Mat Mowbray
Co-Founder, Zuru
Mat Mowbray is a New Zealand entrepreneur and engineer, and one of the richest people in New Zealand. With his brother Nick and sister Anna he co-founded Zuru in 2003, the toy and consumer-goods maker that grew from a farm shed in the Waikato into a global manufacturing empire worth billions.
From a Waikato farm to Guangzhou
Raised on a dairy farm near Cambridge in the Waikato, Mat and his younger brother Nick left New Zealand as teenagers in the early 2000s and set up in Guangzhou, China, learning the toy trade from the factory floor up. Both had walked away from university after a year, Mat from an engineering degree and Nick from law, and it was Mat’s mechanical bent that shaped what Zuru became. Anna joined soon after to run operations, and the three siblings built the business together, with Nick selling, Anna managing and Mat engineering.
The engineer behind the product
Mat is the research and development mind of the family. He designed Zuru’s early injection-moulding tooling himself and has spent most of two decades running product design and manufacturing automation. The breakthrough came with Bunch O Balloons, the self-sealing water-balloon kit invented by Texan father Josh Malone and licensed to Zuru. The company scaled it into one of the best-selling toys in the world and defended it through a landmark patent fight, and it was Zuru’s manufacturing muscle, much of it Mat’s, that turned a clever idea into a household name.
Beyond toys
Zuru has since expanded far past toys into consumer goods, with brands like Rascal + Friends nappies, Monday Haircare and Dose & Co, and into robotics through Zuru Tech, which is developing automated systems for building houses. Mat now leads much of that technology and robotics work. Together the venture has made the Mowbrays one of New Zealand’s wealthiest families, a fortune Forbes first tracked into the billions back in 2019. Zuru now turns over well over a billion US dollars a year, and in 2026 Mat and Nick shared the top of New Zealand’s rich list with a combined fortune estimated at around $20 billion.
For all that, Mat has stayed the least visible of the three. Where Nick is the public face of Zuru, Mat has kept close to the workshop and the factory floor, the engineer who would rather build the machine than talk about it.
Mat Mowbray features in our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.
About this profile
This profile was researched and written by Noteworthy using publicly available sources. If something here is out of date or incorrect, let us know and we’ll review it.
