Pushpay, founded by Chris Heaslip and Eliot Crowther in an Auckland garage in 2011 and listed on the NZX four years later with a $50 million IPO, was sold to US and Australian private equity interests in 2022 for $1.53 billion.
By that point, the bulk of the firm’s 495 staff, and nearly all of its donor-management software business, were in the US, as was its new CEO, Molly Matthews.
Notwithstanding promises to the contrary as a deal is signed, promises of local presence often wilt after an offshore buyout.
But Pushpay has maintained around 20% of its staff in New Zealand – home of 108 of its 517 employees today – and is recruiting for four senior roles in Auckland (in data science, finance, front-end development and software engineering).
While in town earlier this month, the Redmond, Washington-based Matthews took the Herald on a tour of her firm’s new Auckland office, which staff moved into about a month ago (see the video above). It’s in the upmarket Vero building, with harbour views and a corporate step-up from the firm’s old digs on the outskirts of the CBD, accessed via a corridor next to a convenience store.
“Having a New Zealand presence is like our secret superpower,” Matthews said.
“All of our competitors are primarily based in the US. We feel like it gives us the ability to hire really diverse, unique engineers and product people, and we’re able to really operate on a six-day-a-week schedule.”
She adds, “We’ve just hired a VP of engineering that’s located here in New Zealand [former Xero engineering general manager Iain Phillips]. We had options in the States, but really wanted to have a firm foundation of leadership here in Auckland.
“We also have some fantastic UX [user experience] and UI [user interface] designers that are here in our Auckland office. It’s our Centre of Excellence for software engineering.
“We also have a really fantastic accounting team that is based here. We also have BI [business intelligence] and data folk here.”
How is life different under private equity owners BGH Capital and Sixth Street?
“Since changing from a public to a private company, there’s definitely been a few changes,” Matthews says.
“We aren’t reporting on a semi-annual basis, but not much has changed for the people who are working for us.
“We had a tremendous amount of pride being a publicly listed company in New Zealand, and so we’ve tried to honour that and our roots here, and really make sure that we are continuing to invest in the technology community here in New Zealand, but I wouldn’t say that it’s changed a tremendous amount of, like, the business operations for us.”
Pushpay’s delisting took place just as the firm – whose base has been overwhelmingly Protestant churches – was preparing a push into Catholic parishes. Freed from NZX reporting requirements, Matthews keeps her general business update broad-strokes.
“We have our core focuses, which are gaining both new Protestant customers but also our big launch into the Catholic community. That has been growing steadily.”
She adds, “We see a line of sight to serving NPOs [non-profit organisations]. We serve a few that organically come to us, but we want to be more authentic in serving that market.”
With final regulatory clearance for the buyout not granted until well into last year, and a New Zealand subsidiary, Pushpay filed accounts locally for its year to March 31, 2024. The firm reported a rise in revenue to US$224.6m ($378.3m) versus the year-ago US$214.3m and operating earnings of $49.5m – a 15% lift from 2023′s $42.9m.
Pushpay recently completed its annual State of Church Tech report.
One of the key findings of the survey of some 6000 church leaders was “leaders are abandoning the idea of an in-person-only ministry”.
Pushpay’s then NZX-listed shares boomed during the pandemic. Its stock doubled in 2020 as lockdowns saw congregations lean into its mobile app for giving and its church management software. Some 95% of pastors held virtual services that year. Pushpay bolstered its capability in that area by buying livestreaming firm Resi Media.
“Covid was painful for many people in many industries. We saw some tailwinds from that, from a digital generosity standpoint,” Matthews says.
“What we’ve seen post-Covid is that hybrid – online church, plus in-person church – has stayed. So it’s really made our technology, with Resi Media and some of the other features we have all the more important.”
The rise of crypto currencies like bitcoin was another Church Tech 2024 theme.
“The generosity coming from crypto currency to churches doubled from 2023 to 2024 so we want to make sure that we’re really giving our people an option, if they are trading in crypto, to give in that same way to their local church.
