10 Young NZ Entrepreneurs Who Started Early and Built Something Real

New Zealand has a long habit of producing founders who start young and build companies that outgrow the country. The ten below launched their main venture in their teens or twenties, often from a student flat, a family kitchen or a school classroom. Several now run businesses valued in the hundreds of millions or billions, export to the world or set the standard in their category. This is the definitive, current-for-2026 list, and it is built to be verifiable: every founder here has a full profile on Noteworthy, and we say plainly why each one earns their place.

How we chose this list

Anyone can rank ten names. The harder job is choosing well and being honest about the method. We weighted four things: the founder started the business young, in their teens or twenties; the business is real and trading, not a pitch deck or a paused side project; there is independent evidence of scale, whether that is revenue, funding, export reach, category leadership or a genuine award; and the impact is current in 2026, not a headline from years ago that has since gone quiet.

We deliberately left out a few names that appear on older versions of this list. Some businesses have wound down or gone quiet, and we will not present a founder as a going concern when the evidence says otherwise. A stale entry helps no one. What follows are ten founders whose work stands up to a check today.

1. Craig Piggott, Halter

Craig Piggott founded Halter in 2016, in his mid-twenties, after leaving an engineering role at Rocket Lab. The company builds solar-powered smart collars that let farmers herd cattle and set virtual fences from a phone, replacing wire and a lot of manual work. What began on Waikato dairy farms has become one of the country's standout agritech stories, expanding into Australia and the United States.

Halter has raised successive rounds from major international venture investors and reached a valuation in the billions, making Piggott one of the most significant young founders New Zealand has produced. The business now employs hundreds of people and sells into some of the largest cattle markets in the world.

2. Jamie Beaton, Crimson Education

Jamie Beaton co-founded Crimson Education as a teenager in 2013, alongside Sharndré Kushor and Fangzhou Jiang. The company coaches students toward admission at the world's most selective universities, the Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and MIT, and has grown into a global edtech business operating in dozens of countries.

Crimson reached unicorn status, crossing a one billion US dollar valuation on its 2024 funding round, a rare milestone for a New Zealand-born company. Beaton himself is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, and remains chief executive as the business scales its tutoring, admissions and online schooling arms.

3. Brooke Roberts and Sonya Williams, Sharesies

Brooke Roberts and Sonya Williams co-founded Sharesies in Wellington, part of a founding team that set out to let anyone invest with as little as a few dollars. Before Sharesies, buying shares felt like something reserved for people with a broker and a large balance. Their platform removed the minimum and the mystery.

Sharesies now looks after hundreds of thousands of Kiwi investors and billions of dollars in funds under management, and has extended into Australia. Roberts and Williams have become two of the most recognisable faces in New Zealand fintech, and consistent advocates for financial inclusion.

4. Simran Kaur, Girls That Invest

Simran Kaur co-founded Girls That Invest with Sonya Gupta, turning a podcast recorded in her twenties into one of the largest financial-education platforms for women in the world. The mission is direct: make investing understandable for women who were never taught it.

Kaur was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2023, and her book Girls That Invest became a bestseller. The podcast reaches a global audience each week, and the brand has become a genuine on-ramp for first-time women investors well beyond New Zealand.

5. Sam Stuchbury, Motion Sickness

Sam Stuchbury co-founded Motion Sickness from a student flat in Dunedin with fellow Otago alumni Alex McManus and Jono De Alwis. The independent creative agency has grown into one of the most awarded in the country, working with brands including Blunt Umbrellas, Les Mills and Jim Beam, and taking on cause-led campaigns that punch well above the agency's size.

Motion Sickness has earned recognition at Cannes Lions, advertising's most prestigious stage, a rare feat for a small independent shop from the bottom of the world. Stuchbury has built the agency's reputation on work that is sharp, socially aware and unmistakably its own.

6. Lucy Blakiston, Shit You Should Care About

Lucy Blakiston co-founded Shit You Should Care About while at university, building it from a small social account into a global independent media platform followed by millions of people. The brand explains the news, and the world, in a voice that reaches an audience most legacy outlets struggle to hold.

