A conversation with Kami co-founder Hengjie Wang
Plus: Our latest Startup 101 video and a great new product launch for World Mental Health Day.
Good afternoon Caffeinators,
Bringing you a special bonus edition of the newsletter today since there is just too much to fit in ahead of next week.
We have the third in our Startup 101 partnership series with Vanta, a great new launch from Groov on World Mental Health Day and an interview with one of the best in the business, Kami co-founder Hengjie Wang.
If you’ve got a story, press release, interview to pitch or just want to tell me I’m wrong about something - send it over to finn@caffeinedaily.co
If you’re interested in working with Caffeine as a partner, flick Georgia an email on: georgia@caffeinedaily.co
Have a great weekend, look after each other, and we’ll see you next week.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Startup 101: How does compliance work at scale?
For many founders, the word “compliance” conjures images of endless paperwork, bureaucratic red tape, and a drain on precious resources that could be better spent on innovation and growth.
But what if compliance, far from being a drag, was actually the unlock to your startup’s biggest ambitions? That’s the bet Vanta is making. They are on a mission to make compliance accessible and efficient for the next generation of disruptive startups.
To help break down the essentials, Caffeine sat down with GRC Subject Matter Expert Evan Rowse for a three part primer as part of our Startup 101 video series.
In this final episode in the series we look to the future of compliance. Make sure to check out Part One and Part Two if you missed them!
Learn more and get $1000 off when you demo the Vanta platform here.
Here’s a little something to say, ‘we love you all’!
Notion for Business - Enjoy 6 months free
Vanta - Enjoy $1000 off
Lumin- Business Bundle free for 6 months, with all our AI tools included.
Groov, Sir John Kirwan and Health NZ launch AI-powered mental health support for Kiwis: I’ve talked a lot on Caffeine about how terrified I am by the mental health consequences of ubiquitous, unsafe AI chatbots masquerading as social connection and exacerbating all the mental health issues social media has already caused.
So its an absolute pleasure, on World Mental Health Day no less, to see some great Kiwis trying to turn some of this tech towards helping people who are struggling.
Groov, co-founded by Sir John Kirwan, has launched an AI powered mental health support chat bot, with support from Govt and as part of its Health New Zealand funded wellbeing app.
The app aims to provide safe, evidence-based support 24/7 for mild-to-moderate mental health needs. While similar to existing chatbots in format, this one is specialised for New Zealanders, has additional protections for their data and ensures advice always comes from information developed or approved by Groov’s clinical experts.
The tool has also undergone review by Health New Zealand’s Artificial Intelligence and Algorithm Expert Advisory Group (NAIAEAG), making it the first wellbeing AI tool of its kind for adults in the country to achieve this level of oversight. And crucially, i f someone shows signs they need more help, the tool automatically directs them to human services such as 1737.
Sir John Kirwan said “I’ve always believed that small steps every day can make a big difference to our mental health. Ask Groov takes that further, it gives people a safe place to ask their own questions, in their own words, and get trusted answers backed by science. Lots of us turn to Google or ChatGPT, but the difference here is that Ask Groov is designed for Kiwis, with content that’s proven, reliable, and focused on wellbeing. This is the kind of tool I wish I had when I was struggling.”
Outside of the obvious moral imperative to help Kiwis who are struggling, there’s also a clear economic incentive to make sure trustworthy support is more widely available.
Mental health and wellbeing is a major economic issue impacting the public sector in terms of the high cost of mental health and wellbeing within public health and beyond but also the private sector where presenteeism, unplanned absence and health and safety issues to the tune of $5.4 billion dollars in 2024 according to the The 2025 Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum’s State of a Thriving Nation.
“People are already turning to unsafe public AI for support - our job is to provide a safe option backed by science. We’ve now shown that AI can operate responsibly even in highly regulated, sensitive environments, supporting both public sector and enterprise clients,” says Groov CEO Matt Krogstad
“Our goal is to give people a much safer space to get trusted, quality information in the way they’ve grown accustomed to -helping to normalise looking after our minds at work and in life. Ultimately, we believe this can ease some of the pressure on New Zealand’s already stretched mental health workforce.”
A conversation with Kami co-founder Hengjie Wang: Almost exactly a year since I last spoke to him following Kami’s massive $300m valuation, I sat down for another chat with Kami co-founder Hengjie Wang - this time after Kami’s acquisition of Book Creator.
