Digital collectibles platform Veve tops Deloitte Fast 50 index

Veve Digital, the world’s leading platform for digital collectibles, has topped this year’s Deloitte Fast 50 index with a three-year growth rate of 1,239 percent.

Veve (pronounced ‘vee vee’)  is owned by Orbis Technology (formerly Orbis Blockchain Technologies), which was co-founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneurs David Yu and Dan Crothers, originally as a comic store on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. Investors include Blackbird Ventures and Kiwi VC Jonty Kelt. 

Hirestaff (834 percent), Optimal Clinical Trials (782 percent), Nau Mai Ra (727 percent ) and Hnry (608 percent) were the other companies in the index’s top five.

Veve’s users can collect, trade and showcase digital collectibles in the form of NFTS (non-fungible tokens) of their favourite characters, art and memorabilia. Veve has partnered with some of the best-known IP owners in the global entertainment industry including Disney, Marvel and Pixar.

The inaugural drop on Veve was the #100 Todd McFarlane Batman from the famed Batman Black & White series and the latest being dropped this coming weekend will be Goose and the Flerkittens digital plushies from the Marvel series. Veve has sold more than eight million collectibles for the major brands.

Yu was named Entrepreneur of the Year last week with the judges describing him as a true entrepreneur whose story was inspiring for others. The Taiwanese- New Zealander opened his first collectibles store Games R Us when aged 17 and he also founded import distribution business Retail Management Group, which sells a range of products throughout Australasia and Asia.

He recently told Caffeine that despite decades of experience in collectibles, bringing big brands like DC into the digital collectibles world still required hustle. 

Crothers started the web business Digitalus in 2001 and five years later co-founded the cannabis website herb.co, which started as ‘The Stoners Cookbook’ featuring user-submitted edible cannabis recipes. 

The Covid-19 pandemic provided a big boost to the digital collectibles market with high-profile sales  of NFTs in this space reaching millions of dollars. According to a June 2023 report by UnivDatos Markets Insights, the digital collectibles market is expected to continue to have a compound annual growth rate of around 15 percent until 2028.  

The index

The annual Deloitte Fast 50 Index ranks fast-growing businesses based on their growth over three years.

Deloitte Private partner James Arlidge says those ranked on the index have thrived despite tough economic times. 

“The mix of industries on the indices this year is also a market of conditions during the three-year revenue period, as we’ve seen more construction companies featured than technology ones, which is a huge variance to previous years.”

Government regulation topped the list of concerns for Fast 50 companies this year compared with the recruitment and retention of staff in 2022. 

On the Master of Growth index, IT recruitment company Younity secured the top ranking with growth of 627 percent over the past five years, followed by Volpara Technologies (600 percent) and Consult Recruitment (543 percent). 

Younity was founded in 2017 by Richard Vaughan, Tony Pervan, Jane Anderson and Mark Warren with a focus on putting people first in the recruitment process. 

This year required the highest growth rate yet to make the Master of Growth index, with a baseline of 221 percent. 

Key growth drivers for those companies were sales growth, internal expansion, and new products/services, says Arlidge.

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