What started as a way to make current events feel less overwhelming became a business, complete with a book and a large and loyal international following. Blakiston has become one of New Zealand's most influential young media founders, and proof that a serious audience can be built from Aotearoa on its own terms.

7. Levi Fawcett, Partly

Levi Fawcett co-founded Partly, often described as a search engine for car parts, to solve a genuinely hard problem: matching the right replacement part to the right vehicle across a fragmented global catalogue. Fawcett, a former international physics and maths medallist, started the company young and set his sights on a worldwide market from the outset.

Partly has raised tens of millions of US dollars from leading venture investors including Blackbird and Accel, and is building the data layer that a large slice of the automotive aftermarket runs on. It is one of the most ambitious New Zealand software companies of its generation.

8. Brianne West, Ethique

Brianne West founded Ethique in Christchurch after experimenting with solid beauty bars in her kitchen as a student. Her aim was to take the water, and the plastic bottle, out of shampoo and skincare. Ethique grew into a genuinely global zero-waste beauty brand, credited with keeping millions of plastic bottles out of landfill.

West sold Ethique in 2020 and stepped back from the chief executive role in 2023. She has since turned to her next venture, Incrediballs, applying the same instinct for removing waste to how we make everyday drinks. She remains one of New Zealand's most quoted voices on building a business that is actually sustainable rather than merely marketed as such.

9. Latesha Randall, Raglan Food Co

Latesha Randall co-founded what began as Raglan Coconut Yoghurt, now Raglan Food Co, after her partner's dairy allergy sent her experimenting with coconut-based recipes in her kitchen in Raglan. The brand grew from a local market stall to a range stocked in hundreds of stores nationwide, with export into Asia and the Pacific.

Randall was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, and the company has collected a string of New Zealand food awards along the way. It remains one of the country's most recognisable plant-based food brands and a template for the kitchen-table start.

10. Alexia Hilbertidou, GirlBoss NZ

Alexia Hilbertidou founded GirlBoss NZ at 16, after being the only girl in her Year 12 physics and technology class. The organisation grew into one of New Zealand's largest networks for young women, running STEM and leadership programmes for thousands of high school students across the country.

Hilbertidou has won a Westpac Women of Influence Award, worked with a NASA mission project as one of its youngest participants, and become a sought-after speaker on getting more young women into science, technology and leadership. Her impact is measured in the pipeline of students she has moved toward those fields.

Ones to watch

A definitive list should also point at what is coming next. These founders are earlier in the journey but worth following closely.

Emily McIsaac, Daisy Lab. Co-founder and chief operating officer of an Auckland precision-fermentation startup making real dairy proteins without the cow. McIsaac was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2025, and Daisy Lab sits at the front of New Zealand's food-tech wave.

KiwiFibre. Founded by Ben Scales and William Murrell, this Christchurch company turns harakeke, New Zealand flax, into a high-performance natural fibre composite as an alternative to fibreglass and carbon fibre. A genuinely local materials-science story with global potential.

Zincovery. Jonathan Ring's cleantech venture recovers zinc from industrial waste using a low-cost, low-emission process, tackling an unglamorous but valuable corner of the circular economy.

Wise Boys. Brothers Luke and Tim Burrows built their plant-based burger business from a food truck made of scrap and second-hand materials into a permanent Auckland eatery, with sustainability designed in from the packaging up.

What connects them

None of these founders waited for the perfect moment, the right funding or the correct credentials. They started with what they had, a kitchen, a garage, a student flat or a classroom, and built from there. Some now run companies valued in the billions. Others are shaping how a generation invests, eats, learns or reads the news. The starting point was the same each time: a specific problem, the nerve to begin and the discipline to keep going long after the novelty wore off.

For more New Zealand founder stories, browse our People profiles, read about the myths of entrepreneurship, or explore business ideas you can start in New Zealand in 2026.