FAQs

What is Icehouse Ventures?

Icehouse Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm. The firm includes all of the previous startup related activities of The Icehouse including the Flux Accelerator, partnerships with angel networks Ice Angels & ArcAngels; and funds Tuhua Ventures, Eden Ventures and First Cut Ventures, which collectively manage $50 million in funds. Tuhua Ventures second fund, Tuhua II is more than 75% subscribed and will close shortly.

More than $106 million has been invested into 165 New Zealand companies since The Icehouse first began channelling capital to startups with the establishment of its incubator in 2001 and Ice Angels in 2003, with more than half this amount raised within the past four years. In 2018, the Icehouse community invested $22 million into 56 startups.

Icehouse Ventures will continue to be majority owned by The Icehouse Limited. New shareholders will include KiwiSaver funds manager Simplicity; Sir Stephen Tindall’s investment company K1W1; investment banking firm FNZC and a group of other investors and staff that will join with the partners.

How much are the new partners investing in Icehouse Ventures?  

The Icehouse is raising $4 million to power up Icehouse Ventures and grow its business. The investing partners have committed $3 million of investment into Icehouse Ventures between Simplicity, FNZC and K1W1, leaving $1 million of investment to be raised from interests associated with The Icehouse. The investing partnership has also indicated they will be investing in Icehouse Ventures’ funds and investing platforms in their own right. Simplicity will start by investing $2 million into Tuhua Ventures’ second fund, Tuhua II and it expects to invest up to $100 million over the next 5 years in other Ventures funds that are funding emerging high growth New Zealand companies. FNZC will also be investing across the platform and also releasing products that enable its clients to access the portfolio opportunities of Icehouse Ventures best companies.

What is the ownership structure of Icehouse Ventures? 

The new investing partners will own 23% of the company. The Icehouse owns the remaining shares and will be launching an employee share ownership programme.

Who is Robbie Paul? How did he become CEO?

Robbie joined The Icehouse in 2008 and trained under former US Angel Capital Association Director Dan Rosen and New Zealand Angel Association Arch Angel Bill Payne. He became CEO of Ice Angels in 2015. He is the Managing Partner of Tuhua Ventures and was a founding investor in 2016. He will take on the role of CEO of Icehouse Ventures from 1 May. You can find out more about Robbie here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjpaul/

How many people does Icehouse Ventures employ?

Icehouse Ventures will initially employ 8 full-time executives who were previously employed by The Icehouse which now falls under the umbrella of Icehouse Ventures. More staff will be hired as the company grows.

How does the Icehouse work with Icehouse Ventures?

The Icehouse retains majority control of Icehouse Ventures and in simple terms, it is sharing a load of investment with its new investment partners to create more impact and returns. Everything else says the same, the organisation will work from the same place, acting as one business focused on supporting New Zealand’s founders and SMEs to reach their potential. The Icehouse will have a shared services contract with Icehouse Ventures to deliver its back office and compliance together with the support of marketing and executives such as The Icehouse CEO, Andy Hamilton who will continue to be actively involved in the Icehouse Ventures business and operations. This shared services arrangement has an initial period of five years. See diagram below.

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Vodafone Xone. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon talks to Ben Reynolds about how his company Spalk is making sports commentary more accessible. 

Have you ever turned on your favorite live sports game to be disappointed by the commentators? Maybe it is an Aussie butchering Māori or Pasifika names, maybe it is just that they are talking out of their hats.

Well, Ben Reynolds and Michael Prendergast did something about it. They used internet software to do their own commentaries, growing to thousands of fans who would tune in despite audio delays, lags from live action and all sorts of technical shortcomings – shortcomings in which they saw an opportunity.

So they built the perfect system to allow multiple commentaries on a single stream of video.

They prototyped, launched and have now built the tool into Spalk, a service that has let millions view video with their audio and is used by Māori TV, FIBA and soon lots of American sports outfits to allow choice for viewers and savings for broadcasters.

It’s an idea driving up viewership, engagement and getting backing from capital. It’s earned them a place at the Vodafone Xone accelerator that kick-started their growth. To talk the journey so far and the plans ahead, Ben Reynolds joined the podcast. 

You started out with the idea of providing alternate commentary for sports, pretty much for fun. Did you see pretty soon that there were actually people whose home team was playing and they weren’t getting their side of the story out?

Yeah, exactly, so what we did after we built this little hacky version of Spalk was we went out and said to a bunch of amateur sports organisations, hey, you’re not actually streaming anything, can we put some of your content online so us and our friends can commentate it?