He’s a particularly thoughtful, insightful and well intentioned founder who is simultaneously building a great business while also doing genuine good, which is about the best combo possible. Check out our conversation below.
It’s been about 12 months since we last spoke, following your $300m valuation. What has this past year been like for Kami?
It sets us up to continue that journey that we’re on, which is we’re on a mission to get Kami into every single classroom in the world. I think there’s a lot of really great, innovative technology that classrooms and every learner in the world deserves and we see the transformation it brings us to student outcomes. And it just means that we’re now able to go on this more accelerated journey to get to that end goal. So we’ve certainly brought on stronger leadership. And fresh faces to our leadership team. We’re really seeing the benefit that having an incredible partner like Boston Ventures Investment Partners (BVIP) is able to bring on board not just access to financial capital, but advice. And other partners. So we’ve continued to hire our team, obviously have been able to acquire businesses, something that we haven’t been able to do easily before. But yeah. So ultimately, all good things. Really excited.
Looking across the last year of tech advances—especially AI—what excites you about where the space is going and how it intersects with Kami’s plans?
I think we’ve done a great job of making long term decisions. Around the sort of technologies to go after that has that kind of long term, long tail impact in the classroom. So it’s about how do you thoughtfully, thoughtfully integrate technology in a way that makes a huge amount of sense? So we did it first with PDFs. It was a very unsexy space. It was a solved problem of Adobe Acrobat. And yet we’ve actually revitalized, innovated, and brought equity and accessibility into the classroom and really raised the outcome. So recently we did an independent study. We raised ESL students and the first 12 months of using Kami by 8 percentage points. So that’s huge.
So we went from PDFs to teacher efficiency to workflows. And really bring saving teachers eight hours a week. Teachers around the world are short on time. We’ve brought transformations to school budgets, being able to save them a ton of money on printing and having to deal with paper. And as you probably know, the Covid story, massive amount of growth resulted from that because we were setting the classrooms up for future success. Saving time planning for classes, saving time marking. But also saving teachers time, while saving the environment from not having to cut down so many trees. Everything being digital just brings out so much more innovation that you can possibly have classroom accessibility, equity, and everything else.
So when it comes to AI, with Kami and now with Book Creator to really bring about far more interesting, exciting, engaging, interactive lessons into the classroom. And I think that’s what’s really exciting as a period for us, is how do you do it? Thoughtfully, intentionally bring those time efficiencies, student outcome improvements, and deliberately deploy AI in a way that doesn’t radically change anything, but really just over time, slowly just chip away at improving student outcomes. And add a lot of value to the classroom. For us. I think as founders, it’s become clear that it will become our lifelong mission to continue to put our skills to use. Into this particular really important area. Which is education.
What does “thoughtful implementation of AI” actually mean at Kami? How do you avoid hype and focus on measurable value?
I think that’s sort of what you’re alluding to as a lot of folks just kind of use it. They talk about using it, but don’t necessarily think about how this actually impacts the teacher, the classroom, the students. For us, it’s really important that the teacher is always at the heart of every classroom, that they’re there to guide that learning journey. AI doesn’t replace the teachers. It strengthens the impact without ever replacing them. And for us, our AI is built with intent, with safety guardrails, with purpose. It’s not retrofitting consumer tools. It’s doing it in a way that is fully integrated as part of that learning experience. So we know the curriculum, we know the student, we know the teacher, we know how to best sort of bring that to life. We’ve got tools that are sort of foundational to teaching, right? The basics. Think of it as Kami’s got the pens and pencils. And rulers and compasses and everything else of your classroom, and we’re able to sort of bring it together in a way that makes a lot of sense. The best implementation of innovation and technology in the classroom is when teachers don’t have to think about it as if it’s technology. That they just use it naturally.
Can you share specific examples of classroom-driven changes over the last year?
So an example where we’ve been able to help with the improvement of personalization, improve the efficacy and around our use of the understanding tools and translation. So we are able to go into a classroom or teacher is able to go into a classroom with Kami and basically allow English language learners, or ESL students to translate this document into the native tongue. But also, more importantly, level it to where they’re at. In terms of literacy. So being able to go and say, well, this is maybe a little bit too complicated. Let’s decrease a few levels down. So that is an incredibly important form of using AI in a way that makes a lot of sense.
