Icehouse Ventures

Icehouse Ventures Our mission is to be transformative investors in transformative Kiwi companies.

We have invested >$800m into >390 companies, including Halter, Crimson Education, Sharesies, Hnry, Dawn Aerospace, Tracksuit, Wayve, OpenStar, Substack, & Nuro.

01/09/2026

Twelve founders, 1,600 investors, 200 young entrepreneurs. Here is a glimpse of our 16th Annual Showcase.

Until next year ✌️

A small, remote country can produce generation-defining companies. Showcase is the night we celebrate the Kiwi founders ...
01/09/2026

A small, remote country can produce generation-defining companies. Showcase is the night we celebrate the Kiwi founders proving it.

This year, twelve founders took to the stage at our 16th Annual Showcase, presenting to 1,600 investors live at Spark Arena in Auckland and at ten watch parties nationwide.

For the first time, we also opened 200 seats to our First Cut community of young founders and aspiring entrepreneurs to watch, learn, and take inspiration from the founders who presented:

▪️ Adeline Bartoletti from Kelvius - turning industrial waste heat into site-level energy resilience.
▪️ Alex Barker from Advemto - accelerating drug development by mapping cell function to genetic sequence.
▪️ Alur Saguinsin from One Kidney - transforming kidney care with a total artificial kidney.
▪️ Amanda Davies from Biowave - creating a pathway for the global shipping industry to cut emissions.
▪️ Connor Archbold from Tracksuit - beautiful, affordable, and always-on brand tracking.
▪️ Jamie Beaton from Crimson Education - the world's leading education and university admissions support company.
▪️ Jamie France from Outlier Space - the reusable, uncrewed satellite platform enabling researchers and manufacturers to switch off gravity.
▪️ John Robson from BioOra - revolutionising cancer immunotherapy by automating the manufacture of CAR T-cells.
▪️ Luke Campbell from VXT - AI notes from phone calls and meetings for lawyers.
▪️ Lyall Davenport from SKN Systems - turning vehicle surfaces into sensors.
▪️ Mark Rocket from Kea Aerospace - improving life on our planet using insights from the stratosphere.
▪️ Matt Taylor from Trepo - the agentic grocery shopper powered by real household consumption data.

Congratulations also to Wared Seger, co-founder and CEO of Parrot Analytics, this year's Ray Thomson Award recipient. Named in memory of Dr. Ray Thomson, this award recognises an entrepreneur who exemplifies the high integrity, proactivity, and entrepreneurial energy that defined Ray's philosophy.

A huge thank you to the founders, speakers, and investors who joined us around Aotearoa. 🇳🇿

Drumbeat have raised a $2m seed round to help high-growth companies build their brand through storytelling.Every company...
01/09/2026

Drumbeat have raised a $2m seed round to help high-growth companies build their brand through storytelling.

Every company has a story worth telling, why it exists, what it is building, where it is going, but few have a repeatable way to find, tell, and measure those stories.

Drumbeat replaces the traditional PR agency retainer with a platform that turns everyday business activity, product updates, hires, milestones, into ongoing media and content opportunities.

Since launching in March 2026, Drumbeat have grown to more than 50 customers across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and the US, including Andfoods, Re-Leased, Levno, and Factor. Their customers have landed coverage across all four markets and beyond.

“Speaking to customers, and witnessing their results, validated what we expected. PR is more important than ever, but too much of the industry still operates the way it did in the 90s. Drumbeat has brought that into the modern era, and it’s meant breakneck growth - for them, and their customers.” - Jack McQuire, Partner, Icehouse Ventures

Built out of venture studio New+Improved Ventures, Drumbeat was co-founded by Barney Chunn, Fallon Savery, and Aaron Croft, a team of experienced operators from across high-growth companies.

The raise will fund expansion into Australia and the US, and further product development.

Read more via BusinessDesk: https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/startups/ai-comms-platform-drumbeat-raises-2m-in-seed-round

Four Kiwi-founded startups have been named on the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch 2026, the annual list spotlighting standout c...
26/08/2026

Four Kiwi-founded startups have been named on the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch 2026, the annual list spotlighting standout companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific region.

▪️ Caruso
Founded by Mark Hurley and Oliver Shaw, Caruso combines AI-native software with expert fund administration services, giving private market fund managers a single source of truth for their investor and fund data. More than 900 funds across New Zealand, Australia, and the US now run on the platform.

▪️ Ideally
Founded by James Donald, Brendan Cervin, and Josh Nu'u-Steele, Ideally is reinventing research for modern marketing, bringing real consumers into the room while ideas are still being shaped and turning months-long research into overnight results. They now have more than 250 enterprise users across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and the US.

