Hope your short week has started well. It is another stuffed newsey today, including a special offer for Caffeine subs from both our friends at Notion and Airwallex, so I will waste no time with waffle at the top and just get into it.
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
Extraordinary powers up public transport payments: Very interesting move here by Extraordinary, who we’ve profiled here on Caffeine before. Because of a recent change to Cx 19C of the Income Tax Act 2007, employers can contribute to the public transport cost of their employees.
Extraordinary is now making public transport across the country more affordable by using pre-tax income for their public transport cost, meaning the average Kiwi commuter could save $900+ per year. They did this by building the case that an employee should also be able to access this tax benefit using their own pre-tax income. With the support Deloitte, Extraordinary submitted a request for a binding ruling with Inland Revenue NZ and had it granted.
As founder Steven Zinsli points out, there were 89 million public transport trips in Auckland last year, almost 40 million in Wellington. Imagine how much money could be saved for commuters if every trip was paid for using pre-tax income. We love to see startups creatively solving problems and unlocking new opportunities. Congrats to the team.
Help create actual data on how A.I is transforming business: From Auckland to Invercargill - how is AI really impacting Kiwi businesses? It’s the question which will only grow more crucial in the months ahead as A.I progress seems to be kicking up a gear (more on that below). The best way that we can prepare both as founders and more broadly, as a country, is to get good data. The AI Forum, in partnership with Callaghan Innovation and Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, are doing just that.
Their research tracks AI adoption across all sectors and regions of Aotearoa to build the most comprehensive picture of AI's impact on New Zealand productivity. But they need your input to help inform that research.
From Firefighting to Fintech: Scaling Lessons from the Frontlines: Auckland-based founders should head along to the next Bootstrappers Breakfast at GridAKL and hear from one of New Zealand’s most inspiring fintech founders—Jovan Pavlicevic, co-founder of Emerge and SquareOne.
From volunteering as a firefighter to launching startups, Jovan brings a unique perspective on risk, resilience, and scaling with purpose.
What you'll learn:
Jovan will share insights and key lessons from his entrepreneurial journey, including:
● How he bootstrapped a fintech product in its early days
● The tipping points that signaled it was time to raise capital
● Lessons from navigating the fundraising process
● Strategies for scaling a team, product, and customer base post-investment
● Or anything else you’re curious to ask him that morning.
🗓 Date: Tuesday, 24 June 2025
🕢 Time: 7:30 AM – 8:30 AM
📍 Location: GridAKL / John Lysaght Building (opposite Woolworths Metro), Wynyard Quarter
🎟 Capacity: Limited to 60 attendees – includes coffee and light breakfast!
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We’re excited to see some home-grown Kiwi talent attending Cannes Lions over in France this week. We couldn’t think of a better stage to promote the talent, innovation and drive of our incredible tech and startup community.
But – there’s a catch. France is far. And expensive. Unfortunately, this excludes some of our early-stage founders from getting in on the action. That’s why we’re proud to team up with Airwallex to promote their Global Growth Grant.
They’re awarding two $5,000 grants to lucky Kiwi founders to put towards attending a global conference of choice – in 2025 or beyond. All you have to do is submit your application online by telling them what global conference you’d attend and how it'd benefit your business.
It could be your golden ticket to help grow your business by hearing from some of the industry’s most inspiring founders. After all, rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest in France never hurts, right?
Sam Altman pens ‘Gentle Singularity’ op-ed, reveals average cost in power and water of a GPT prompt: Fascinating blog post in the past week from the man at the forefront of the A.I revolution. As I’ve mentioned before, we seem to be be picking up pace in our transition to an AI powered future and things we once expected to see in 2050 are now plausibly going to arrive before 2030.
As Altman opens his piece: “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”
The Open AI CEO argues that while many (me included) are waiting for some definitive moment where we cross the threshold into AGI or super intelligence, what we might see instead is a ‘gentle singularity’, where we only really appreciate how far we’ve come when we look back in a decade. For the more cynical Caffeinators out there, there’s also some interesting hard numbers he includes on exactly what each Chat GPT prompt costs