So our first partner was Auckland Cricket, who streamed a bunch of their Plunket Shield matches and a bunch of their county level cricket games, and so we’d be sitting there with a camcorder following the action on the side of the field, streaming it to YouTube, it would go onto our system, and then people would be commentating it from all around New Zealand.

Soon we had a commentator in Australia, and then one in London. The commentators were growing and growing. We started doing a lot of work with other amateur sports organisations, the likes of New Zealand Swimming and New Zealand Squash and a lot of those other sports who weren’t quite at the broadcast stage but were really keen to get content online so their fans could commentate it.

We were getting good numbers of people tuning in and listening to all this good commentary. We had professional players coming on and commentating tournaments, and kids who’d just finished up at their high school champs coming on to commentate their friends and all sorts of things like that.

We started seeing a lot of grassroots people coming in and getting really really excited about what we were doing.

Did you have to build out the infrastructure to actually film everything and live stream it in order to get the Spalk idea off the ground? 

It was interesting, at that stage we didn’t really think that places like SkyTV or Māori Television who are one of our really good partners now would ever take us seriously. So we said to ourselves, what’s the easiest way that we can get access to some content? And the easiest way was to just do it ourselves. 

I borrowed a camcorder from Mum and Dad and figured out how to stream everything online and it was a pretty hacky setup with a camcorder on the side of the pitch and me sitting there texting scores through to the commentators so that they could give score updates because there was no score graphic or anything up on the screen.

We got the numbers and that really validated that we had a kernel of something interesting.

With that kernel you then went to Māori TV who were one of your first big broadcast partners. Was that driven by the horrendous mispronunciations of Māori and Pasifika names you hear?

Yeah that was part of it. It’s funny because they actually ended up coming to us. They got in touch and said hey, we’ve seen what you guys are doing and think it’s really interesting from the ability to have multiple different languages.

Obviously as a state broadcaster they’ve got to provide a certain level of coverage in te reo Māori so for them it was a really easy way to say here’s a really easy way to do English commentary, Māori commentary, and hey, if we want to throw in Fijian and Samoan and a variety of other Pasifika languages so we’ve got a really broad broadcast and a really appealing product to different demographics around New Zealand. 

Really for them it was where they saw the use case and so for us what it meant was we had to go back and rejig our entire infrastructure to be able to deal with being on a product like Māori Television.

Rather than dealing with a camcorder, suddenly we were on broadcast-level content coming out of the New Zealand High School Basketball champs, and we’ve got a certain level of service that we’ve got to provide, and so it was a really good opportunity for us to go and build a proper product and take the time to go and do a bit more research and development and really mature where the product was at.

A commercial facility for salvaging high-value metals such as gold, silver and palladium from electronic waste is being planned, after a partnership deal between two Kiwi companies. 

Mint Innovation and Remarkit Solutions have signed a deal to build the factory and expand the company across the country, and then internationally.

New Zealand Cleantech company Mint Innovation has developed the low-cost recovery process using specialised microorganisms which purify the metals from e-waste in what chief executive Will Barker says is an environmentally benign process.

"Our team, led by Dr Ollie Crush, has successfully extracted precious metals on a small scale and it is now time to take the technology further," Barker said.

"It's very exciting for us - we have developed a technology that we are very satisfied can be scaled and taken global and the first step for us is to build a New Zealand facility," Barker said.

"We're currently looking at Wellington and Auckland [for the facility], and Remarkit as a leading e-waste recycler is a key partner to enable us to have access to the waste that we need to process." 

Barker said the current process for most e-waste was for it to be broken into parts and sent to various areas of the world that could break it down into specific metals.

IMeasureU, a division of the Academy Award-winning motion capture leader Vicon, today announces the release of IMU Step, a new piece of motion-sensing wearable tech designed to track the movements of professional and amateur athletes. Early units are already being used by both professional sports and collegiate programs alike, including the NBA, Pac-12 schools and Harvard University to help train and rehabilitate athletes across a wide variety of sports.

Consisting of two small, lightweight sensors that produce highly accurate movement data, IMU Step gives coaches and athletes the ability to precisely measure the movements and stress put on athletes’ bodies in any running-based sport. While IMU Step will soon be available to the public, IMeasureU has been working with professional and collegiate athletes for years. Harvard University recently used IMU sensors to study the impact of runners in the Boston Marathon, and Pac-12 schools the University of Oregon, Stanford, USC and the University of Colorado are also currently using the sensors to help understand the injuries commonly sustained by cross country runners.

