Kiwi companies bid for cash to take on Ozempic, Ziplock and Stratocaster
Friday, 15 May 2026
You could have heard a diamond tie-pin drop as Louise Cunningham ran through soon-to-be-published scientific data on the effectiveness of what could be New Zealand’s hop-based answer to weight loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic.
Entry to the exclusive Icehouse Ventures Demo Day event in Parnell in Auckland on Thursday came on condition the data from a study on the Calocurb “bioceutical” did not get repeated outside the glitzy dining hall.
“What I’m about to show you now is the culmination of 2 years’ work, several million dollars, a very sophisticated double-blind 150 patient trial that ran over 9 months, and this information is confidential,” Cunningham, who is the company’s chief customer and marketing officer, said.
The data would be published in a medical journal in the US, which is Calocurb’s biggest market, in three weeks’ time, she said.
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Calocurb, which was established as a company in 2018 to commercialise a proprietary bitter hops extract breakthrough discovered by New Zealand government scientists and launched as a retail product in 2018, has long sought empirical research in the US to further access that market’s huge potential customer base.
It was one of 11 promising, high-growth companies seeking to secure capital to grow from Auckland’s moneyed venture investors, which include many of the city’s chief executives.
Calocurb was seeking to raise US$10 million to fund its plan to double revenue next year to $30m, and $60m the year after on the back of the study into the effectiveness of Calocurb at suppressing appetite and assisting weight-loss without the side effects of the “injectables” drug rivals, which have unfortunate side-effects like loss of muscle.
Cunningham’s presentation sparked loud applause, though it was upstaged for sheer fun by Hans Kim’s “kinetic guitar”.
The Auckland musician and inventor said there had been no significant reinvention of the guitar since the electric guitar 100 years’ ago.
“To be a guitarist today feels like you’re exploring a fully defined map,” Kim said.
Until now, that is.
His kinetic guitar responded not just to fingers of the strings, but to the player’s movements, and he demonstrated what it could do by playing Daft Punk.
Kim’s Field Guitars was seeking $600,000 to build further demonstration guitars for guitarists in the US.
The company’s kinetic guitars have one big-name fan already: David Byrne from Talking Heads.
“Two weeks from now, we will be delivering our first instruments to our players in LA starting with David Byrne of Talking Heads who is planning to take this guitar on tour with him in his European tour,” Kim said.
One of the best-known of the companies seeking capital to grow was the rapidly growing First Table app business.
Restaurants use the app to make sure tables are filled in the early evening, giving diners who book tables through it 50% off the menu price of their food.
Weir said 4000 restaurants in 80 cities were now using it.
“London is the number one city by revenue, Auckland is number two, Sydney is number three, and the UK overtook New Zealand as our biggest market at the beginning of the year, and is growing at 160% year on year,” said founder Mat Weir.
He was seeking to complete First Table’s US$10m capital raise to use to market to get the company’s revenue over the $100m-mark by March 2029.
“We’re now at around $16 million annualized revenue,” he told the gathered investors.
Other companies seeking funding that had a public face included Compostic, which makes soy-based biodergadable plastic bags to compete with Ziplock, and which is already stocked in US chains including Target and Costco, and was seeking capital of $2m for growth.
It already had revenue of $17m.
Not all of the companies seeking money were ones that had a retail face to them.
Several were based around scientific breakthroughs that could transform existing industries, but which were buried away deep in industrial processes and sites.
They included bspkl, which had developed a catalyst to make the manufacture of hydrogen for fuel much cheaper, and less energy-intensive, and Enagain, which had patent-pending technology to convert gas from landfill into gas for use as fuel.
There was Precision Chroma, whose technology developed at the University of Canterbury, cut the cost of making certain, currently very expensive, drugs.
And there was Aquafortus, which had developed a process for cleaning toxic, high-salinity water that is a by-product of oil and gas extraction, and many kinds of mining.
“We can treat any nasty wastewater, and we turn that nasty wastewater into crystal clear water that does not require any post-treatment,” said its chief techical officer Richard Brunton.
The company was seeking US$20m to take its proven technology into rapid commercialisation.
“We have clear line of sight to over US$200 in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2032,” Brunton said.
The company that kicked off the Icehouse Demo evening was Seascape, which was a high-tech company with a surprising physical product that could save lives on the high seas.
Seascape was a data company which had developed capability to monitor the world’s oceans using “synthetic aperture radar” satellite data, which is gathered by remote-sensing technology mounted on satellites or aircraft to create high-resolution, 2D or 3D images of landscapes and objects.
But it had also developed an incredible device, on which a patent was pending.
It was an unfoldable search-and-rescue device that folds flat, but in an emergency can be unfolded to float on the surface of the sea by stranded sailors.
“If you're in trouble, you unfold it,” said Seascape chief executive Andrew Steel. “It pops out on the ocean surface, and can actually be spotted by satellite, which is an amazing evolution.”
The company was seeking to raise $3.5m in growth capital.