Hnry founding members, L-R: Claire Fuller (COO), James Fuller (CEO), Richard Freestone (CFO) (Photo: Supplied)

BusinessMay 14, 2019

Five innovative New Zealand companies you need to know about

The Spinoff Business

Staff writers

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Hnry founding members, L-R: Claire Fuller (COO), James Fuller (CEO), Richard Freestone (CFO) (Photo: Supplied)

The Hi-Tech Awards are fast approaching, but who’ll be deemed the most innovative of them all? We take a closer look at the five nominees for Kiwibank’s Most Innovative Hi-Tech Service award.

Eleven billion dollars: that’s how much revenue New Zealand’s leading hi-tech companies brought into our economy last year. That’s an 11% increase from the year before. Today, technology is New Zealand’s third largest export earner behind tourism and dairy. Not bad for a little island in the South Pacific.

With TechWeek in just a few week’s time, it wouldn’t be complete without the Hi-Tech Awards to top it all off. There are 13 awards up for grabs including ‘Most Innovative Hi-Tech Service’, sponsored by Kiwibank for the third year running. It’s a highly competitive category made up of companies from a mix of industries. Last year, the award was won by Beca’s Beacon System – a real-time alert service using technology and engineering to assess the impact on buildings right after an earthquake hits.

Kiwibank’s Tracey Berry poses with the Beca team after winning the award for most innovative hi-tech service (Photo: The Heather & Doug Records)

This year’s awards will be held at Auckland’s Spark Arena where the winners will be announced on May 24. In anticipation of the night, we take a closer look at the five nominees:

Hnry

Since completing the Kiwibank Fintech Accelerator (a 12-week programme providing financial tech start-ups with access to resources to achieve rapid growth) last year, Hnry has gone on to become one of the programme’s most successful alumni, rapidly growing its customer base and raising major funding from various investors. To top it all off, two-year-old Hnry is now nominated for its first ever Hi-Tech Award.

Applications for the 2019 Kiwi Fintech Accelerator are open.

So what is it? Hnry is an online service that handles financial admin (Income Tax, GST, ACC, Student Loans, KiwiSaver etc.) for self-employed people. The idea came to founders James and Claire Fuller when the pair found themselves battling the admin tasks of self-employment in 2016. Despite having an accountant, they found they still had to do a lot of the extra work themselves like invoicing, calculating and getting insurance.

So in 2017, the pair started Hnry in an attempt to help other self-employed freelancers, contractors and sole traders. How it works is that customers are provided a Hnry bank account to have all their self-employed income paid into. Tax from that income is then automatically calculated and deducted before the remaining amount is given to the customer. And because Hnry is a registered Tax Agent with both IRD and ACC, it’s able to represent its customers to those agencies just as an accountant would. Hnry currently works on a pay-as-you-earn model, charging a 1% fee on the income that gets paid into your Hnry account.

Predict HQ

The stakes are high for Predict HQ, which is nominated for not one, not two, but three awards this year. It’s a huge endorsement for a company that was launched in 2015 by Campbell Brown, formerly of Zoomy, GrabOne, and Online Republic. Drawing on his years of experience working in tech businesses, Brown noticed how hard it was to know exactly why a demand spike was happening. It turned out most of these spikes were being caused by events, so he decided to create a platform (with co-founders Robert Kern and Mike Ballantyne) that would predict these spikes by aggregating all public events into one, easy to access service (AKA Predict HQ).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq20xn8sh4M

Four years on, Predict HQ now has two teams across Auckland and San Francisco. Its San Francisco office was set up in order to get a foot in the door with Silicon Valley clients and investors, something which so far seems to have paid off. Predict HQ now works with companies like Dominos, Booking.com, Accor Hotels, Qantas, and – in its biggest get yet – Uber. Its customers get alerted to around 20 million events (concerts, public holidays, conferences, sporting events) that could potentially cause fluctuations in demand for everything from flights home to ordering a pizza.

Emergency Q

Emergency Q is no stranger to the Hi-Tech Awards. Not only was its parent company Healthcare Applications nominated twice at last year’s awards (including Most Innovative Hi-Tech Service), but it also won the award for Most Innovative Technology Solution for the Public Good.