“IMU sensors allow for the collection of biomechanics data in the wild,” said Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Irene Davis. “Devices like IMU Step allow the assessment of movement patterns on the court or in the field, and help to bridge the gap between laboratory research and applied sports science.”

Along with the Boston Marathon, Harvard is also preparing to use the sensors in an NBA/G co-funded study designed to measure bone stress injuries in collegiate and professional basketball players, and monitor changes as a result of fatigue. Thanks to the recent acquisition by Vicon, the world’s largest supplier of precision motion capture and tracking systems, IMeasureU hopes to offer its IMU Step technology to participants around the world in any sport.

IMU Step records movement data through two synchronized sensors placed above the ankle bone. The data is then interpreted through algorithms and software that precisely quantify the impact of each step an athlete takes. Unlike most single-sensor wearables that treat the body as a single unit of mass and only focus on distance, speed and heart rate, IMU Step precisely measures and classifies how hard each limb hits the ground to calculate asymmetries and workout intensity in order to offer an accumulative “bone load” score for each athlete’s training session. For running-based sports like basketball, where over 40-percent of injuries are sustained on the foot and ankle, these metrics can help coaches and trainers remove the guesswork from a player’s journey back from a lower limb injury, and dramatically reduce the risk of re-injury. 

The analysis of an athlete’s lower limbs and bone loading impact generated through IMU Step offers a first of its kind look at each athlete’s body and the impact of workouts on their musculoskeletal system. With enough data, IMU Step can create individual profiles for athletes, making it easier to produce personalized workouts and rest schedules. Even if the players themselves feel fine, constant metrics alert trainers and coaches to potential problems before they happen, ensuring that their athletes are at optimal strength for when it’s time to compete. The data can also help with recovery by enabling effective observations and strategic planning that personalizes the rehabilitation process and prevents future injuries.

“IMU Step brings about a new understanding of injury biomechanics as we move outside of the lab and obtain accurate measurements in the real world,” said Dr. Thor Besier, co-founder and chief scientist at IMeasureU. “Using the data collected with IMU Step, athletes, coaches, trainers and support staff can make informed decisions about how to get athletes healthy, and how to keep them that way.”

By: Rebecca Howard

Chief executive and founder Shaun Quincey says Genoapay is signing five new merchants a day and forecasts show the platform is on track to be available in more than 1,000 stores by the second quarter of 2018, enabling transactions for some 80,000 qualified users.

"I am delighted with our current growth trajectory, and we are learning every day how to grow faster and add more value to our merchants in the process," said Quincey.

The platform is bankrolled by Finance Now, a finance company owned by Southland Building Society, and uses Debitsuccess to manage its payment systems and credit services. Finance Now has a 10 percent stake in Genoapay.

“We’re delighted to have Promus as an early investor, and see Mike and his team as the ideal, strategic partners for Halter as we work to grow globally,” said Craig Piggott, CEO and founder of Halter.

This funding will enable us to scale our on-farm development ahead of providing commercial services in 2018. We’ve seen considerable demand from customers looking to run a pilot farm, and get ahead of the queue. We’re taking pre-orders and would encourage anyone interested to get in touch quickly.” 

Mike Collett of Promus will join Halter’s board of directors. Collett has existing investment interests in New Zealand after Promus invested in Rocket Lab’s Series D financing round. 

"At Promus we look to invest in tech companies run by visionary and tenacious founding teams,” said Collett. “Craig and his team are dedicated to revolutionising farming in a globally unprecedented way.”

“Halter is set to redefine an industry and truly modernise farming,” said Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, and an independent director of Halter. “I believe in kiwi companies that have big, billion-dollar potential - Halter is one of those companies.”

The Series A round of funding follows a seed round (2016) led by New Zealand angel network, Tuhua Ventures.

Halter will begin commercial roll out in 2018 and has plans to expand globally. 

About Promus Ventures

Promus Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Chicago investing in deep-technology software and hardware companies. The firm has invested in more than 60 private technology companies, including areas such as artificial intelligence, space, virtual reality/ alternative reality, machine learning, robotics, natural language processing, autonomous vehicles/connected car, bitcoin/blockchain, computer vision, digital health, fintech, insurance, and others. Promus Ventures focuses primarily on Seed and Series A rounds and has invested in such leading companies as AngelList, Kensho, Mapbox, Spire, Rocket Lab, Swift Navigation, Tulip Retail and others. More information can be found at www.promusventures.com.