Grid AKL

Grid AKL Our aim is to make our city the best place for innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive!

GridAKL supports early stage Startups and entrepreneurs; we are in the Innovation Precinct at the beautiful Wynyard Quarter, Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand. GridAKL is part of the Innovation Precinct at Wynyard Quarter, Auckland, New Zealand. We're home to startups, SMEs, tech companies, and global innovators.

11/10/2026

You heard it! đŸ€©

Auckland Startup Week 2026 is in full swing, and we’ve been catching up with some of the incredible exhibitors joining us for our Challenges Expo tomorrow, Monday 12 October!

Meet the innovators, changemakers and bold thinkers who are challenging the sector to be more ambitious, daring and bold. đŸ”„

Come along, connect with our exhibitors, discover fresh ideas and see what’s possible when we challenge the status quo.

You don’t want to miss it! 👀

📅 Tomorrow | Monday 12 October 📍 Challenges Expo | Auckland Startup Week 2026

Bring your curiosity, bring your ideas, and we’ll see you there! 🙌

Status quo, meet QippayWhat does it really cost a business to get paid? Not just the transaction fee, but failed payment...
07/10/2026

Status quo, meet Qippay

What does it really cost a business to get paid? Not just the transaction fee, but failed payments, manual reconciliation, admin, and customers dropping off when onboarding gets too hard.
Qippay connects how money moves with consented financial data, replacing cards and direct debits with secure bank-to-bank payments, direct through New Zealand’s major banks under Payments NZ standardised APIs, no screen scraping, no bank shaping the roadmap.

ISO 27001 certified, FSP registered, and accredited under the Customer and Product Data Act.
Payment infrastructure built for a different era. This one’s rebuilding it for today.

Meet Qippay at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet Toro Technology

Global language technology decides which languages are worth building for, and indigenous languages rarely make the list.
Toro Technology, a Māori-owned company, built the voice pipeline that mainstream platforms don’t: Kawainga teaches te reo Māori down to dialect level, including Te Reo-Nāti, their own Ngāti Porou variant.
Language authorities govern their own content and data, rather than handing it to a vendor.
Commercially live since July, now onboarding schools nationally.

A language tech industry that said this market was too small. This one proved otherwise.

Meet Toro Technology at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet Authentic Japan

Search and rescue off-grid usually means racing against time with no signal and no way to pinpoint where someone is. Cocoheli changes that: a lightweight emergency beacon paired with handheld receivers on dedicated radio frequencies, built to find people fast when there’s no network to rely on.

Their mission is simple: a world without the fear of losing someone to disaster, getting lost, or worse.
Rescue that depends on luck and daylight. This one runs on signal instead.

Meet Authentic Japan at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

07/10/2026

Status quo, meet Boatseekr

Finding the right boat online usually means knowing the make and model before you can even search, so buyers end up scrolling through mismatched listings on generic classifieds sites.

Boatseekr flips that: upload a photo of a boat you like and its AI surfaces similar listings from nearly 20,000 boats across New Zealand, Australia and the US. For sellers, it takes the manual grunt work out of building listings altogether, with tools like Creatr and Tendr making the whole process easier on both sides.

A market too fragmented for keyword search to work. This one searches by sight instead. Meet Boatseekr at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet Naturally Genius (Formerly Mushroom Material)Protective packaging has run on polystyrene foam for seven...
02/10/2026

Status quo, meet Naturally Genius (Formerly Mushroom Material)

Protective packaging has run on polystyrene foam for seventy years, cheap, light, and easy to ignore once it’s in the bin.

Mushroom Material grows a mycelium-based alternative that does the same job, strength, thermal and acoustic insulation, but breaks down at home in 45 to 60 days.
It even works in the same moulds polystyrene does, so production doesn’t need to change.

Status quo, meet Trust Before Ship

Software development has changed faster than software assurance.

AI tools mean a working demo can appear in hours, but a demo isn’t proof something’s ready to ship, hand over or rely on. Trust Before Ship separates those two questions: does it work, and is there enough evidence to trust it? Its Vibe Code Forensic Audit gives founders and software owners an independent, read-only record of what’s been checked, and what hasn’t.
Speed used to mean skipping the checks. This one says you don’t have to.

Meet Trust Before Ship at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet Resectaur

Online medical education has grown fast, but most of it is still just information to consume, watch a lecture, read a case, move on.

Resectaur says that’s missing the point: clinical judgement has always been taught through direct feedback and real discussion, not content alone.
Its platform lets radiologists teach through real diagnostic images, with learners engaging directly with the teacher on the same cases, built solo over seven years by a practising consultant radiologist.

A field that’s always taught one-on-one. This one’s finding a way to scale it.

Meet Resectaur at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.
Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

02/10/2026

Super cool to be apart of NZGDC 2026! - Awesome to see what people have created, everyone sharing the love of the game and supporting one another.

Come on down to the convention center and visit our booth in the business lounge- We’ve teamed up with MDS and In2Games to showcase what we do here at Grid and to let you know about Indie Games showcase .