“So we’ve invested in a partnership with a company called Engiven [that] handles crypto and stock donations. So we offer that through an integration to our customers, and it’s actually been really heavily adopted.”
Stock donations?
Amazon recently ordered its staff (including those in New Zealand) back to the office five days a week, helping to cement the trend back to the “old normal” in the tech sector. US each year,” Matthews says.
“So we want to make sure that our churches have the ability to participate in that generosity.”
The Herald arrived at Pushpay’s office just as a “hackathon” was wrapping up.
“A hackathon is where we invite everybody across our entire company to participate in teams and think of what is the next best feature or product that we should release,” Matthews explained.
“And I want to say about half of them had some element of AI.
“We think of it as an opportunity for us to gain efficiency, to really create more systems and processes that ease the pain of our local churches, and so we’re leveraging that today in many different ways, inside of our product, but also in how we handle customers – with chat, creating content, or to edit and review data. It’s something that I think all businesses are coming up to speed with.
“We’re being very safe around how we’re introducing that into our ecosystem. But we do see that it’s a big part of our future.”
Amazon recently ordered its staff (including those in New Zealand) back to the office five days a week, helping to cement the trend back to the “old normal” in the tech sector.
Pushpay is bucking the trend, with staff still able to hybrid-work, with three days in the office required.
Matthews says there are no plans to change that.
“There is a tremendous amount of value in in-office collaboration, but we also appreciate that people have family dynamics. Our headquarters is in Redmond, Washington, a stone’s throw from Microsoft and Amazon, their policies usually impact us. But we’ve decided that the best opportunity to have a creative, diverse and thriving staff is to continue with a three days in and two days remote option.”
Chris Heaslip is now based in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, where he relocated from Seattle and raised $14m in a Series A round for his new start-up Leadr, a “performance development platform” to help early-stage companies deal with staff management pains. It now has just under 100 staff, including fellow Kiwi Matt Tresidder. Heaslip also recently supported a $3.2m seed round (led by Icehouse Ventures) for Auckland start-up Caruso, a maker of software for fund managers.
Eliot Crowther – who came close to becoming a professional cyclist before moving into business – also moved to Seattle but was back in New Zealand last November to compete in the Tour of Southland (he was not placed overall, but won the fourth stage). Crowther has put money into Leadr, plus Auckland start-up First AML.
The pandemic stimulus-driven low interest rates fuelled a venture capital and private equity frenzy, with a clutch of New Zealand tech companies sold offshore, including retail software firm Vend’s $455m sale to Canada’s Lightspeed, geo-modelling software firm Seequent’s $1.45b sale to Nasdaq-listed Bentley Systems, Grinding Gear Games’ $100m-plus sale to China’s Tencent, veterinary practice management software maker ezyVet’s $216m sale to Nasdaq-listed Idexx Laboratories, salon appointment software maker Timely’s $100m-plus sale to the Silver Lake-backed EverCommerce, NZX-listed Pushpay’s $1.53b sale to a private equity consortium lead by a US firm, mobile game developer Ninja Kiwi’s $203m sale to a Scandinavian buyer, e-commerce player Cin7′s $133m sale to US private equity firm Rubicon, breast cancer screening software firm Volpara’s $322m sale to a Korean rival, US private equity giant KKR took majority control of Dunedin’s Education Perfect in a mid-2021 transaction that valued the Kiwi firm at $455m, Hawaiki Cable’s circa $500m sale to Singapore’s BW Group and the $2.2b sale of Wētā Digital’s technology division to US-based Unity Software (a deal that would later unravel as Unity hit financial strife).
More recent deals have seen US private equity firm Boston Ventures take majority control of Auckland education software firm Kami in a deal that valued the firm at $289m and tradie management app Tradify selling to UK roll-up outfit The Access Group in a $100m-plus deal, among other transactions.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
Investors are waiting for next week's pivotal interest rate decision.