Fintech Lab 2026 was yuuuuge with 300 people packing the house! We don’t need a strong dollar to manage other people’s money, let’s build more of this.

Our very own Ipshita Mandal-Johnson joins the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Class of 2026 🥳

Switched On had eight bikes stolen in the past while. Thanks to Welly-based tracker company Follo, they were able to recover all eight!

Storypark acquires Xap to bring that Welly-Melbs mind meld to early education 😇

Investment in startups soared in 2025, 61% YoY reports NBR 💸

The NZ RNA Development Platform celebrated its 500th construct last week, meaning vaccines, therapies, and the components to make them.

If you want to save the planet, stop asking for charity and start talking about the ROI: Motu Research says climate cooperation only happens when we swap "being nice" for a cold, hard strategic power play.

B-Corps will have to score a minimum in each individual category, rather than relying on an overall points tally in a rejig of the certification. Shouldn’t affect any ANZ companies.

Reactions to the science system update are still coming in. Mission-led science is basically innovation-by-committee, says Dr Austen Ganley: a high-cost, low-impact attempt to script the future. 700 jobs cut that are not visible but “until we experience a natural disaster and we don’t have enough expertise to respond”, writes Michael Edmonds.

Connecting to the celebration of FinTech, Greg Hurrell Easier calls for cheaper compliance for new financial products on Business Desk, so they can be successful at home as well as overseas. Imagine that.

“Auckland backs itself and the Minister is listening” says NZ Tech—and Mayor Brown is a big promoter.

Even if you’re a die-hard, never-fruit Linux user, every person in Tech and research is either influenced or simply affected by the unique innovation giant that is Apple Inc. After 15 years at the helm, Tim Cook is stepping down. Devs will know his successor, John Ternus, from many swish presentations at WWDC. Let’s see what this means, a hardware engineer as Apple CEO.

This comes as hardware nerds describe the new, affordable MacBook NEO as the most repairable in 14 years.

An homage to The restaurants that outlast trends, crises and time.

Here’s something that' really has fallen through a massive gap in the past while: compensating creative types when training AI models with their IP. RSL is a proposal to curb this practice.

Have you let an AI agent run your computer yet? People like the new Codex app as a personal assistant. It’s a time saver for both researchers and techies. I’m still not handing over the keys, but I do use non-agentic tools heavily to make this newsletter. Search goes from days to minutes.

Along the same lines of productivity, I can only imagine those 100 features in 100 days on the new Gemini macOS app used Gemini quite heavily to write all that Swift code.

FNZ’s US$4.6B dispute reaches High Court. 500 Welly-based employees.

Tell your US-based friends to apply for a Fullbright to study here. It’s better here, duh.

Save the date for Disastrous Doctorates 2027, EoI coming soon. Resilience is very much the word of the week.

Tony Rule’s Foodjump organises your shopping list according to the grocery store you just walked into.

Seb Krueger’s ZunoSmart Labs makes LLM-driven workflows available on the cloud, in a secure way.

TEDxVUW will be an amazing showcase of big thinkers from Welly—and also, some data scientist! Vic students: promo code VICUNI gets you 40% off. Everybody: code TEDX26 gets you 20% off the Cable Car ride. I’m so good at promo codes… maybe I should start a podcast.

Applications to MBIE’s New Zealand–China Strategic Research Alliance 2026 round open on 4 May.

Mondays 8–9am, Atom - Founder Mentoring ON-LINE

Weds 12–1pm, Atom - Founder Support Drop-In Hour

Thursdays (every other), 26th Mar 8am, Kapiti Start-Up Network Meet-Ups

Fridays (every other), 27th Mar 5pm, Founders Meet Up at Southern Cross hosted by Jack Shennan, Alistair St Pierre and Adiraj Gupta.