Tomorrow is the last day, we’d love to meet you, so come through đŸ«¶

If your next event needs a venue that's already done the hard work for you, the Startup Hub at GridAKL / John Lysaght is...
24/09/2026

If your next event needs a venue that's already done the hard work for you, the Startup Hub at GridAKL / John Lysaght is worth a look. Plug n' play spaces that fit anywhere from 10 to 150 people, built for workshops, meetups, product showcases, Hackathons, team training, and everything in between. Bring your people and your plan, the space is ready when you are. 🎯

Status quo, meet PhaseFoam“We are challenging the refrigerated transport industry to be smarter, cleaner and bolder.”Ref...
22/09/2026

Status quo, meet PhaseFoam

“We are challenging the refrigerated transport industry to be smarter, cleaner and bolder.”

Refrigerated trucks have run the same way for decades: a diesel engine, a compressor, running constantly just to keep things cold.

PhaseFoam does it differently. Cooling energy gets stored at the depot, then released throughout the delivery route. No compressor. No refrigerant. No diesel engine running the whole way.

It’s simpler, quieter, lower emission, and retrofits straight into existing fleets.
Already proven in live Auckland dairy distribution.

This is PhaseFoam deciding “that’s just how it’s done” wasn’t good enough. Meet them at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, Meet Qrtr

“We are challenging AI to check, not chat” 

Every building, bridge and product around you has passed a professional check, hundreds of hours of an engineer’s time, reviewed line by line, at hundreds of dollars an hour.

Qrtr does that review in minutes. It checks a professional document against the briefs, standards and references it needs to satisfy, and returns a scored, traceable register, with a human approving every outcome.

Already in closed beta with a global engineering consultancy on board.
Fifty years of doing it one way. One team decided that wasn’t good enough.

Meet Qrtr at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet CyAura AI“We are creating the new intelligence behind the forecasts that run the world.”The tools that ...
21/09/2026

Status quo, meet CyAura AI

“We are creating the new intelligence behind the forecasts that run the world.”

The tools that top hedge funds use to win? Locked away from everyone else.

CyAura is changing that with a neutral AI layer across brokers, exchanges and wallets.
No holding your money. No placing trades. It only wins if you do.

The goal: turn every everyday investor into their own hedge fund.

Get in the room with the ones rewriting the rules.
Meet CyAura AI at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet DevforGov

What if an experience created for one city could help communities around the world?
DevforGov, a new venture from Geo Applied Realities, is a global marketplace and collaboration hub for purpose-driven digital experiences. It connects governments, councils, educational institutions, funders and technology partners to co-create solutions, share development costs and extend their impact across cities and regions.

At the heart of the platform is app recycling. Proven digital products can be adapted with new stories, imagery, languages and local content while retaining the underlying technology. An experience developed in Auckland could be tailored for Cape Town, Rotterdam or any community facing a similar challenge.

The growing marketplace includes serious games, augmented reality trails, interactive learning experiences and simulations focused on climate action, emergency preparedness, conservation, culture and local history.

Meet the rebels exploring how local innovation can become a shared global resource.

Friday 9 October 2026
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West, Auckland C*D

Learn more: devforgov.com

Background artwork: Hiwa i te rangi ki tua (2022), by Hana Maihi (Hine X Hana) and Poi Ngawati (Poi | Manu Graphics). The mural depicts Hine Pohewa, the embodiment of creativity and innovation, and Hiwa-i-te-rangi, symbolising aspirations for future generations. The taiaha represents the guiding presence of tƫpuna.

Status quo, meet SceneStar.Passive scrolling is the default, watch a feed, never make one. SceneStar flips that, letting...
20/09/2026

Status quo, meet SceneStar.

Passive scrolling is the default, watch a feed, never make one. SceneStar flips that, letting anyone step into a cinematic scene, a movie trailer, a music video, solo or with friends, with no prompting skills or technical knowledge needed.

Built by filmmakers with ethical guardrails baked in, it turns feeds from something you watch into something you make and share.

Get in the room with the ones rewriting the rules. Meet SceneStar at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Status quo, meet WoolAid Most plasters and wound care products are made from plastic, touching your skin at the exact mo...
18/09/2026

Status quo, meet WoolAid

Most plasters and wound care products are made from plastic, touching your skin at the exact moment it needs to heal. WoolAid replaces it with FDA Class 1 medical-grade merino wool, custom woven in Northern Italy from New Zealand wool, certified by ZQ.

See the founders refusing to accept how it’s always been done. Meet WoolAid at the Auckland Startup Week Challenger Expo.

Monday 12 October, 10am–2pm
GridAKL, 101 Pakenham Street West

Address

12 Madden Street AND 101 Pakenham St W, Wynyard Qtr
Auckland
1010

Opening Hours

Monday 7:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 7:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 7:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday 7:30am - 5:30pm
Friday 7:30am - 5:30pm

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