New Zealand Innovations January Newsletter
Nga mihi o te Tau Hou! Wish you all a very Happy New Year!
In this newsletter:
- Portfolio updates
- Startup of the month: decentralized AWS (our first token investment)
- NZ border update
Fund update
🚀 Our portfolio company oVRcome made it into the SxSW startup pitch competition in Austin, Texas in March. The finalists and alternates for SxSW have been announced here. They are the only health tech startup in the VR category. Their founder Adam Hutchinson would be in Austin and LA/SF in March if anyone would like to meet.
🚀 Our mental health and wellness B2B portfolio startup chnnl also had this exciting video update on their continued expansion with corporates/ institutions + growth in Australia.
🚀 And checkout this timelapse of our fog-clearing startup Pyper Vision that is quickly clearing hurdles for approval by the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand.
Visibility created during fog dispersal trial - 8min timelapse
Startup of the month: Aleph.im
We invested into an early round of Aleph.im which was just announced a few weeks ago. We met Moshe, the founder early last year through our friends at BitFwd, an Australian crypto incubator run by EHF fellow Daniel Bar. Aleph is developing a decentralized storage solution for decentralized applications (Daaps) on the blockchain. To give some context on the problem Aleph solves, you need to understand that current blockchain technology can only optimize 2 out of the following 3 parameters: scalability/speed, security, decentralization. The current leader in terms of number of applications built is Ethereum, which is decentralized, and very secure but isn't very scalable with transactions sometimes taking minutes and costing $100’s of dollars.
Networks like Solana or Avalanche sacrifice decentralization to attain high speed and security and have lower costs. Still, any activity that requires multiple transactions such as playing a game, using a social network etc will incur fees. This is where Aleph comes in. Aleph serves as a Layer 2 protocol on top of Layer 1’s like Ethereum and Solana to both allow computing of transactions locally before being sent to the blockchain and also allow for fast indexing and storage of files such as NFTs. The most analogous example for what Aleph is building is a decentralized AWS. There are currently 2 other companies in the space that are Arweave and the Graph. You can read more about Aleph here and here.
What's interesting about this investment is that this was our first one buying the tokens from the company rather than equity. We believe in the fundamental value of the token as the currency used to pay for compute and storage on the Aleph network. We value Aleph the same way you can value Ethereum on a discounted cash flow model. Beyond just holding the tokens, we have locked them up in several nodes to stake and accrue additional yields. This way we can help with securing the network, increase compute all while accruing additional yields and compounding our returns. You can see our 3 nodes here under the compute section. If you're interested in learning more about Aleph, web3 in general or even participating in some of these deals please don't hesitate to get in touch.
New Zealand border update
In a positive development, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Arden just announced a phased plan to reopen the border after the last dates were scrapped due to Omicron. It’s also great to see the elimination of MIQ in favor of self-isolation.
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson