Bankrupt Wellington start-up founder Melissa (Mel) Gollan starts over in United States
Friday, 30 January 2026
After the high-profile collapse of her Wellington-based tech venture and a contentious bankruptcy battle, entrepreneur Melissa (Mel) Gollan has resurfaced in the United States.
Gollan was adjudicated bankrupt by the High Court in Wellington late last year, having lost her flagship company RIPA Global in a multimillion-dollar collapse just months earlier.
The bankruptcy order restricted Gollan from leaving Aotearoa or being the director of a company in New Zealand without the consent of the Official Assignee.
Now, however, she is listed online as a “mission-driven, global connector and visionary” company “President” of a newly launched tech company based in Washington DC.
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The company – 6th Generation Payment Intelligence (6GPI) – describes itself as focused on modernising financial interactions in a way that reduces cost and protects against fraud.
Once hailed as a tech mogul on her way to global success, Gollan founded The Work Shop Limited, which traded as RIPA Global New Zealand, in 2011.
The tech start-up branded itself as having“game-changing” technology that would reduce the time and cost of accounting through an app that automated the processing of receipts, invoices and payments.
'Effectively what we're saying is: ‘nothing beats doing nothing’ and that’s what we’re offering to our customers,” Gollan said at the time.
But in February of last year, Inland Revenue successfully applied to put The Work Shop into liquidation. A subsequent liquidator’s report showed the company’s debts had climbed to almost $7 million.
One former RIPA employee, Linda Cilliers, previously told The Post she was still owed about $26,000 from Gollan: “We almost lost our house and couldn't stay on top of bills. All of us from RIPA are still trying to dig ourselves out of the financial holes we had to dig to survive.”
Another former employee, Craig Knox, worked for Gollan for three years and said he was left about $47,500 out of pocket amid the company’s demise.
In November, Gollan was adjudicated bankrupt having failed to repay $400,000 owed to the Bank of New Zealand.
Gollan previously told The Post she was “unable to comment until the legal situation is resolved”, but that she would be “happy to comment post that”.
She has not replied to further questions from The Post.
However, in a lengthy LinkedIn post dated October 6, Gollan said she had come to the realisation that “New Zealand is not the place for me - I simply do not fit the ‘mold’ and I am ok with that”.
“It’s time to move to a country where I can be a gamechanger, a disrupter - fight the injustice in the world with people who support relentless drive and grit,” she wrote.