▪️ Marloo
Founded by Shakeel Lala, Hardy Michel, and Ben Robertson, Marloo is the AI partner for financial advice. They handle the work that surrounds advice - from meeting notes and advice documents to emails and forms -so advisers can focus on their clients. Marloo now have more than 850 subscribers across eight countries.

▪️ Number 8 Bio
Founded by Dr Tom Williams and Dr Alex Carpenter, Number 8 Bio is a scientist-led team making scalable, affordable feed additives, reducing methane emissions from cattle and sheep while improving feed efficiency and productivity on farm.

Congratulations to the founders and teams behind each of these companies! Recognition like this reflects years of hard work and we are proud to back them as they build for New Zealand and beyond.

See the full list here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ranawehbe/2026/08/24/forbes-asia-100-to-watch-2026/

Neocrete have raised a US$3.5m pre-Series A to bring lower-carbon, lower-cost concrete to more of the world.Cement is re...
24/08/2026

Neocrete have raised a US$3.5m pre-Series A to bring lower-carbon, lower-cost concrete to more of the world.

Cement is responsible for around 8% of global carbon emissions. One proven way to cut concrete's footprint is to replace some of the cement with materials like fly ash, but high-quality versions are scarce, and the low-grade ash that is abundant has been too poor-performing to use, so vast volumes of it go to landfill.

Founded in 2018 by Zarina Alexander and Matt Kennedy-Good, Neocrete has developed a dry-powder additive that boosts this low-grade waste ash so it performs like cement, letting producers replace 30 to 50% of the cement in a mix. It cuts both carbon and cost, with no change to existing plant and no loss of strength or durability.

It is already working at scale. In Brunei, the country's largest ready-mix supplier has poured more than 3,700m³ of Neocrete concrete, turning previously dumped ash into commercial-grade material and cutting embodied carbon by around 25%, and costs by 10%. Their largest deployment yet, the redevelopment of Brunei's Muara Port, is forecast to avoid around 5,200 tonnes of CO2.

"We backed Neocrete early because we believed they had developed a solution that could transform one of the world's largest industries without requiring producers to fundamentally change the way they operate. Since our initial investment, the team has continued to execute against that vision, reinforcing our conviction and our belief in Neocrete's potential to become a globally transformative company." - Bex Gidall, Principal at Icehouse Ventures.

The round will help the team expand into Europe and the United States, and deepen deployment across Southeast Asia.

Read more via BusinessDesk (paywall): https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/news-in-brief/neocrete-raises-59m-in-pre-series-a-raise-for-global-scale-up

Congratulations to Vessev on their US$19m Series A and for signing their first US customer!Vessev builds electric hydrof...
21/08/2026

Congratulations to Vessev on their US$19m Series A and for signing their first US customer!

Vessev builds electric hydrofoiling vessels, boats that rise up out of the water to deliver a smoother, quieter, and more efficient ride than conventional water transportation.

Founded in 2018, Vessev designed and built their first vessel, the VS-9, in-house with a small team, flying it for the first time in 2024. Today they are a team of 60 with two vessels in full commercial service with Fullers360 on Auckland's Waitematā Harbour, having logged more than 11,000 nautical miles.

This raise will help Vessev meet their growing global demand, scale production of the VS-9, and accelerate development of their next vessel, the VS-12.

It also marks their entry into the United States. Their first US customer, FlyTahoe, operates on Lake Tahoe, California, which draws 15 million visitors a year and sees up to 20,000 cars travel between the north and south shores each day. The VS-9 offers a quieter, more sustainable, and more efficient alternative.

Next month, the VS-9 will debut at New York Climate Week, before heading to Washington DC, and then Lake Tahoe for on-water demonstrations.

‘Hydrofoiling doesn't just make boats better, it redefines what’s possible on water’ Eric Laakmann, co-founder and CEO of Vessev.

Read more via Business Desk (paywall):
https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/startups/electric-hydrofoil-startup-vessev-buoyant-after-326m-fundraise

03/08/2026

We spend our days backing exceptional Kiwi founders building world-leading companies, from Halter to Partly to Dawn Aerospace.

Building companies like these is hard. It takes discipline, resilience, and the ability to perform under pressure, alongside exceptional teams to make it happen.

The traits of a world-class founder are the same as a world-class athlete.

For a country of five million, we produce high-performance athletes in abundance; winning on the world stage time and time again at the Olympics, the America's Cup, and through our national teams.

IV Athletes aims to bring together the performance mindset of NZ sport to the technology industry. A community for current and former New Zealand athletes thinking about what comes next; this could be a career in startups, building their own company, or investing in startups.

