Kiwibank backs women-led startups in bid to bridge funding gap
Thursday, 11 June 2026
When Madeleine Patel wanted to grow her AI and ecommerce startup Delightable, she turned to a new product for business owners who typically have found it hard to secure capital investment.
Initially she received $80,000 from a new Kiwibank lending scheme StartUp+, but she found this was not enough to be able prepare to take the business global.
Kiwibank reviewed her application and came back willing to provide $150,000.
“Even early on there seemed to be a real appetite [from the bank] to take a bit more risk and put their money where their mouth was,” said Patel.
Read more:
Early stage startups, and particularly those started and run by women, can struggle to gain access to funding, but Kiwibank’s StartUp+ aims to change that.
StartUp+, which Kiwibank says is a modern-age lending scheme that allows businesses to unlock more funding as they hit their goals, has so far lent out $4 million to 32 startups.
About half went to women-led businesses.
Women-led startups receive less than 3% of every dollar invested in venture capital, and only one in 10 are getting any investment at all, according to the Gender Investment Gap research, conducted by the University of Auckland.
Kiwibank general manager of business products and performance, Joanna Greaves, said she hoped the product would bridge the funding gap for women and anyone that found it hard to secure funding to take their business forward.
Traditional lending mechanisms can be very retrospective, looking at revenue, assets, track record, which doesn’t work for startups, Greaves said.
Many founders were feeling like they were too early for a bank, VC funding might not have been the right fit for them just yet, and alternative solutions often came with trade-offs,” Greaves told The Post.
First piloted and launched last year, StartUp+ offers businesses $450,000, released in tranches of up to $150,000. There is no security on the initial $150,000 lending and a personal guarantee on the remaining $300,000.
Traditionally, you would have to put your guarantee against an asset.
Greaves said she was excited to see how StartUp+ could make a difference and was pleased to see strong uptake amongst women setting up businesses.
“It’s rewarding for us to know that we're making that impact.”
Greaves said the bank’s model considered where the businesses were heading “and how they're going to get there, and how do we best support and mould our solution around them”.
Funding and Kiwibank’s product was spoken about on the first day of the women founders conference Electrify Aotearoa. Six hundred people attended the two-day event held at the International Convention Centre.
Greaves said the bank - which has 50,000 business customers - had received three times more demand than anticipated since it launched StartUp+.
“What that signals is there's quite a significant funding gap, and we would really challenge our partners to also step in and help.”
According to the chairperson of Electrify Aotearoa women founder programmes, Marian Johnson, before the product there was no bank in New Zealand that was willing to build or invest in high growth startups and ambitious entrepreneurs.
Ankita Dhakar, founder of cybersecurity firm Capture The Bug, also said she found the fudning helpful. She had to provide her financial forecast and business plans as part of the application.
“It’s a great tool for any founder who’s thinking of having non-dilutive funding.”