Happy Thursday!
Kia ora Caffeinators and happy Thursday! Nice mix of good local news and apocalyptic global news today so really a balanced diet. Fitting because our first story is about a startup tackling problems in the GI tract.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Kiwi AI Startup Nexture Tackles Diagnostic Delays in GI Healthcare
Pod Pick: The All-In Founder: How One Bet Sparked a New Superhuman AI
Event: Startup World Cup Final is TONIGHT
Sponsored - KNK: Escaping the PowerPoint Industrial Complex
The AI bubble doom sirens are blaring
A nineteen year old nabs Google backing for AI startup
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Kiwi AI Startup Nexture Tackles Diagnostic Delays in GI Healthcare: From my perspective, Healthtech in NZ is massively undervalued so I love seeing stories like this. Auckland-based startup Nexture is getting in on the action with the launch of their affordable AI-powered diagnostic platform, TheraSeus.
Like a few others in the space, ala HeartLab, Nexture is tackling the extremely time-consuming and costly process of reviewing medical imagery, except here with capsule endoscopy images instead of heart scans. .
Traditionally, physicians spend up to an hour per case manually reviewing these images. TheraSeus automates this workflow using AI to filter out normal images and highlight areas of clinical concern, significantly reducing physician workload and increasing diagnostic efficiency.
“TheraSeus filters out the noise and lets doctors focus on what matters,” says Sun. “It’s about saving lives by catching disease early—without adding pressure to already stretched healthcare systems.”
“The late diagnosis of gastric diseases is a major problem,” says founder Wei Sun. “In many cases, cancer is only caught once it has spread — when it’s too late.” For instance, gastric cancer has a five-year survival rate of around 75% when caught early, but just 7% when diagnosed at an advanced stage. TheraSeus aims to close that gap by enabling earlier, more accurate detection.
Unlike most competing solutions—often costing upwards of $50,000 and tied to proprietary hardware—TheraSeus is hardware-agnostic and designed to run on existing capsule endoscopy systems already in use across hospitals worldwide. It operates on a pay-per-use model at just NZD $30 per report, enabling immediate uptake without major capital expenditure.
Nexture is backed by Ministry of Awesome, Google for Startups, Microsoft for Startups, and NVIDIA Inception. The team is now preparing for regulatory approval in New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S., and is in discussions with hospital groups and research institutions globally.
Pod Pick: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗹-𝗜𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿: 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝘁 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗡𝗲𝘄 “𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗔𝗜 - The team at Startup Theatre have another banger episode, with a co-founder Caffeine readers are likely familiar with.
What happens when a broke Kiwi founder and his team fly to San Francisco with only $15,000 left, sleep in a basement, and end up playing poker with the investor who changes everything?
In this episode Troy Hammond sits down with Alistair McLeay, co-founder and co-CEO of Grw AI, one of New Zealand’s most ambitious artificial intelligence startups.
Alistair shares how a chance poker game in San Francisco helped him land funding and kickstart the creation of what he calls a “superhuman AI sales leader.” Grw AI is a tool that coaches, trains, and lifts entire sales teams like the world’s best manager on steroids.
Listen here.
Event: Startup World Cup Final is TONIGHT - Last chnace to secure your spot at a great event in the startup calendar. For the first time ever, Kāpiti will host the Startup World Cup New Zealand Final, powered by Pegasus Tech Ventures – the world’s largest startup pitch competition. Startups from across the motu will go head-to-head in front of a live audience and expert judging panel at the beautiful Te Raukura ki Kāpiti. The winner will receive flights and support to pitch on the global stage in Silicon Valley on 17 October 2025, competing for a USD $1 million investment prize. This inaugural event is more than a pitch night – it’s a high-energy celebration of New Zealand’s creativity, capability, and ambition. Expect standout founder pitches, insight from leading judges, and a vibrant crowd of innovators, investors, and changemakers. Get your tickets here.
The doom sirens are blaring: As we touched on yesterday, there is a growing chorus of pretty reputable voices that AI hype is well and truly becoming an AI bubble of epic proportions . Of course, sceptics have always called 50 out of the last 10 crashes but this time it feels like there’s mounting evidence.
At FT reported: With the great headline ‘America is essentially one big bet on AI’, it noted 80% of stock growth in the past year being driven by AI spend and a shocking 40% of GDP growth down to the same.
More corporate debt tied to AI than banks: Bloomberg reports $1.2 Trillion USD in corporate debt is now tied to AI, making it a larger sector than banks.
Bank of England sounds the alarm: The BoE’s Financial Policy Committee just flagged soaring AI-sector valuations as a key risk. If investor sentiment shifts or progress stalls, they say we could see a “sharp market correction.”, which seems like it is polite British for ‘Very Bad Crash’.
MIT survey gets fresh scrutiny: With this ambient doubt about, the recent MIT study which reviewed hundreds of generative AI initiatives and found 95% delivered zero meaningful financial returns is starting to do the rounds again.
“Circular” deals: Some of the biggest names in AI are entering intertwined mega deals worth hundreds of billions — Nvidia investing in OpenAI while OpenAI commits to buying Nvidia’s chips, and so on. Money being passed back and forth this way is a worrying indicator that a bubble might be peaking. Matt Levine had a great hilarious summary of the recent AMD/OpenAI deal
KNK: Escaping the PowerPoint Industrial Complex
Naomi and Kris Ballantyne built KNK around a simple but distinctive proposition: giving founders direct access to the kind of experience and judgement they could never normally afford.
Naomi’s record speaks for itself - she helped create three of New Zealand’s largest life and health insurers, including founding Partners Life, which sold for $1b in 2022. Kris, who started in insurance at just 15, rose to become an executive at Partners Life, specialising in technology, brand, and digital innovation.
