the company originated from the founders’ experience operating Ardmore Nurseries and their need to address labor shortages and repetitive outdoor work.

Its Agovor eTractor is a lightweight electric autonomous machine designed to navigate narrow rows while towing and powering interchangeable attachments for tasks including mowing, spraying, cultivating and hauling. The system can be controlled and monitored remotely through the Agovor Portal, allowing growers to manage individual machines or fleets from a smartphone, tablet or computer.

After more than two years of field testing in challenging conditions, Agovor has progressed toward its fourth-generation platform and broader commercialization. The company announced a significant milestone in February 2026 when it closed an A$3 million pre-seed round led by Australian agriculture-focused investor Tenacious Ventures, with co-investment from Hort Innovation’s Investment Fund, managed by Artesian, and an individual investor through New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus scheme. The funding is intended to support expansion of its autonomous machinery and technology.

Agovor’s proposition is particularly relevant as agricultural businesses face rising labor costs, worker shortages and pressure to reduce fuel consumption and environmental impact. By developing smaller electric machines that can operate autonomously rather than attempting to replace conventional tractors with equally large autonomous vehicles, Agovor is pursuing a specialized approach to agricultural automation that could have applications well beyond New Zealand’s horticultural sector.

5. bspkl

bspkl is a New Zealand deep-tech company developing high-performance catalyst-coated membranes for the green hydrogen industry. The company is a spinout from GNS Science and describes itself as New Zealand’s first hydrogen deep-tech startup.

Founded by Christina Houlihan and Jérôme Leveneur, bspkl is developing manufacturing technology for catalyst-coated membranes used in proton-exchange membrane electrolysis, with plans to expand into anion-exchange membranes, fuel cells and other energy technologies. Its proprietary manufacturing approach is designed to produce catalyst-coated membranes with significantly lower quantities of expensive platinum-group metals while maintaining high performance. The company says its current products can use 25 times less catalyst metal, including just 0.089 mg/cm² of iridium, while its manufacturing process is designed to avoid wastewater and harmful by-products.

The company’s origins are closely linked to New Zealand’s scientific research ecosystem. GNS Science became an early shareholder, while WNT Ventures supported the commercialization process and helped bspkl secure its first capital raise of NZ$2.8 million, including a NZ$750,000 repayable Callaghan Innovation grant.

Bspkl is now working to scale production and commercialize its technology for the rapidly developing hydrogen economy. Its manufacturing system is designed to support rapid prototyping and bespoke catalyst formulations while remaining compatible with different membrane materials. As green hydrogen developers seek to reduce the cost and material intensity of electrolyzers, improvements in catalyst efficiency and manufacturing could become increasingly important. Bspkl is therefore operating in a technically demanding market where a relatively small New Zealand company could have an outsized impact if its technology reaches commercial scale.

6. Grw AI

Grw AI is a New Zealand-founded artificial intelligence company building software designed to become an operational system for sales teams. Founded in 2023 by Alex McNaughten, Alistair McLeay and Daniel Ash, Grw grew from the founders’ experience with the repetitive administrative work that surrounds modern sales, including preparation, follow-ups, CRM maintenance, pipeline reviews and coaching. Its platform uses AI agents to perform operational tasks around sales processes while helping teams improve performance and maintain more consistent data.

The company’s broader vision has evolved from AI-assisted sales coaching toward a system that can help run the operational infrastructure behind a revenue organization, keeping CRM information current, supporting forecasting and helping sales leaders understand how AI is being used across their teams.

Grw attracted significant attention in December 2024 when it raised NZ$2.4 million in a pre-seed round led by Precursor Ventures, with participation from Incisive Ventures and Investible and support from a group of experienced sales and technology angels. The financing was described as a record New Zealand pre-seed round at the time and was intended to support the company’s international expansion.

The founding team has deep experience across sales, engineering and product, with McNaughten serving as co-founder and co-CEO, McLeay as co-founder and co-CEO, and Ash as co-founder and CTO.

Grw is particularly interesting because it is targeting the growing gap between the rapid adoption of individual AI tools by salespeople and the need for companies to govern, standardize and measure that usage. If AI agents increasingly become part of everyday revenue operations, software that coordinates those agents could become an important layer in the future sales technology stack.

7. RossOps

RossOps is a New Zealand industrial AI startup developing software that captures, connects and retrieves operational knowledge inside manufacturing environments. Founded by Loïc Estier and Joshua Wyllie, the company emerged from Estier’s experience as a mechanical engineer working on manufacturing and packaging lines, including his time at Nestlé, and Wyllie’s background building software and fintech products.

RossOps addresses a common problem in factories: critical operational knowledge often remains in the heads of experienced workers, disappears between shifts or becomes buried in logbooks, emails and messaging applications. Its platform allows workers to record shift handovers, incidents, observations and fixes through voice or text, while an AI system organizes the information and allows teams to ask questions about current or historical operations. The system is designed to connect related issues across shifts and surface previous solutions when similar equipment problems occur, effectively creating a searchable institutional memory for factories.

RossOps is already being used across manufacturing operations in Australia and New Zealand, including at Apollo Foods, where teams use the platform for shift handovers and operational knowledge preservation. The company was also named a finalist at the 2026 NZ Hi-Tech Awards. Public information about RossOps’ venture funding is comparatively limited, making its commercial adoption and customer traction particularly important indicators to watch.

The company says its platform can be deployed alongside existing systems without complex integrations and can be operational in under an hour. As manufacturing companies face skilled-labor shortages, increasingly complex equipment and the retirement of experienced workers, preserving frontline knowledge could become a major application for enterprise AI. RossOps is targeting that problem directly by turning informal factory knowledge into an operational data asset.

