New + Improved Ventures, a ‘company that starts companies’, raises $6m

The New + Improved founders. From left: James Hurman, Chris Paykel, Simon Pound, Phoebe Devine, Antony Ede and Connon Bray.

They keep recombining, like so many characters in a Startup Land version of the Marvel Universe.

And now the crew behind two of New Zealand’s fastest-growing tech companies, Tracksuit and Ideally, have formed New + Improved Ventures, a “venture studio” or “company for making companies”, that has raised $6 million to build new firms.

The plan is to build one or two startups per year.

The $6m comes from founders of the new business, TRA, Previously Unavailable and Icehouse Ventures.

“We’re significant shareholders in both Ideally and Tracksuit, where it was immediately obvious how much both companies benefited from hitting the ground running with a product concept the world wants,” Icehouse Ventures’ partner Barnaby Marshall.

“The founders of New + Improved Ventures have developed a formula to test ideas and find early product market fit.

“Given the success of prior ventures they are attracting ever more high-quality talent to join the companies they form, which we expect will increase the chances of future spin out’s potential.”

Co-founder Simon Pound said there are different models of venture studio.

“Some have ongoing relationships with the companies that they help start.”

But New + Improved’s model is to eventually set them free to make their own way in the world. In management terms, N+I will retain an ownership stake for its initial efforts.

“We’ll do the idea validation, make the first sales, build the MVP [minimum viable product], make the first brand and website hires and bring on the founders and help them hire their first key team members, and then they become independent companies,” Pound told the Herald.

“The process of starting a business is a lot broader than most people think.

“It’s not just a person sitting in the garage having an ‘a-ha’ moment and then, boom, a business pops out. It’s a long hard slog from the initial idea to having something where it’s sufficiently capitalsed with a decent team.”

Ede was a director and co-founder of both of the aforementioned Tracksuit and Ideally – two marketing tech (or “martech”) startups that share the same initial backer, TRA, where Ede is a former partner of its TRA Labs business.

Pound’s ventures include being a principal at Previously Unavailable, which trades equity for services as it fosters brand-led startups (making it, like TRA Labs, something of a precursor to New + Improved).

“The marketing space is going to undergo quite a lot of changes over the next few years,” co-founder Antony Ede says “There are a lot of services companies that are ripe to be disrupted by automation and AI.”

The other members of New + Improved’s founding crew are Phoebe Devine (head of design at Previously Unavailable), Chris Paykel (managing partner at Previously Unavailable), Connon Bray (a TRA Group director) and ubiquitous Auckland man James Hurman.

Between them they cover marketing, data, brand-building and company-scaling skills.

All going well, New + Improved’s stake in the firms it starts will appreciate, with the proceeds used to fund its next wave of startups, Ede said.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.