Scale-up support - Annual Report 2023

14 April, 2024

The Zincovery team developing a containerised pilot plant at the University of Canterbury

New Zealand has an excellent pipeline of scientific intellectual property emerging from its research institutions. This is supported by scientific funding such as MBIE Endeavour grants which aim to generate impact from scientific research. So much so that there is a large cohort of start-up companies out-growing their university origins and needing supportive facilities to scale-up their technologies to pilot scale. Developing a pilot scale chemical or industrial process is relatively new for New Zealand. Ambitious start-up founders are aiming to follow in the footsteps of carbon capture and conversion company LanzaTech and others, to develop cleaner processes that disrupt entire industrial sectors.

We have identified the need for four pillars of support to accelerate local deep tech and cleantech start-ups to address the global market. These are:

• High-quality shared facilities that can house a blend of industrial, office and engineering teams;
• Access to experienced talent from global industries which are the target customers and industrial partners across engineering, commercial and technical disciplines;
• Non-dilutive funding to enable access to the talent and facilities;
• Streamlined regulatory policy and approvals that enable new industries, and enable novel technology to be more easily deployed into established industry.

Working closely with KiwiNet and other stakeholders, we have used our insights into the deep tech and cleantech start-up sector to advocate for these pillars of enhanced support across government, economic development agencies, universities and the private sector. We are pleased to see potential clusters starting to emerge.