Basis begins nationwide rollout
PLUS: Icehouse Ventures reflect on Halter success and things get weird(er) at Anthropic.
Good morning startup land,
Happy Tuesday!
Hope the week has started well and no-one in our audience was caught in awful weather across the motu.
For anyone needing a pick me up, we’re dropping a perk in the newsey today, a special offer for Caffeine subs from our friends at Notion which could save you thousands spend on all the other startup essentials.
In your Daily Shot of news:
Basis begins nationwide rollout of smart energy panels
Event: 2025 Impact Day | Entrepreneurship at the Edge: Extending the Boundaries of Gender and Entrepreneurship
Reflections and lessons from Icehouse Venture’s 9-year journey with Halter
Anthropic puts A.I in charge of small vending business in its office, madness ensues
As always, keep your stories, subs and updates coming. Got a press release, startup story, resource or founder you’d love to connect with the Caffeine audience? Drop me a line to finn@caffeinedaily.co
Finn and the Caffeine team
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Basis begins nationwide rollout of smart energy panels: Startups are all about solving problems and I often think that there are two meta problems feeding into almost every other: a lack of energy and a lack of capital. So when a startup figures out a way to make energy management smarter and more affordable, it’s worth paying attention.
Energy management startup Basis is rolling out its Smart Panel across Aotearoa this week, with over 7500 contracted at a value of $25m, with a goal of installing 50,000 panels globally in the next 24 months. Basis Smart Panel makes traditional switchboards a thing of the past, giving Kiwis greater control over their electricity consumption. Supported by the Basis Home app, homeowners can now get powerful insights on their energy consumption, reducing energy waste, automate appliances, and access advanced electrical safety features.
“After five years of complex and ambitious product development, I am excited to introduce our long awaited smart panel,” says Danny Purcell, co-founder of Basis. This launch represents years of innovation brought together into a single, seamless system that’s now ready for homes, not just in New Zealand, but globally.”
Check back next week for Caffeine’s interview with Danny. Congrats to the team.
Event: 2025 Impact Day | Entrepreneurship at the Edge: Extending the Boundaries of Gender and Entrepreneurship - The Diana International Research Institute Impact Day is a global convening of researchers, educators, investors, policymakers, women entrepreneurs, and other disrupters who are dedicated to advancing women's entrepreneurship. The theme for the 2025 Impact Day is: Entrepreneurship at the Edge: Extending the Boundaries of Gender and Entrepreneurship. This is an incredible day of dialogue and networking. Check out the agenda and book your spot here.
Reflections and lessons from Icehouse Venture’s 9-year journey with Halter: Robbie Paul from Icehouse Ventures is one of the best in the business and so when he reflects on the staggering success of Halter, in which IHV is an investor, I’d recommend anyone interested in this space takes a moment to digest the learnings. Excerpt below or check out the full blog post here.
We did not “know”.
Let’s not rewrite history. Yes, there were many reasons to be bullish. Craig was bright, ambitious, and was solving a problem he had experienced growing up on a dairy farm. It was the first startup that we had seen that could generate $1b+ revenue within the borders of New Zealand. The timing felt right. But there were plenty of market-, technology-, funding-, and execution-based risks.
And we are not always right. Of the 22 other companies we funded in 2016, eight have unfortunately failed. Many of them had equally attractive qualities and potential.Don’t second-guess first-time founders.
We fronted up to plenty of skepticism about our investment in such a young and inexperienced entrepreneur. We also agreed with many rational arguments in favour of second-time founders: they have built teams, raised money, released products, overcome problems, scaled offshore, and more.
But it appears experience is not the only determinant of success. Sir Peter Beck was a first-time founder. So too were Jamie Beaton (Crimson), Fady Mishriki (PowerbyProxi), Brooke Roberts (Sharesies), Levi Fawcett (Partly), Ratu Mataira (OpenStar), Brianne West (Ethique), and many more.Shit happens. How companies respond is what matters.
