Boring on Purpose: The NZ Founders Who Built Moats Out of Regulation

New Zealand likes a tech hero with a consumer logo. The apps everyone has heard of get the magazine covers and the conference keynotes. But the country's most durable and most exportable technology tends to be built by companies almost nobody has knowingly used. They sell to banks, transport regulators, law firms and government standards bodies, in markets defined by compliance and paperwork. The unglamorous nature of that work is not a weakness these four founders overcame. It is the moat.

Built into the rules

Steven Newman led the clearest example. EROAD, which he joined in 2007 and took to an NZX listing in 2014, did the thing most startups run from: it built its product on top of road-user-charging law. Where others saw regulation as a cost, EROAD turned compliance into the service, replacing paper licences with a GPS system that calculates and pays a transport operator's road charges automatically. When the United States mandated electronic logging for heavy trucks, EROAD already had the hard part built and its North American sales jumped. EROAD was founded by infrastructure economist Brian Michie in 2000 and Newman, a co-founder of Navman before it, was the chief executive who commercialised and scaled it before stepping down in 2022. The lesson he carries from both companies is the same: a product that satisfies a regulator is a product competitors cannot easily copy.

Mohammed Hikmet built his moat a layer deeper, in the standards themselves. He founded HMI Technologies in 1999 with his brother Ahmed and through its subsidiary Ohmio it builds intelligent transport systems and autonomous shuttles, including the world's largest 3D-printed vehicle, currently operating at Christchurch Airport. The customers are governments and transport authorities and the gatekeeper is not a marketing budget but a standards committee. Hikmet served as president of Intelligent Transport Systems New Zealand from 2015 to 2017 and leads the New Zealand delegation to ISO TC204, the international committee that writes the rules for the very technology his company sells. When the buyer is the state and the qualification is a standard, the founder who helped write the standard is hard to dislodge.

Built into the institutions

Carmen Vicelich went after the plumbing of the property market. She founded Data Insight in 2012 and Valocity a year later.

Valocity now sits inside the mortgage and valuation process for lenders, connecting banks, valuers and brokers on one platform. It works with every major bank in New Zealand and has expanded across Australia, India and Singapore, winning Best International Fintech at the India Fintech Awards in 2025. It is not a product a consumer ever opens. It is infrastructure a bank cannot easily rip out once its lending runs through it, sold into an industry where bank-grade security and regulatory compliance are the price of entry rather than a feature.

Luke Campbell took the same idea to a single profession. VXT, which he co-founded as a University of Canterbury student with Lucy Turner, is a phone system built specifically for law firms, wired into the practice-management software lawyers already live in so that calls, transcripts and time records land against the right matter automatically. It is a deliberately narrow product for a compliance-bound profession and that focus has carried it to more than 1,000 firms across the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with roughly 90 per cent of its customers outside New Zealand. The narrowness is the strategy. A tool that fits one regulated workflow perfectly is stickier than one that fits everyone's loosely.

Why New Zealand looks past them

None of these companies make for an easy story. There is no consumer app to download, no founder myth about a dorm-room idea, no product the average New Zealander will ever touch. What they have instead is revenue that does not churn, customers locked in by compliance rather than habit and export markets that open whenever a regulation changes. That is precisely the profile the country undervalues. New Zealand tells itself a story about plucky consumer startups, when the tech that actually travels and lasts is more often built by people willing to spend a decade mastering something boring. The four here made the same bet from four corners of the economy: that the dullest problems, the ones bound up in rules and institutions, are the ones worth owning. If you are building something in New Zealand and wondering whether to chase consumers or regulators, this is the argument for the second door.

Sources: EROAD · Valocity · VXT · HMI Technologies · Ohmio · interest.co.nz