26 August 2026
By Jacques Richter, Investment Director, NZ Growth Capital Partners
In 2025 New Zealand followed a global pattern: capital concentrating into later-stage rounds and into companies investors already knew. Offshore, that concentration has been driven by the AI boom, in which a handful of start-ups attract the lion’s share of VC dollars. Here the driver is different, but the shape is similar. The result is that despite promising headline growth in investment, the capital reaching the top of the funnel is not growing with it.
Our first-half data for 2026 is still being collected, and the full analysis will follow in the next edition of Young Company Finance. The direction, though, is already clear enough to mention. In the first six months of this year, more capital went into New Zealand start-ups than in the whole of 2025 — across roughly the same number of deals as H1 2025.
Much of that growth came from a small number of outlier deals. That is a feature of the asset class, not a bug. Building and funding outlier companies is what we aspire to, and those rounds are justifiably celebrated. Those successes spur the next generation of founders, and when the companies exit, that capital is recycled into the next generation of startups.
It is worth pondering what this means for the ecosystem. Deal volume has not grown. Average round size has grown considerably, but only at the upper quartile of deals. The market is putting substantially more money to work without materially increasing the number of companies it is working with.
New Zealand is not unusual in this. Crunchbase recorded a record US$510 billion of global start-up investment in the first half of 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounting for 43% of it, and more than 70% of second-quarter capital going to AI companies. Deal counts fell while dollars climbed. What is happening here in NZ is a smaller, less pronounced version of the same thing happening offshore.
A key difference is the maturity of the ecosystem, and the liquidity that follows from it. In the US, SpaceX has recently gone public and Anthropic is reported to be preparing to follow. The liquidity that generates will lubricate the machine. Our champions may be some way off producing liquidity of that kind, and could very well continue to attract more and more capital in the meantime. How do we support new start-ups in that scenario?
The Dealroom New Zealand Tech Ecosystem Report released this month values our venture-backed companies at NZ$133 billion, built on less than NZ$13 billion of venture capital, across more than 400 companies, eight unicorns and two decacorns. That is exceptional capital efficiency by any international comparison. Is it sustainable? As more of the marginal dollars go in at the later stages of growth, that efficiency may indeed come under pressure.
So the priority is the front end, and there is work underway.
The Scout Fund trial, being rolled out through Aspire NZ Seed Fund, aims to address this. It puts capital with experienced operators and early-stage investors who are close to founders before a formal round exists. Putting more dry powder in the hands of the people who can write a first cheque is the most direct lever available to us to grow the top of the funnel. Through the Scout fund we intend to support the companies that will raise the large rounds of the 2030s.
More capital in the first six months of 2026 than in the previous twelve is a good “problem” to have. The question worth holding onto is how many new companies that capital will have to choose from in five years’ time.