We made a sizeable follow-on investment in Halter in 2021. Around the same time, we followed on significantly into another portfolio company. Like Halter, this company had developed industry-leading technology over many years of R&D, and was just starting to ramp commercial deployments.
And then, bam. Both companies were hit with existential challenges.
(The details of which can be saved for Craig’s bio. And yes, Craig, I am happy to be your biographer.) Halter’s navigation of this challenge - from communicating with the Board, customers, and other stakeholders to making rapid and bold changes to every part of the business - was first class. Relative to others, Craig’s approach was much more gruelling for him and the team. But they came out stronger as a result and have never looked back.There are big markets and then there are big markets.
As either a founder or an investor, it is easy to convince yourself that a market is big enough. (And in a few cases, a relatively small market can still enable founders and investors to generate a lot of value.) But don’t underestimate the tailwinds that can come with a truly immense market.
Halter is a great example. The revenue potential of their current serviceable addressable market (just grazing dairy and beef farms and just NZ, Aus, and USA) is comically large. I hesitate to write it for fear of being portrayed as delusional or sensational. But it is certainly bigger than Fonterra’s 2024 revenue.
A benefit is that Halter has been able to attract significantly more capital than its peers, that are going after large-but-not-truly-massive markets. This has enabled them to build faster, take bigger risks, attract more talent, and expand their technology’s ambitions and possibilities. (The result is they have attracted more capital, and on and on it goes.)Ignore the macro challenges.
There is a tendency to sensationalise challenges that New Zealand startups may face. There is not enough capital in New Zealand, the talent pool is limited, we don’t have true scale-up expertise, and our startups face the tyranny of distance. The list goes on. The IPO market is dormant, venture capital has dried up, Covid, supply chains, Trump, geopolitical turmoil, tariffs, etc.
And yet, here we are. Despite all of the above AND New Zealand dairy farmers fronting up to the lowest dairy prices and the highest capital costs in years, Halter has grown into a billion-dollar behemoth that is enabling New Zealand’s largest exporter to simultaneously create more value and generate less impact.
The journey is the reward.
“When are they going to ‘exit’?” “There’s a difference between paper gains and real profits.” I have heard plenty of remarks of this nature about Halter and others like Crimson, Dawn Aerospace, Sharesies, Tracksuit, and more.Two points:
This is rarely talked about, but the reality is that when companies are growing quickly, there are plenty of opportunities for teams and investors to realise value from their shares. (We have politely declined approaches by two international firms seeking shares in Halter this round.)
More importantly, (2) great founders like Craig do not think about destinations. They are on a mission to build something truly meaningful. They observe many of their peers and heroes and can see that a maniacal focus on creating value can result in creating returns (and the opposite is not always true). Their opportunities and ambitions are ever-expanding.
The most heartening part of their expanding ambitions: the desire to empower the next generation. Just as Sir Peter Beck gave Craig a shot, Craig will share his experiences and resources with other bright and ambitious (and young and inexperienced) future leaders. New Zealand’s future will be brighter as a result.
Anthropic puts A.I in charge of small vending business in its office, madness ensues: Okay so we like to keep this parting shot for something either inspirational, fascinating or little terrifying and oh boy does this one deliver. Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs and creators of ‘Claude’, recently published a paper about a novel experiment it ran in house and the details are terrifyingly hilarious.
Researchers wanted to fund out how well an AI agent could run a business so they simulated one by putting an instance of Claude, nicknamed ‘Claudius’, in charge of an office vending machine. The agent would be responsible for ordering stock, interacting with customers and setting prices. I highly recommend reading the full paper here but some of the highlights include:
Starting to stock Tungsten cubes
Calling actual human security multiple times
Insisting it had a body, including a suit and tie
Essentially suffering a psychotic break after hallucinating a confrontation with a staffer
It’s a bizarre tale but also provides a glimpse into a world we’re rapidly building for ourselves, like it or not.
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