Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: 21 years of boosting smart ideas

The 21-year mark is a milestone by any measure but when your achievements are nothing short of spectacular, it’s definitely worth celebrating.

In its 21 years, the University of Auckland’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) has supported tens of thousands of students, and staff, to help them bring their clever ideas to life.

Take educational software company Kami, which in August attracted a US private equity firm to invest in it at a $300m valuation.

Co-founders Alliv Samson, Hengjie Wang and Jordon Thoms were University of Auckland students whose idea for Kami was born at CIE and boosted by it.

In May, engineering and CIE alumnus Alex Kendall’s company Wayve was given a lift by a $1.7 billion investment that will allow it to develop and launch the first ‘embodied AI’ technology for self-driving vehicles. Alex participated in the Velocity entrepreneurship development programme, before going on to set up Wayve.

“The culture at the University of Auckland and my experience in the Velocity programme were formative for me to become an entrepreneur. I loved the things I learned there.”

AI is also a driver for a game-changing health screening test created by Associate Professor Ehsan Vaghefi and Dr David Squirrell. Their Toku Eyes software uses the power of AI to analyse scans from eye exams to detect underlying conditions such as chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease.

Vaghefi also participated in the Velocity entrepreneurship development programme and later received support from the University’s commercialisation company UniServices. (Listen to a recent interview with Ehsan Vaghefi on RNZ.)

Darsel Keane, CIE’s director, says cultivating innovative and entrepreneurial talent and supporting the creation of ventures are the key focuses of CIE – and it has been hugely successful.   

“Supporting students to develop their capability for an innovative career is a big part of it; we know that if students can leave this University with an entrepreneurial mindset and capability, it would be transformative for this country.

"Our entrepreneurs are founding ventures that are solving global problems and also creating highly valued jobs here in New Zealand.”

CIE’s flagship programme, the Velocity $100k Challenge, is a competition that began in 2003 (as Spark) and grew from the 2001 Knowledge Wave Conference which recommended that New Zealand should redefine itself as a knowledge-based economy.

The University of Auckland Business School, seeing the potential to build on the success of Velocity, created CIE to develop innovative and entrepreneurial staff and students and support the creation of early-stage ventures. It attracted sponsors and donors and was able to grow its programme offerings, establish an incubator, set up a physical space (Unleash) and employ staff with expertise.

21 facts you might not know about CIE

1. CIE’s long-running success story is Velocity, an entrepreneurship development programme, which runs seminars and start-up planning competitions such as the Velocity $100k Challenge. The challenge gives students and staff the opportunity to win a share of a $100,000 prize pool, along with other measures of support, to bring their ideas to life.

2. CIE offers free learning and professional development opportunities to students and staff from all faculties at the University of Auckland, not just Business where CIE is based. This means there’s complementary subject matter expertise and skills on hand to support participants.

3. People who have been through the CIE programme – its alumni - have raised more than $4.2 billion in capital in the big wide world to get their start-ups off the ground or to take the next step. CIE alumni have so far created 292 ventures.

4. CIE alumni run their commercial and social ventures in more than 195 countries.

5. They have created more than 3, 760 jobs through their start-ups. (Read about some of the start-ups here.)

6. These entrepreneurs are regular award winners too, including at the Hi-Tech Awards, KEA World Class New Zealander, the American Chamber of Commerce Awards, EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Deloitte Fast 50 and more.

7. As New Zealand’s leading innovation and entrepreneurship centre at a university, CIE has won 12 international awards since 2020, including from the US Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Educators for Impact, the International Council of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the Accreditation Council for Entrepreneurial and Engaged Universities.  

8. You don’t have to be involved in the programmes to get hands-on experience making cool things. CIE delivers experiential learning at two locations – Unleash Space Kura Matahuna, an innovation hub with a ‘makerspace’, where people can try out technology like laser cutting and 3D printing, and there’s also Te Ahi Hangarau Technology Hub – a 5G lab.