Emergency Q is a software designed to reduce wait times in hospital emergency departments (EDs). It does this by allowing patients to get an estimate of how long waits might be by looking at the Emergency Q app or screen. That way it allows patients to make more informed decisions, as well as eliminating time wasted in waiting rooms. For medical staff, it allows them to focus on the most urgent cases, relieving pressure on beds and other resources.

In its first 10 months, Emergency Q was able to save patients more than 21,600 hours of waiting, as well as reduce patient volumes by 12%. Today, the app has more than 12,000 users and is now fully operational at both North Shore and Middlemore hospitals. Unsurprisingly, in addition to its Most Innovative Hi-Tech Service nomination, Emergency Q is also nominated for Māori Company of the Year

Serko

With more than 6,000 corporate customers across multiple continents, Serko’s integrated travel and expense solutions have transformed the way business travel works. Zeno Travel, one of Serko’s most popular solutions, aggregates data from various sources to give corporate users access to a range of travel options. Accompanying that is Zeno Expense, a cloud-based expense management solution where users can manage cash claims, mileage, allowance and corporate credit card expenses from their mobile phones. This streamlines the process of matching corporate card expenses and saves accountants from hours of admin time.

Along with Emergency Q, Serko was also nominated for Most Innovative Hi-Tech service last year but was beaten out by Beca. This year, it’ll be hoping for some better luck, especially with its nomination for the biggest prize of the night – Hi-Tech Company of the Year.

Xero Learn

As one of New Zealand’s great business success stories, it would be easy to assume it was business-as-usual at Xero. But last year the accounting software company unveiled something new: Xero Learn, the first cloud accounting platform designed for educators. With Xero Learn, educators can set up business scenarios for students to experiment with, or tasks for students to work through in Xero, and monitor student access and progress. Ultimately, the goal is to provide young people with more real-world experience with a software that’s fully immersive and accessible anywhere, anytime.

Right now, Xero Learn is being used at over 20 educational institutions to teach students accounting, bookkeeping and business studies. That includes Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Macquarie University in Sydney, and the University of Waikato. In 2018, Australian Financial Review named Xero Learn best service innovation of the year (meanwhile, Xero was also listed as the third most innovative company in Australasia).

To find out more about the Hi-Tech Service Award finalists click here.

This article was created in paid partnership with Kiwibank. Learn more about our partnerships here.

Collaborate matches volunteers with organisations that need help based on skills and interests (Photo: letscollaborate.co.nz)

BusinessMay 11, 2019

How Collaborate matches volunteers with jobs that match their skills

The Spinoff Business

Staff writers

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Collaborate matches volunteers with organisations that need help based on skills and interests (Photo: letscollaborate.co.nz)

In our Q&A series, The Lightbulb, we ask innovators and entrepreneurs to tell us about how they turned their ideas into reality. This week, we talk to Collaborate co-founder Poppy Norton who’s helped create an app matching charitable organisations with volunteers.

Nominated for a Hi-Tech Award for the second year in a row, Collaborate is the brainchild of four young women – Poppy Norton, her sister Holly Norton, Ceara McAuliffe Bickerton, and Sophie Harker. They wanted to make volunteering easier for everyone involved, so they created an app matching charities who needed help to those who could offer their time and skills for free. Since launching in October 2017, thousands of charitable New Zealanders have signed up to give something back to their communities in a way that fits their skills, interests, schedule, and time.

Today, all four women continue to volunteer their time to Collaborate on top of working their full-time jobs. It’s a platform made by volunteers for volunteers. Poppy Norton explains how that works and what sparked Collaborate’s lightbulb moment.

L-R: Ceara McAuliffe Bickerton, Poppy Norton, Holly Norton, and Sophie Harker (Photo: Supplied)

First of all, give us your elevator pitch for Collaborate.

We’ve created an app which is effectively Tinder but for volunteering. It’s supposed to make volunteering more accessible to anybody who wants to get out there. But in particular, why we started it was for young people to have an easier way of finding volunteering roles that matched their skills, interests, and time they had available.

How did the idea for Collaborate come to you? What was your lightbulb moment?

