Five Kiwis you’ve (probably) never heard of are dominating global tech

Saturday, 4 July 2026

Here are five terms you should know, in order from interesting but harmless to existentially terrifying.

Five New Zealanders are quietly steering multi-billion dollar global companies behind the most transformational technologies of our time.

Shane Legg co-founded Google DeepMind which OpenAI was created to compete with.

Alex Kendall and Dave Ferguson are heading autonomous vehicle powerhouses valued at $15 billion NZD and $10 billion NZD respectively.

From sports to movies, New Zealand famously punches above its weight on the world stage but there might be no field where this is more true than technology.

While no-one needs a reminder who Sir Peter Beck is and breakout stars like Halter have made plenty of headlines, there are many other Kiwis flying under the radar while quietly steering the most transformational technologies of our time.

Here are five New Zealanders at the helm of multi-billion dollar tech companies who you have probably never heard of, but should be following.

1. Shane Legg – Co-Founder & Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind

Of everyone on this list, Rotorua raised Shane Legg arguably holds the most influence. Alongside co-founder Sir Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Legg is central to steering the AI revolution currently driving the global economy.

Legg earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Waikato before completing his PhD in Switzerland. In 2010, he co-founded DeepMind, the research lab responsible for the foundational work informing virtually all modern AI progress.

When Google bought DeepMind for around $1 billion in 2014, Sam Altman and Elon Musk founded OpenAI a year later as a direct response, kicking off the generative AI boom.

Legg also coined the term 'Artificial General Intelligence' (AGI) in the early 2000s to describe a system capable of doing most human labour – a concept now considered the finish line in the great AI race. Check out Stuff’s explainer for more detail.

2. Alex Kendall – Co-Founder & CEO, Wayve

One of the world’s leading autonomous driving companies, Wayve was recently valued at $15 billion NZD following a massive $2b funding round backed by giants like SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.

Raised in Christchurch, co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall studied engineering at the University of Canterbury before winning a scholarship to complete his PhD at the University of Cambridge, specialising in computer vision and robotics.

Kendall realised traditional self-driving cars relied too heavily on hyper-expensive sensors and rigid, hand-coded rules. He co-founded Wayve in 2017 to build a more flexible autonomous driving system that essentially learns the way a human does.

While American self-driving giants like Waymo focus on mapping out specific cities block-by-block, Wayve is building a generalised AI driver that can navigate almost any city in the world and respond to changing conditions in real time. The software is also designed to be licensed to any company building driverless cars.

If his system works, Kendall could crack the potentially multi-trillion-dollar global autonomous vehicle market and beat behemoths like Tesla to the punch.

Between Peter Beck challenging SpaceX with Rocket Lab and Alex Kendall taking on self-driving, some of the stiffest competition to Elon Musk’s tech empire is being led by Kiwis.

3. Dave Ferguson – Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Nuro

Paul Copplestone (center) with co-founder Ant Wilson and Y Combinator's Jared Friedman

Like Kendall, Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson heads an autonomous vehicle powerhouse, but with an explicit vision of taking the technology to a wider scale. Nuro is currently valued at $10b NZD, with major backers in its latest funding round ranging from NVIDIA to Uber.

Growing up in Wellington, Ferguson completed his computer science degree at the University of Otago before moving to the US to earn a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Before striking out on his own, Ferguson was a principal engineer on Google’s self-driving car team (which later became Waymo), meaning he helped lay the groundwork for modern autonomous vehicle technology. He also worked with NASA to develop autonomous systems for Mars rovers.

In 2016, he co-founded Nuro, which is currently licensing its 'Nuro Driver' software to giants like Uber and Lucid Motors to power robotaxi fleets.

Ferguson’s ultimate goal goes past cars: he wants to pioneer what he calls Artificial General Robotics (AGR), which uses AI infrastructure to expand robotics into every corner of the physical world.

4. Paul Copplestone – Co-Founder & CEO, Supabase

If you aren't a software engineer, you might not know what Supabase is, but in the world of ‘vibe-coding' – where developers use AI to build apps using natural language – Paul Copplestone is a titan.

Another graduate out of the University of Canterbury, Copplestone founded Supabase in 2020 to challenge the dominance of existing giants in the infrastructure powering the digital economy.

Building apps requires heavy-duty backend databases, a market that has long been dominated by Google’s Firebase. Supabase gives developers a powerful, customisable, open-source alternative to build their apps on without locking them into Google’s ecosystem.

Supabase is currently benefiting from the massive boom in vibe-coding powered by agents like Claude Code. Last month, it raised $877m NZD and was valued at over $17b, doubling its valuation in just eight months.

5. Jeff Hawke – Co-Founder & CTO, Odyssey

Jeff Hawke is pioneering the next generation of AI development, moving beyond text and images and into the physical world. Check out more detail in Stuff’s interview with Hawke.

Hawke grew up in Auckland and spent years as a founding engineer at Wayve alongside Alex Kendall. After working on physical AI systems in the proving ground of autonomous driving, he struck out on his own and co-founded Odyssey in 2023.

The company just raised a massive $500 million NZD round at a $2.5 billion USD valuation, backed by Amazon and AMD.

Odyssey is pioneering ‘general world models’, which researchers and investors are betting billions will push AI closer to the finish line of AGI.

Instead of just building chatbots that break down everything into language problems, Hawke's team is building AI that can simulate the actual physical world in real-time video.

It’s a technology that could completely reinvent everything from gaming to Hollywood, and unlock the kind of sci-fi future filled with humanoid robotics that Silicon Valley has been promising for decades.