We’ve actually broadened our horizons quite a bit since we last spoke. So one area that we saw was an absolute need for some more innovation is around accessibility across every piece of curriculum, not just curriculum that you can open inside of Kami. And we were able to launch a product, a brand new product called Kami Companion that essentially brings the same accessibility and equity that Kami is known for and people love every piece of content on the web that teachers, students will be able to be using in their classroom environment.
A crazy statistic, or rather quite a large statistic, is 1 in 4 students need some form of inclusion accessibility support. And the sort of special education and English as a second language need, or demand, rather, is rising extremely fast. So one in four students need that kind of support.
To really help around this particular area, we continue to give Kami away for free to all New Zealand schools. And that’s been a commitment that we’ve, as founders, made. We see that there is a lot of adoption of great technology, but we think that there could be even higher.
Why acquire Book Creator? What does it unlock combined with Kami?
It has been on our radar for a number of years. We have really admired them from afar. It’s one of the most loved products in the industry and for very good reason. Teachers today, as I said before, expected to deliver more personalized, accessible lessons, but with less time and support. And at the same time students have been asked to show their learnings a more authentic, particularly with AI, authentic and multimodal ways. So Book Creator really fits in this perfect moment in time because it allows students to be more expressive, that brings more expressiveness, creativity. To the heart of the classroom. And being part of Kami, it really becomes something substantially bigger.
So to give you an example of what that difference is, so Kami unlocks interactivity and locks time saving workflows in the classroom. Book Creator empowers the students to have student authorship and self expression. And this third product that I just mentioned, Kami Companion really extends the accessibility and self directed learning. So all three of these provide a really powerful solution that complements each other. Works with all the systems that a school naturally will use with the curriculum or learning with resources that they have to really ultimately deliver far more engaging learning experience.
The sector feels like it’s consolidating. Do you expect that trend to continue—and what does it mean for Kami?
If you’re asking if we’re going to buy more companies, yes, absolutely. We will continue to do that. I think that’s certainly one of the pieces that we really want to build a muscle around. It unlocks a lot more access to, unlocks like a more comprehensive set of value that we can bring to the classroom. And Boston Ventures being on board helps unlock a lot of those opportunities.
I think if you were saying a step back and think about the macro consolidation, that question that you asked well then yes, there is. Absolutely. Customers tell us all the time there is too many tools. It’s way too fragmented. It’s very difficult to roll out so many pieces of technology. So really, what they’re saying is less tools is better. Fewer tools allow us to have higher quality training, less resistance to change, easier to implement thoughtfully. And it means that ultimately, all these platforms in the classroom need to become an all in one. There’s a lot more demand for an all in one classroom so that it’s a unified, integrated way to teach, assess to learn to support these students.
What can’t Kami do today that you want it to be able to do?
What can Kami do right now? That we want it to be able to do. I think that’s a great question. Look, without giving too much away. I think. The partnership and the investment that we receive from Boston Ventures ultimately unlocks that final piece of the puzzle that we’ve really always been wanting to unlock. Which is around mergers and acquisitions. It’s given us the time and the discipline and the advice and execution around how do we go out and accelerate and deliver on our mission? To get really incredible, innovative technology that we can see drives better, certainly outcomes every single classroom in the world. There are over a billion and a billion and a half learners in the world. 70 million users would still be scratching the surface, believe it or not. So at the end of the day, I think for us, it’s about how we respond to every need, everyday needs of and learners of every classroom around the world. What is the best technology that they deserve? And we’ll continue to do that, and we’ll continue to grow our teams, grow our skill sets.
What lessons do you hope founders—edtech or otherwise—take from Kami’s journey?
We’ve always played the long game, whether it’s with technology, with AI, with how we treat our customers. We always do right by them. We play the long game, even if it’s at great expense to us in the short term. And you saw that with Covid, where we gave away Kami for free. Hurt us financially in the short term. I think we were all trying to just help but ultimately, that played out well in the long run. And I think for us, it’s always been about what is best for the customer and how do we do the best possible job to serve and provide the best possible service. We listen to them intently. We make changes and improve our product at rapid pace, based on things that they’re telling us.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co. Look after yourselves this weekend and we’ll see you Monday.