KiwiNet — New Zealand's National Research-Commercialisation Network

KiwiNet (Kiwi Innovation Network Limited) was established in 2011 to pool New Zealand's government PreSeed Accelerator Fund and share commercialisation expertise nationally, building on UniCom, a 2008 consortium of four university tech-transfer offices. It is a shareholder company owned by New Zealand universities, Crown Research Institutes and other public research organisations, together representing roughly 80% of the country's publicly funded researchers.
KiwiNet's 2024 annual report (to 30 June 2024) records 82 start-up companies and $560 million in cumulative financial returns since 2011. An independent evaluation commissioned by New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), conducted by Ridley Insights in 2014, found that 573 PreSeed-funded projects since 2004 had received NZ$42.6 million in government investment, matched by a further NZ$90.9 million in co-funding, generating 386+ licences plus start-ups and commercial deals. In its 2019 funding round, MBIE approved NZ$9,944,920 (excluding GST) over two years for KiwiNet. A named success story on KiwiNet's own site, Zincovery (a University of Canterbury spin-out founded 2021), received NZ$267,000 in PreSeed funding, has since raised NZ$20 million in total, and signed over NZ$500 million in global commercial agreements.
KiwiNet's own 2025 Shareholder Vision Statement is candid that 'less than 1% of public research funding goes toward commercialisation' in New Zealand, citing TTO funding instability, a shallow early-stage investment market, and system fragmentation as ongoing constraints — with the country's overall R&D spend sitting at roughly 0.95% of GDP, well below the government's 2% target. In 2026, KiwiNet's CEO publicly warned that new science-system funding reforms redirecting NZ$111 million toward 'advanced technology' by cutting other research budgets risk treating commercialisation 'as a zero-sum exercise' that undermines the upstream research pipeline it depends on.

Read the full analysis: https://kiwinet.org.nz/About