9. CIE supports researchers and staff to develop their entrepreneurial mindsets and capabilities. Professor Pierre Quenneville, for example, developed the idea for Tectonus through CIE – it’s a multi-national company that fits out buildings to be earthquake-resistant through innovative seismic dampers. 

10. CIE is the starting point for many MedTech innovators. These include the people behind Alimetry – who provide digital healthcare and diagnostic devices to support patients with gastrointestinal diseases, AI rostering software company RosterLab, AI brain surgery innovators Neurofanos, Avasa who simplify microsurgery, orthopaedic pre-operative planning software company Formus Labs and Kitea Health who have conducted a world-first brain implant, successfully implanting a chip under an Auckland patient’s skull as part of the development of their pressure-sensing device.  

11. CIE is the birthplace of social innovators too. This includes social enterprise SavY, which has provided financial literacy workshops for the past 15 years to more than 60,000 school students. Meanwhile, SpinPoi was started by a researcher who has the world’s first PhD in poi, through Dance Studies and the Centre for Brain Research, and now delivers poi workshops for health benefits. 

12. CIE was the starting point for AgriTech innovators such as the founders of Cropsy Technologies who use AI on tractors for viticulture, Halter which specialises in virtually managed cows and pasture management, Hot Lime Labs whose innovative carbon dioxide capture system is a gamechanger for greenhouse growers and Hectre whose orchard management and fruit sizing software is used internationally. 

13. CIE alumni are tackling the energy crisis from multiple angles. Vertus Energy is controlling bacteria to create power from waste and recently raised $15.7m to help drive the European renewable energy agenda; Vortex Power Systems aim to turn waste heat found in industrial wastewater into clean electricity by creating atmospheric vortexes. The company is running trials in Gisborne; and Energy Bank is exploring energy storage. 

14. Each year, CIE takes a group of students on a study tour of Silicon Valley, supported through the generosity of philanthropist Tony Falkenstein. (See YouTube video below.)

15. The aforementioned EdTech company Kami had their beginnings in CIE’s Velocity $100k Challenge competition, entering 10 minutes before the competition closed! Kami is now used in 90 percent of K-12 schools in the United States and was named by TIME in 2022 as one of the world’s most influential companies. Kami’s head office is still in Parnell. 

16. In 2024, CIE piloted its Kurutao programme, taking a cohort of high-potential Māori students on a study tour of Aotearoa. It’s confirmed to run again in 2025. (See video below.)

17. CIE had 564 applications in 2024 for the six available positions in its 'Start-up Interns' programme. CIE is currently looking for financial support to expand the programme.

18. The founders of CIE alumni company Auror, a retail crime intelligence platform, won EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023. Auror serves 90 percent of the retail enterprise market in NZ and has expanded to Australia, North America and the UK, supporting law enforcement agencies and some of the world’s largest retailers. 

19. CIE runs the Hynds Entrepreneurial Fellows Programme, where teaching fellows work with academic staff across the University to embed innovation and entrepreneurship into curricula in a context that is relevant and resonates with their study discipline. This encompasses everything from exploring innovation with students of sustainability to teaching students of pharmacy about best practice in business and entrepreneurship. 

20.  Earth isn’t the only place CIE alumni are having an impact. Space start-ups include Astrix Astronautics and sustainable space exploration company Zenno. Zenno raised more than $80 million in presales and had their first launch into space at the end of 2023.  

21. Ben Reynolds is the co-founder of Spalk, a multi-national company that translates sports commentary into dozens of languages for global sports events such as the Olympics and the Super Bowl. He took part in the Velocity programme with fellow graduate Michael Prendergast in 2015. The experience offered an important early  lesson: that success is never a given. Their proposal was “summarily declined”, he says. “However, entrepreneurship is all about rolling with the punches, and we did not let that setback dishearten us!”  

Nine years on, the company powers  sports commentary and international rights distribution. “What started as a way to have fun with friends around our passion for sports has morphed into an organisation turning over $5m annually, employing more than 20 people around the world and powering live broadcasts for tens of thousands of sports matches every single year,” says Ben.

Win-win.