Mara Bio secures $1m strategic investment
PLUS: Secure your spot for Caffeine's next in person event.
Welcome to mid week!
Happy hump day team.
Apologies for the slightly sporadic release schedule recently! Was off for a few days in lovely Taupo running a half marathon. Now that I am in my mid thirties I felt like I had to either get really into running or golf and the running seemed cheaper.
Since coming back we’ve had a few plates to spin this week hence the later afternoon newsletters but we will be back to our more regular morning newsletter from next week. We have some very fun content cooking behind the scenes which I can’t wait to share with you but thank you for bearing with me as we get it done!
In the meantime, help yourself to a fresh Daily Shot.
Here’s what’s in your Daily Shot of news you don’t want to miss
Mara Bio Secures $1m Investment to Scale Climate-Positive Protein Production
Caffeine Presents: I Wish I Knew Series with Hadleigh Ford, SwipedOn
Event: The Annual Digital Trust Hui Taumata
Carta’s State of VC 2025 drops, packed full of fascinating insights
You can store a PNG in…birdsong?
Got a tip, press release or just a comment? Drop us a note: hello@caffeinedaily.co - we love to hear from you.
Finn & the Caffeine team
We’re excited to partner with BNZ. As New Zealand's largest business bank, BNZ shares our mission to support the next wave of founders and operators. Over the coming months, we’ll be working together to share insights, tools, and stories that help you grow smarter and faster. Keep an eye out every Thursday for content powered by BNZ.
Mara Bio Secures $1m Investment to Scale Climate-Positive Protein Production: Producing enough protein to fuel the world without destroying it is one of the great challenges of our time so we love to see startups tackling that problem head on.
Hastings Biotechnology company Mara Bio has hit the headlines with a $1m strategic funding round led by Climate Venture Capital Fund, with support from the Stephen Tindall-founded K1W1 and existing shareholders. The investment will accelerate its pioneering fermentation platform that turns food industry by-products into high-value, clean-label protein ingredients.
Mara Bio’s mission is to provide a climate-positive, allergen-free alternative to traditional proteins, unlocking new sustainable pathways for food, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
“At Mara Bio, we're harnessing cutting-edge technology to unlock more nutrition from existing food systems while reducing the industry's environmental impact, or ‘foodprint,’” said Mark Balchin, CEO and co-founder of Mara Bio as they announced the news.
Congrats to the team and can’t wait to see what the funding unlocks for you.
Caffeine Presents: I Wish I Knew Series with Hadleigh Ford, SwipedOn: Building a company isn’t a single event – it’s a long game. One with messy middles, unexpected pivots, and the odd “what now?” at 2am.
Join us for a series of raw and real conversations with successful Kiwi founders who’ve taken the hits, made the calls, and kept showing up. This is about the stuff they wish they knew earlier – the kind of lessons that only come from doing the work (and a few things going sideways).
This event is for founders, early-stage teams and leaders who are serious about growing. We screen all registrations to make sure appropriate criteria is met.
More on our speaker:
SwipedOn is a workplace sign-in system turned global SaaS success story, built in Tauranga and scaled to thousands of businesses worldwide.
Hadleigh Ford didn’t set out to build a SaaS company and definitely not one that would be sold twice. He started in the maritime industry, worlds away from term sheets and cap tables. But SwipedOn scaled globally, was acquired by a public company, and later snapped up by private equity. And oh boy, has it been a ride.
The one thing he wishes he’d known sooner? Back yourself. Especially when things get noisy and complicated.
“There were times I overthought things or waited too long for more certainty,” he says. “But you rarely get certainty. You just make the best call you can and keep moving.”
Life inside a listed company came with its own lessons: constant reporting, shifting priorities, and investor pressure. It taught Hadleigh to let go of perfect timing and to move with clarity, not consensus.
These days, he leads with gut instinct and a steady hand. Even when things get messy.
“No ragrets,” he laughs. “You learn far more from the rough patches than the smooth sailing.”
Date and time
Wed, 20 Aug 2025 5:15 PM - 6:45 PM NZST
Location: BNZ Cameron Road
639 Cameron Road Tauranga, Bay of Plenty
Get your tickets here.
Event: The Annual Digital Trust Hui Taumata is leading the digital trust conversation in Aotearoa and after our conversations with Max Ferguson from Lumin over here at Caffeine I am becoming increasingly interested in the digital trust space.
Trust is the infrastructure underpinning our entire online economy and it is facing some extraordinary challenges, making conversations like this event facilitates more crucial than ever.
The one-day programme in 2025 will feature keynote presentations, panel discussions, roundtables and more focusing on crucial topics like regulation and digital identity frameworks, payments and biometrics.
The Hui Taumata provides the digital identity and trust ecosystem with an opportunity to share their insights into building a thriving and resilient trust economy for the benefit of all New Zealanders.
Created by NZTech and Digital Identity New Zealand (DINZ) this is a must-attend event for New Zealand’s digital identity and trust ecosystem. Get more information and register your interest here.
Carta’s State of VC 2025 drops, packed full of fascinating insights: The team at Carta have released their State of VC 2025 presentation and it’s packed with 30 slides of fascinating insights into all things startup.
Head of Insights Peter Walker handily summarised the toplines thusly:
Funding dollars are up, but number of rounds is stubbornly low. Mega rounds doled out to mostly AI companies have painted a rosier-than-accurate picture of current VC landscape.
Metrics required to raise have gotten steep. Data from SVB shows that median ARR at Series A is about 2.2x higher than it was in 2021.
Team sizes are shrinking. The average number of full-time employees at a Series A company was 15 in 2024, down from 22 in 2022. By the end of 2025, I'd expect that to be more like 13 or 12.
But employees, even the earliest ones, aren't really seeing bigger equity packages. Will the gold rush for AI engineers change this dynamic at the early stages?
Many AI companies are sticking to old patterns of venture, raising rounds at high valuations for lots of cash and doing so quickly. Seed-strapping must be out there but we aren't seeing it too often.
You can request the entire deck yourself by following this link.
You can store a PNG in…birdsong?: Okay this one isn’t necessarily founder specific but good lord is it a weird and cool bit of science. A Youtuber by the name of Benn Jordan converted a sketch of a bird into an audio wave form, played it to a bird who mimicked the sound and then re downloaded that png from the birdsong. Doing so, he discovered a bird can ‘store’ and transfer data at approximately 2 MB/s. We are living through wild times, team. Check out the video here.
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