Naomi brings the scars and insights of a founder who’s had to fight regulators and incumbents in one of the toughest industries in the country. Kris brings a deep understanding of how technology, sales, and innovation actually land inside large organisations. Their combination lets KNK offer something rare: a shadow executive team founders can tap into at precisely the moment they need it most.
They differentiate themselves from a consultancy industry which offers a dizzying array of services but not always the one founders actually need.
“What we don’t do and won’t do is methodology or facilitation,” Naomi told me. “We don’t run workshops on how to do strategy. What we bring is something completely unique, which is the brains and the experience of having been there, done this.”
KNK’s rejection of the ‘PowerPoint industrial complex’ and vague yet expensive rhetoric around how to action strategy is rooted in lived frustration.
Kris has watched a particular dynamic from the inside of large organisations. “There’s a temptation in that cottage industry of directors and executives at a certain level where they want to use consulting to delegate responsibility for decision making as opposed to looking for anything that’s actually helpful,” he said. “It’s more about: I already know I want to do this. I just need someone else to pull the trigger.”
That kind of theatre, in their view, doesn’t help founders who are in the trenches. It produces busy work, not clarity. And clarity is exactly what KNK is designed to deliver.
Filling the Gap
From talking to the Ballantynes I realised that many founders don’t fail because of a lack of capital or vision or product market fit - they fail because they lack the right sounding boards.
“Every founder will tell you how lonely it is,” Naomi said. “You’re the knower of all things, the one that keeps everybody calm even when you’re panicking and don’t know what you’re doing. So we help fill that hole for them in a way that’s not a contractual financial drain on the business and doesn’t take anything away from them. It just adds it in.”
She described her role less as handing down instructions and more as creating space. “The value that it’s adding is not telling you what to do,” she said. “It’s listening to your weird ideas. It’s bouncing things off. It’s challenging you with things you may not have thought of yet, and then leaving you to do it.”
Kris offered an analogy that landed: “Do you think doctors diagnose themselves? Of course they don’t. They go and talk to another doctor. That’s what we’re offering: someone who speaks your language at your level, but with a fresher perspective. Because being a founder can be so lonely, and without that perspective, the stakes can feel crushing.”
A Shadow Executive Team
Naomi is careful not to overstate what KNK provides. “You’re going to pay for it, but you’re only going to pay for it as long as it’s adding value,” she said. “This isn’t a coaching contract. This isn’t outsourcing your decisions. It’s entrepreneurial brains, on tap.”
Kris frames the same idea in operational terms: “What you’re buying is almost a shadow executive team. A fully featured team who can play devil’s advocate and can play support, for you as a founder to have access to all of those wide variety of skills in a way that makes sense for your business. You don’t want to go to Deloitte and get a 60-person team. That’s not what smaller businesses need.”
It’s a proposition designed for the moment most founders hit Series A: when the cracks start to show, but the budget doesn’t stretch to a C-suite full of veterans. KNK steps in to bridge that gap, providing judgement without overhead.
One of the recurring frustrations Naomi carries from her career is the way “strategy” gets diluted. “If the system didn’t exist, then we built it,” she said of her time building insurers. “Not because we had a strategy to build systems. But because we had a strategy that we needed to play in this space and in this way, and the thing that was stopping us from doing it was that it didn’t exist.”
Kris translates that into a framework-free definition. “A strategy does not involve an action,” he said. “It relates to philosophies or mindset or approaches that drive the actions… who do you want to have been at the end, what difference do you want to have made? Which drives you to do tactics that are not a copy or an iteration of what you already know.”
Pivoting Without Panic
Founders often dread the word “pivot,” but Naomi insists it doesn’t have to be paralysing. “When it’s time to pivot, it’s normally a shock,” she said. “A change of regulation, a new entrant comes in, a funding partner pulls out. It can be terrifying. You’ll have a billion people telling you what you should do, and it’s all contradictory. You can be crippled by it.”
Her counsel is to pause and reframe. “The question is always: is it you or is it everyone? If it’s everyone, then it’s an opportunity to be better at dealing with it. When you stop being scared and start getting excited, that can spark creativity. There’s always someone who wins in the bad times - usually because they keep investing when everyone else pulls back. The accountant tells them to cut, but cutting makes it worse. Our role is giving them the bravery to keep playing the game.”
Kris added: “You can’t underestimate how paralysing that moment can feel for a founder. Having someone sit beside you and say, ‘Here’s how I’ve seen this before, here’s where it goes wrong, here’s what to try,’ can be the difference between acting and freezing.”
For all their extraordinary careers, Naomi insists what makes KNK effective is ordinariness. The consultancy world can feel intimidating and transactional. KNK wants the opposite: peers, not judges. As Kris put it: “Our whole thing is, you don’t need to impress us. We’ve seen it all - the panic, the dumb mistakes, the left-field ideas. Bring it. We’ll help you figure out which ones are worth pursuing.”
Capital is less scarce than it used to be. What’s scarce is scar tissue: people who’ve sat in the founder’s chair, taken the bets, and lived with the consequences.
In a market where advice is everywhere but informed judgement is rare, KNK might be trading in the most valuable commodity of all.
This article was written in partnership with KNK
A nineteen year old nabs Google backing for AI startup: Look, I’m really trying to be happy for this kid and congratulations to him but I have never felt more like an ancient, desiccated corpse.
Nineteen year old founder Dhravya Shah has secured seed funding of $2.6 million USD for his startup SuperMemory, which tackles one of the core problems in AI - it can’t remember enough stuff to be truly useful.
The round was led by Susa Ventures, Browder Capital, and SF1.vc, including individual investors from Google and Deepmind. Congrats to this small child for his global success.
If anyone needs me I am going to stare at my forehead wrinkles in a mirror and regret the choices I’ve made.
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