At our recent launch event, 80 athletes heard from Hugo Inglis (Olympian), Tim Brown (ex-All White and IV Partner), Jackie Gowler (two-time Olympic medallist and IV Portfolio Community Manager), and Barnaby Marshall (IV Partner) on why we are building this community.

If you are a current or former athlete looking to join a community of high performers, get in touch: [email protected]

Outlier Space have raised a US$7.35m pre-seed round to unlock microgravity manufacturing with a scalable, reusable satel...
29/07/2026

Outlier Space have raised a US$7.35m pre-seed round to unlock microgravity manufacturing with a scalable, reusable satellite platform.

Some materials cannot be made on Earth. In microgravity, compounds behave differently, forming purer crystals, more uniform proteins, and materials with properties gravity makes impossible. That has applications across cancer treatments, drug discovery, and next-generation semiconductors.

Outlier is building an autonomous and reusable satellite capsule that carries research and manufacturing payloads to microgravity, holds them there for weeks or months, then returns them safely to Earth.

"Outlier is like the landlord for a very special factory. Our customers supply the manufacturing equipment, and we enable that equipment to bypass gravity so they can produce their materials.” - Founder and CEO Jamie France.

Two things make this the right time to build. The cost to reach orbit is at an all-time low, and the International Space Station, which has proven the science over three decades, is being decommissioned soon, leaving room for a commercial, uncrewed platform. Outlier is targeting its first test flight for 2028.

Jamie brings a depth of experience: 16 years and multiple America's Cup campaigns at Emirates Team New Zealand, the development of Air New Zealand's Skycouch, and nearly a decade at Rocket Lab, finishing as Global Director of the Electron launch vehicle programme. The wider team of engineers and designers is drawn from New Zealand and Australia's aerospace and high-performance sectors.

Read more via NZ Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/outlier-space-raises-us75m-for-its-reusable-satellites/premium/J6KTQ7NOAZEEDMER3WZ7HAFRGA/

CullBeck have raised $20m to commercialise their hydrogen-based ironmaking process.Steel is one of the world's most esse...
28/07/2026

CullBeck have raised $20m to commercialise their hydrogen-based ironmaking process.

Steel is one of the world's most essential materials, and one of its biggest carbon emitters, accounting for 7 to 8% of global emissions. Iron is the key ingredient in steel, and making it the conventional way relies on coal, both to fuel the process and to strip oxygen from the ore, which releases significant CO2.

CullBeck's process replaces coal with hydrogen entirely, cutting iron ore processing from more than eight hours in a conventional blast furnace to under two and a half minutes, with water as the only by-product. As CEO and co-founder Martin Hacon puts it: ”We aim to produce iron, and therefore steel, for much lower cost and ultimately zero emissions.”

The technology was developed at the Robinson Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, and is designed for titanomagnetite ores, the iron-rich black sands found along New Zealand's coastline. Similar deposits exist across Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, making the technology relevant well beyond New Zealand.

Next, the team will build a demonstration plant next to the NZ Steel site at Glenbrook, with the aim of producing 2.5 tonnes of steel per hour.

Congrats team!

Read more via BusinessDesk (paywall):
https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/news-in-brief/cullbeck-raises-20m-in-record-first-funding-round-for-hydrogen-steelmaking-tech

Congratulations to Hyades who have raised a $1.5m pre-seed round!Founded by Ashin Alex, Sam Kurian, and Jimin Seo, Hyade...
13/07/2026

Congratulations to Hyades who have raised a $1.5m pre-seed round!

Founded by Ashin Alex, Sam Kurian, and Jimin Seo, Hyades is tackling one of the most fragmented problems in AI: making sense of spatial data.

Industries like insurance, agriculture, mining, and climate science all depend on map-based data, including satellite imagery, drone footage, and climate records. The problem is that this data arrives in dozens of incompatible formats, and preparing it for AI has traditionally been slow, manual work that can drag on for months.

Hyades is building a platform that collapses this timeline dramatically, translating messy, multi-source data into something machine learning models can use, and keeping those models current as conditions change.

The team came together at university, where Ash and Sam met in a physics lecture, and later connected with Jimin on a University of Auckland Vanguard trip to Silicon Valley.

“It's rare to come across a founding team where every founder is exceptional in their own right. What's even rarer is finding one where they're stronger together than they are individually. Ash, Sam and Jimin stood out to us for exactly that reason,” Bex Gidall, Principal at Icehouse Ventures.

The round will help the team bring on more enterprise partners, recruit AI engineering talent, and ready the platform for a wider release.

Read more via NZ Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/auckland-uni-grads-secure-backing-from-allbirds-tim-brown-and-stephen-tindall-in-15m-ai-start-up-capital-raise/premium/QOLSS7OJFZGQRFJVYMTBUUNRHA/

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