Paying it forward: The Kiwis who made good in tech and are now backing a new generation of start-ups

But you might be less aware that the Invercargill-born spaceman is also backing the next generation of Kiwi entrepreneurs – from his own wallet and with hands-on mentoring.

Beck has helped line up financial backing for a string of start-ups through his role as an investment committee member of Auckland venture capital firm Outset Ventures and his own funds.

He’s often been the first on board – playing an “angel” investor role in companies’ crucial make-or-break early days, then chipped in more money as a firm develops – often using his connections to help draw in other investors too.

Examples include Auckland start-up HeartLab, the developer of a platform that uses AI to speed analysis of echocardiograms – helping to free up specialists’ time in hard-pressed healthcare systems worldwide; another Auckland start-up, Astrix Astronautics, which is working on more efficient solar panels for satellites; and Wellington “microwaving metal” firm Foundary Lab, creator of a new technical for casting.

In the case of Astrix Astronautics, Beck first became involved after meeting its physics student founders after he gave a guest lecture at Auckland University (former Fisher & Paykel intern Beck taught himself rocket science and never went to varsity – although his achievements had Auckland University make him an adjunct professor in aerospace engineering at Auckland University in 2019).

Beck gave Astrix a home, letting the young firm use Rocket Lab’s Auckland plant to create and test prototypes. In April 2022, one company’s Electron rockets blasted off with an Astrix prototype on board. “We gave them a ride to orbit so they could test their technology. And look, if there was another New Zealand space company that needed a ride to orbit to test something, we would do the same.”

Beck has also backed Rocket Lab staff to strike out on their own. Engineer Craig Piggott has previously told the Herald how he walked into Peter Beck’s office with trepidation in 2016, after finally working up the courage to tell the Rocket Lab CEO he had been working on a smart collar for cows on the side. He expected his boss to throw him out. Instead, Beck backed the new venture, becoming a director of Piggott’s firm – Halter – whose technology is today worn around the necks of hundreds of thousands of cows across New Zealand, Australia and the US, with Piggott’s staff numbering about 200.

Halter’s various funding rounds have displayed the power of Beck’s contact book. A $7m raise in 2018 led to one of Rocket Lab’s earliest backers, Chicago-based Promus Ventures, coming on board (along with Beck himself, Sir Stephen Tindall and Icehouse Ventures).

In March 2023, Halter’s bumper $85m Series C round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners – one of the largest American VC firms and another of Rocket Lab’s offshore backers and supported by others, including Silicon Valley-based DCVC, yet another Rocket Lab backer.

“That’s where I try to be helpful, introducing people to sophisticated sources of capital,” Beck says. “But there’s also the less-exciting stuff like legal and finance.”

Other Rocket Lab alumni backed by Beck include Levi Fawcett who graduated from Canterbury and then worked on guidance and navigation systems at Beck’s firm for four and a half years before striking out on his own to form Partly in 2020. Beck backed $1.7m and $3.7m angel rounds for the start-up, which created an online marketplace for major auto players to locate the right car part – a segment that Fawcett had identified as being surprisingly manual. He applied machine learning (a form of AI) to give it an overall.

Fawcett told the Herald he would talk with Beck at least once a month in those early days.

The Christchurch-based Partly would go on to raise $37m at a $180m valuation in an NZ-record Series A round in 2023. Today, the still fast-growing company employs about 100.

Beck – who became a billionaire twice over with Rocket Lab’s share price surge during 2024 – told the Herald he also attends as many start-up networking events as possible.

The start-up and venture capital scene is “light years ahead” of where it was when he started out and “banged my head against the wall for a while”, Beck said.

“There’s only one thing: we need entrepreneurs to think bigger. Some have a great idea, but their idea of going global is Australia. You need to think global from day one.”

When start-ups come before Outset’s investment committee, “I always say, ‘Show me a path to a billion-dollar company, or you haven’t got my vote’,” Beck said.

“The definition of success is a company getting so big they can go global – and that’s what we should be celebrating because it all benefits New Zealand one way or the other. It’s such a paradise that we all end up back in New Zealand and doing our own things and making investments.”

Beck adds, “There are a lot of Rocket Lab investors who ended up as residents as well.” One is Matt Ocko, co-managing partner of Rocket Lab investor DCVC (based in Silicon Valley). Ocko emerged as a native forestry advocate and serving as an investment committee member for the Crown-backed NZ Growth Capital Partners since 2020 and a backer of start-ups, including Auckland water purification start-up Aquafortus, and Halter.

While its corporate headquarters and key customers are in the US, Rocket Lab continues to expand its rocket launch and satellite component manufacturing operations in NZ, home to about half its 1700 staff.

Sam Morgan

Syos Aerospace – a Bay of Plenty-based maker of heavy-lifting uncrewed aerial vehicles (think outsized drones) and uncrewed boats and ground vehicles – staged a key test flight at Tawhaki National Aerospace Centre last month.

Its chief executive, Sam Vye, expects to grow sales from $4m to $55m this year.