Around 2015, Holly was actually the one who started thinking there was this gap in volunteering for young people. She was volunteering for an organisation [at the time] that focused on refugee-background youth. She was the only young person volunteering for the organisation and they were really struggling to get young people involved.

But when Holly was telling me about this, I realised I had the complete opposite experience. While I was in high school, I got diagnosed with depression and it turned into quite severe chronic depression. Something that kind of helped me get out of that was being able to volunteer while I was a student at university. And then around 2015 I got my first full-time job. I struggled to find volunteering opportunities that were outside of Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, so I was having a bit of internal panic.

That’s when I realised there was this massive disconnect. I was desperate to volunteer whereas Holly was getting too [many opportunities]. And that’s how we came up with the idea for Collaborate.

In the beginning, it was four female co-founders. Now we have a team of about 17 people and everybody works full-time as well as volunteering their time to Collaborate.

So how did you go about making your idea into a reality?

We actually started off quite differently. The focus was about young people and youth-led organisations, so we thought a good way to do this was to have meet-ups with organisations in Wellington. [But] we realised people were actually too time poor and it was external people wanting to volunteer their time to these organisations. So we started looking at platforms like Tinder, Uber and Airbnb and spoke to lots of people from these organisations and volunteers about it.

Then when we started to do some research to find out how much it would cost to build an app, we were a little bit shocked when we realised it wasn’t a couple hundred dollars! By that stage we’d already spoken to heaps of people who were behind the idea, so we realised we couldn’t give up. So Springload, a development firm in Wellington, actually volunteered [to help build] what we have with the app so far and gave it to us for free.

Example of a volunteer profile (Photo: letscollaborate.co.nz)

How do volunteers get matched with volunteer opportunities? Is there a method behind that?

There’s an algorithm built into the app. The volunteer builds a profile (who they are, a little bio about themselves etc.) and then they select interest areas and skills which have been selected from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) skill set. Then when an organisation uploads a role to the app, they select what interest areas and skill set that role falls under so that when people go through the app, it lists those ones first. It’s also done by geolocation so things closest to the user will appear in the app first. The idea is that if someone had a spare hour, they could go on the app and see what good they contribute immediately in their community.

How many volunteers and organisations does Collaborate have?

At the moment we have about 1,400 volunteers [signed up] and we’ve got over 350 community organisations, predominantly in New Zealand. Although a third of our roles are remote so people can actually volunteer from the other side of the world.

We’ve got big names like Cancer Society and Plunket [on board], but also a lot of names that people don’t know. There are some amazing organisations out there that are empowering people through music and dance, or cooking meals for people in need. So there’s a lot of community organisations that we didn’t even know existed before we started this which is really cool.

Instead of being a charity or a fully for-profit business, Collaborate is a social enterprise. What was your reasoning behind that?

It’s because we don’t want to be reliant on grants. We don’t want to be taking that money away from the charities [we help], so we want to make sure we’re self-sustaining to keep the platform growing.

So what are some of the ways you make money in order for Collaborate to sustain itself?

At the moment we haven’t made any money [but] at the moment, we’re developing a corporate volunteering arm of the app. That’s to encourage not just those big corporates [take part], but also to help organisations upskill their staff through ongoing volunteering and being able to give back to the community in a really skilled way. So that’s how we’re developing our business model.

We’ve done a lot of user testing and we have a solution concept at the moment so it’s in development at the moment.

Te Papa’s new nature exhibition will feature a custom version of the app where you can see nature-based volunteering opportunities (Photo: Supplied)

What’s been your biggest challenge so far?

Probably our biggest challenge is not having that revenue at the moment. We have a lot more tech that we’d like to build… but we don’t have those funds to take it to the next level. That’s probably our biggest thing that’s holding us back at the moment. But we’ve just been overwhelmed by the amount of support and interest people have been giving us. So even though it was quite scary in the beginning, it’s turned into something really cool.

Finally, what can we expect for the rest of 2019?

Definitely the launch of the corporate volunteering arm. But also this week, Te Papa’s new nature exhibition is launching and we’ve developed a custom version of the app where you can see volunteering opportunities in New Zealand that are all for nature-based organisations. Hopefully, that gets more people inspired to do volunteering and look after our natural environment.