8. Outlier Space

Outlier Space is an Auckland-based space technology startup developing reusable autonomous spacecraft designed to provide commercial customers with reliable access to microgravity and a way to return payloads safely to Earth.

Founded by Jamie France, a former Rocket Lab executive who spent years working on the Electron launch vehicle program, the company is pursuing a different opportunity from conventional satellite companies. Rather than simply putting payloads into orbit, Outlier Space wants to create a reusable platform capable of carrying research or manufacturing payloads into microgravity for weeks or months before returning them to Earth.

The potential customers include pharmaceutical, biotechnology, advanced-materials and scientific organizations that could use microgravity for research and manufacturing processes that are difficult or impossible to replicate on Earth.

Outlier reached a major milestone in July 2026 when it announced a US$7.35 million pre-seed financing round, described by the company as one of the largest pre-seed raises in New Zealand history. GD1 led the round, with participation from Nova Threshold, Brian Cartmell, AirTree, Icehouse Ventures, Investible and Side Stage Ventures. The funding will support development and qualification of Outlier’s first reusable satellite capsules, which are designed to be rocket-agnostic and capable of flying on available launch vehicles. The company is targeting its first test flight for 2028, subject to engineering, regulatory and funding milestones.

Outlier is entering an ambitious segment of the space economy where the long-term opportunity could extend beyond transportation toward in-orbit manufacturing and research. Its progress will be particularly interesting to watch as New Zealand’s established aerospace capabilities increasingly produce startups pursuing commercial opportunities beyond the launch market.

9. Caruso

Caruso is a New Zealand-founded fintech and enterprise software company developing AI-native infrastructure for private-market fund managers. Founded in 2023 by Mark Hurley and Oliver Shaw, the company originated as an internal technology tool inside a fund management business before being spun out after other fund managers expressed interest in using the platform.

Caruso combines software and fund-administration services to help investment managers manage investor records, compliance, capital raising, distributions, fund accounting and other operational processes through a unified platform. Its technology has increasingly incorporated AI agents designed to automate routine fund-administration work while maintaining a centralized source of truth for investor and fund information.

Caruso raised a NZ$3.2 million seed round led by Icehouse Ventures, with GD1, Chris Heaslip and Rae Capital also participating, before securing additional strategic investment from Balmain. Its latest major financing came in April 2026, when Caruso announced an US$11.2 million Series A led by Icehouse Ventures and GD1, with Balmain participating. The company said assets under administration had increased tenfold to more than NZ$100 billion, with more than 80 fund managers using the platform across New Zealand, Australia and the United States at that time.

Caruso has continued expanding its AI capabilities, including background agents designed to perform increasingly autonomous operational tasks. Its opportunity is significant because private markets remain heavily dependent on fragmented systems, spreadsheets and manual administrative processes.

By combining specialized financial software, services and AI agents, Caruso is attempting to build a new operating layer for private-market funds, while its rapid international growth demonstrates the potential for New Zealand enterprise software companies to compete in global financial markets.

10. Contented

Contented is a Christchurch-based AI company transforming conversations from meetings, calls and other interactions into structured business documents and insights. Founded in 2023 by Hannah Hardy-Jones and Lucy Pink, the company was created around the founders’ belief that important information is frequently generated during conversations but becomes difficult to use once meetings end.

Contented’s platform records conversations through mobile, desktop or video-call workflows and converts them into tailored outputs such as meeting minutes, compliance records, client communications, action plans, risk registers and other documents. Its library contains more than 50 templates, while the platform supports industries including financial services, legal, construction, manufacturing, government, recruitment and education.

Contented has built its differentiation around structured, industry-specific outputs rather than generic meeting summaries, with templates developed in collaboration with industry experts. The company has also expanded its ability to record video meetings without requiring an automated bot to join calls.

In February 2026, Contented raised NZ$4.1 million in its first seed round, led by Altered Capital, with participation from Shearwater Capital, K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Aspire NZ Seed Fund, Phase One Ventures and Exhort Ventures. The company had previously bootstrapped its growth and reported more than 200 customers globally, NZ$1.4 million in recurring revenue and approximately 40,000 documents generated each month. The new funding is supporting international expansion into markets including Australia, the UK and the United States.

As businesses increasingly seek to turn unstructured conversations into usable organizational data, Contented is positioning itself at the intersection of AI transcription, knowledge management and workflow automation.

New Zealand’s Next Wave of Technology Is Built for the World

The startups featured in this list demonstrate that New Zealand’s emerging technology sector is becoming increasingly diverse and globally ambitious. AI is clearly a major theme, but it is only one part of the picture. Companies are also developing autonomous agricultural machinery, hydrogen manufacturing technology, industrial AI, commercial spacecraft and sophisticated financial infrastructure.

The country’s investment environment is strengthening as well: NZ$754 million was invested across 166 startup deals in 2025, while venture and early-stage investment reached a record NZ$687 million. At the same time, New Zealand’s geographic distance from major technology markets means that international ambition is often embedded into companies from an early stage.

Several startups in this list are already expanding into the United States, Australia or other global markets, while others are building technologies aimed at international industries from the beginning. That combination of research capability, specialized expertise, increasingly sophisticated venture capital and global market ambition could make New Zealand an increasingly interesting source of emerging technology companies.

The real story in 2026 may therefore be less about the size of New Zealand’s domestic market and more about the country’s ability to turn a relatively small technology ecosystem into companies capable of competing on the world stage.