The firm was founded four years ago with backing from several high-net-worth individuals, including Sam Morgan, who Vye regards as a mentor.

Syos is only the latest in a raft of early-stage firms backed by Morgan, who is perhaps the prototypical example of recycling money from big wins, such as an offshore sale or public listing, into the local start-up ecosystem.

Famously, Morgan netted about $270m when the first company he founded, Trade Me, was sold to Australia’s Fairfax for $750m in 2006.

But he then became one of the earliest backers of Xero as one of the handful to invest before the cloud accounting firm’s 2007 IPO. As its stock soared on the NZX (and later the Australian stock exchange), his Xero shares became the source of most of Morgan’s wealth (estimated by NBR at $580m in 2024), even as he gradually sold down his stake.

And in 2011, Morgan – with fellow Trade Me alumni Rowan Simpson – became the first investors in Auckland start-up Vend, a major of point-of-sale software that was a one-man operation (that man being Vaughan Fergusson, who was absorbed into Trade Me after it bought his travel site) and one customer (a clothing store owned by Fergusson’s wife).

Vend, which replaced traditional checkout tills with iPads, became a worldwide hit and the third major firm Morgan helped create. It sold to Canada’s Lightspeed for about $455m in 2021, and maintains 150 NZ staff today – the same as at the time of this sale.

Keeping the rolling maul going, Fergusson in turn invested in a dozen start-ups, including Upstock (which aims to make life easier for small firms ordering wholesale supplies and dealing with supermarket stocking) and CoGo, an app that helps you track the planet-friendliness of your spending – plus creating the OMGTech! trust that helped underprivileged kids get tech education (Fergusson, raised by a wheelchair-bound solo mother, could relate to doing it tough).

Morgan, meanwhile, has put money into new local start-up firms, including SMX (email management), Joyous (HR software) and Mint Innovation (recycling e-waste) and, through Jasmine Social Investments, a series of early-stage firms and social initiatives in developing countries and environmental and social projects at home.

Anna Mowbray

Anna Mowbray made her fortune with her siblings through Zuru Toys. She is now backing an array of new ventures, including Zeil – an app billed as the “Tinder for recruitment” that was built from the ground up using AI tools and with Gen-Z in mind. She now employs 30 and says her new venture has Seek rattled.

Mowbray is also one of the entrepreneurs behind Recorp, which built a $100m-plus aluminium can factory in South Auckland that opened last year – with sustainable and high-tech smarts to produce up to half a billion cans a year as it takes aim at single-use plastic bottles.

Along with capital, Mowbray brought the practical experience of mass production techniques in China.

“There’s not a lot of that [she] doesn’t know about factories and how to run them and how to be efficient,” Recorp chief executive Bruce Parton told the Herald.

With husband and former All Black Ali Williams, Mowbray also owns 15% of newly minted A-League team Auckland FC (majority owned by US billionaire Bill Foley, whose sports portfolio includes Bournemouth in the English Premier League).

“I grew up playing football,” Mowbray told the Herald. “Ali grew up playing football, and we have five kids, all who play. They love the sport, are obsessed with the sport and it has really ignited a passion for Ali and I.

“This is about bringing a team to one of the largest cities in the world that doesn’t have a football team and figuring out how to do that in a way that also allows for an individual to be propelled into a global sphere.”

On the back of Auckland FC’s success, Mowbray has also teamed with a group of high-profile New Zealanders – including Williams and NBA star Steven Adams to build a 12,500-capacity sports arena at Western Springs.

Lovina McMurchy

South Auckland-raised Lovina McMurchy (Ngāti Rongomai) went to relatively poor schools in South Auckland – Holy Cross Convent and then the 90% Pasifika McAuley High School (where she and businesswoman Annette Presley would later set up a scholarship for career-minded students).

Her first job was as a statistician for market research firm Colmar Brunton in Takapuna. But her life changed when her then-partner – a statistician at Auckland University – took a sabbatical in the US. McMurchy applied for and gained a $160,000 Frank Knox Memorial Scholarship and used it to complete a Harvard MBA.

Her career took off with a series of plum roles on the US West Coast with Starbucks, where she spearheaded efforts to introduce Wi-Fi in cafes (this was the year 2000), Microsoft, where she rose to be general manager product for Skype (the WhatsApp of its day), then Amazon, where during 2017-18 she took charge of an effort to bring a conversational shopping experience to the multinational’s voice AI, Alexa.

McMurchy’s return to New Zealand coincided with the Covid years, which – in part because of low interest rates and stimulus spending – brought a venture capital boom. She was in the middle of it as she became a general partner at Movac, the country’s largest home-grown VC firm. There she raised $250m – a NZ record – for a multi-sector fund that invested in 20 companies, with McMurchy joining the board of five, including one of our most successful tech firms of the past decade, the retail crime-fighting Auror. She also joined the board of the NZX’s top gainers for the period, Pushpay (bought by two private equity firms in 2023 for $1.5b but still splitting its operations between Auckland and Seattle).

She then hopped the fence, joining a start-up herself as chief commercial officer for Wellington-based Kry10 – a maker of secure software to help run the likes of cars, electricity grids and satellites – where she helped it raise $6m in venture capital from backers that included Rotomā as the iwi fund made its first investment outside primary industries.

Now McMurchy is back in Seattle and back with Amazon after a six-year break - this time as a talent-scouting “founder in residence” role, looking for the next technology that could become a multibillion-dollar business.

“I get outreach from Kiwi companies all the time and have helped several with Amazon and intros to US investors where I know them,” McMurchy told the Herald.

“I want to see our guys win.”

Sean Simpson, Mat Rowe

Auckland-founded clean energy firm LanzaTech is based in Chicago these days and listed on the Nasdaq, while its privately held sister company, LanzaJet, is one of the fastest-growing players in sustainable aviation fuel.

But its success is still being felt at home. LanzaTech alumni have bankrolled, mentored or created a clutch of promising NZ early-stage companies, including BioConsortia (using microbes to replace chemical fertilisers), drone and noise-dampening start-up Dotterel Technologies, and e-waste recycler Mint Innovation.

LanzaTech co-founder Dr Sean Simpson remains a strategic adviser to the firm, but these days is also a member of the investment committee at Outset Ventures, along with Matt Rowe – another of LanzaTech’s founding team – and the aforementioned Peter Beck.

The privately funded Outset is housed in the same building in Balfour Rd, Parnell, that once upon a time housed the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), then its successor Industrial Research Ltd (IRL, which became part of Callaghan Innovation, itself now part of the latest Crown research restructure).

In a famous incident in Kiwi start-up lore, Sir Stephen Tindall was visiting the Balfour Rd building in the mid-2000s, for a meeting with LanzaTech, when he literally stumbled over a young Peter Beck who was smoking out the IRL basement with early rocket tech tests.

Tindall went on to become part of Rocket Lab’s first group of backers. The Warehouse Group founder’s investment vehicle, K1W1, is one of the most prolific backers of early-stage NZ tech firms, so it was likely the pair’s paths would have crossed at some point. But Tindall later told the Herald it also proved the worth of having lots of start-ups in one incubator.

Simpson and Rowe are continuing that tradition by offering start-ups digs at Balfour Rd, on top of venture capital investment.

New Zealand is known for producing Xero and other firms in cloud software – a “weightless” export that defeats the tyranny of distance.

But Simpson told the Herald, “We need to do more things to grow our GDP. We need to be producing more products. We need a broader industrial base, more high-paying jobs in more industries.”

Revolution is possible. Companies under Outset’s roof include Ruminant BioTech, which is developing a slow-release capsule that sits in a cow’s rumen (part of its stomach system), reducing methane emissions, while one of its partners, Angus Blair, is also a director of OpenStar – which has 50 physicists in Wellington working on a possible nuclear fission breakthrough that would provide abundant clean energy at low cost.

Rod Drury

After selling two start-ups for tens of millions – Glazier Systems ($7.5m) and Aftermail (US$45m) – Rod Drury hit the jackpot with Xero as it climbed to a multibillion-dollar market cap, pushing his worth to about $1.5b.

Dury stepped down as CEO in 2018 and left Xero’s board in 2023 – but, although officially billing himself as “funemployed”, he had plenty of new hustles on the boil by that point.

In 2022, he was one of a scrum of rich-listers – including Sam Morgan, Guy Haddleton and Sir Stephen Tindall – who banded together to participate in a $300m raise for Lodestone Energy to build five massive solar farms in New Zealand.

Three have been built: Kohirā in Northland, with 61,000 solar panels, producing enough energy to power about 7700 homes, and Rangitaiki (59,000 panels) and Te Herenga o Te Rā (71,000) in the Bay of Plenty, with a fourth under construction at Whitianga in the Coromandel (53,000 panels) and a fifth in planning for near Dargaville. Lodestone recently revealed plans to raise hundreds of millions more to expand to eight solar farms.

Drury is also a director of Atomic.io and a mentor to its chief executive, Jo Haanstra, whose in-app messaging platform for boosting customer engagement has won customers such as ANZ, BNZ, Kiwibank, Westpac, NZTA and Mercury.

Drury is now living near Queenstown and has emerged as an advocate for electrifying tourism in the area and making it a hub for emission-reducing projects. He recently chipped in most of the funding for Electric Wave, an e-boat charging start-up on Lake Wakatipu that gels with his plans for an electric wake-boarding boat.

The investments have been coupled with a push for electricity sector reform. Drury is lobbying the Government to break up the electricity gentailers, just as Telecom split into wholesale (Chorus) and retail (Spark) arms, which helped spur Ultrafast Fibre and tech innovation – seeing it as part of his crusade to build NZ’s economy as a whole.

“What’s our version of Saudi Arabian oil? I think it’s renewable electricity,” Drury says.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.