Kea Aerospace founder Mark Rocket at his firm's assembly plant in Christchurch. Photo / Chris Keall
Kea Aerospace founder Mark Rocket reveals a capital raise, and addresses the industry folklore about why he parted ways with Peter Beck. Open banking inches along. John Chow takes a knock. New blood at Tuanz.
Mark Rocket says he’s shooting for the stratosphere.
And unlike other start-up founders, it’s no cheesy metaphor.
The Kea Aerospace chief executive aims for one of his firm’s Atmos solar-powered, remotely-powered aircraft to fly in the stratosphere - beginning around 66,000 feet or about 20km above the Earth) by year’s end. For context, commercial aircraft usually cruise between 30,000 and 40,000 feet.
The firm, founded in 2018, is still largely in commercial mode: “We’ve got a couple of Government research projects under way,” Rocket says. And an unnamed client has commissioned upper-atmosphere research.
Furthermore, Rocket sees Kea reaching its goal of stratospheric flight as the catalyst for a Series A round next year. He’ll be looking to raise $10-$15 million. (Today, Rocket owns the largest tranche of shares, followed by his CTO Philipp Sueltrop and Austrian billionaire Wolfgang Leitner, who has also put money into several deep-tech Kiwi firms including Zincovery.
Rocket wants to build a whole fleet of Atmos aircraft, which will initially operate in Australia and New Zealand, with possible expansion around the Pacific Islands.
Today’s prototype is designed to go up and down in a day, but Kea is working towards craft that can fly for months - on battery power during the night then recharging through solar panels by midday.
Rocket says uses will include surveying farms, maritime surveillance and spotting forest fires.
He pitches Kea as much cheaper than a helicopter or plane, and “20 times close to the Earth than a satellite, so the picture quality is 20 times better”.
A Kea UAV is launched from the roof of a speeding car (see clip below).
“We’re not burning av-gas [aviation fuel]. We don’t need expensive infrastructure. We’ve got a compelling cost-advantage - and loitering capability,” Rocket says. Kea aircraft also have zero emissions.
Some of the craft will be leased at first, to generate cashflow.
But long-term, the founder sees his firm owning and operating all of the planes.
“We’ll be a data company,” he says.
Images and data collected by Atmos craft will be sold to government, defence and private customers. He also sees scope for a circling Atmos to provide broadband from above in a disaster situation. Rocket envisages an airborne 5G “celltower in the sky” with a 200km coverage radius.
Personally, he loves the engineering, and the quest to make a high-flying UAV from ultralight materials. But he’s also pragmatic about the commercial realities, and how the average punter operates. “Nobody cares where their Google Earth images come from,” he says.
Rocket (born Mark Stevens) joined Rocket Lab in March 2007, nine months after it was founded.
He became the start-up’s second director, joining Peter Beck on what became a two-man board, and was granted a small stake in the firm.
Rocket quit four years later. Industry folklore holds that he split with Beck over whether the firm should take military money (something of a hot topic as protesters mobbed the 2024 NZ Aerospace Summit last week.
“We picked up a contract that I wasn’t that enthusiastic about. So I thought it was a good time for me to let Peter move on and do what he wanted to do with the company in that direction,” he told the Herald earlier this week during a visit to his firm’s Christchurch plant.
Was it the Darpa (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract to develop a new propellant with characteristics of both solid and liquid fuels? (A US patent says one use for the propellant - which Rocket Lab says has never been deployed - is sub-orbital airborne missiles.)
“Let’s just say it was an international contract,” Rocket says.
A Rocket Lab insider told the Herald, “Ask him if he still owns his shares.”
Rocket said: “Yes, I’ve got shares.”
What does he think of Rocket Lab today?
“Most of the work they’re doing, from what I’m seeing, looks. really exciting. Their larger Neutron rocket is going to put them on that same tier as SpaceX.”
What did he mean when he told visitors to the NZ Aerospace Conference in Christchurch - including Nasa and Japan Space Port brass - that Kea’s roster would include defence work?
“We’re more than happy to work with the Defence Force on maritime surveillance,” Rocket says.
“I’m comfortable with the defensive side of defence. I’m just not so keen on the offensive side.”
Rocket is also the president of Aerospace New Zealand and was an advisory board that helped shape Space Minister Judith Collins’ new red tape-cutting policy for the sector - which will establish permanent no-fly zones for regular aircraft, making it easier to test experimental ones in “sandboxes” and allow iterative tweaks to designs without having to go through the process of recertification.
Businessman John Chow is the latest to benefit from Apple’s collision-detection feature (which works with the iPhone 14 or later its Watch since Series 8.
“A couple of weeks ago, while my wife and I were stopped at a traffic light, our VW was hit by a Land Rover. Thankfully, we weren’t seriously hurt - just a bit of neck pain. We’re really lucky it wasn’t worse,” Chow told his LinkedIn followers yesterday.
“Interestingly, my iPhone automatically called 111 using its emergency feature right after the impact. It’s amazing how technology can play such a crucial role in moments like these.”
Whether it was because of a knock to the head or just a new outlook on life, Chow - who bought an ozone-unfriendly Rolls Royce last year - said he was now road-testing an electric car from BYD.
Chow’s accident occurred in Auckland, where it was always going to be phoned-in by a bystander, but Apple crash detection has also alerted emergency services to crashes in rural Rangiora, where it helped save lives, and a crash on a Nelson off-roading track - where it helped police locate the bodies of two teens who died after their vehicle went down a steep bank.
Payments NZ - the payments management and governance body collectively owned by the major banks - has released a consultation document on open banking.
Fintech players say NZ is behind on open banking - a sweeping term that covers everything from banks making their systems easy to access by the makers of finance apps, making potentially lower-cost and more capable mobile and online payment options available, to customers being able to take their account numbers with them when they change banks, similar to how you can take your mobile number with you today when you change telcos.
Fintech makers have to be pleased that Payments NZ has been doing preliminary work, laying the foundations for open banking this year, nudged along by Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly, who told the Herald in May: “Open banking is a very high priority for me [but] industry-led initiatives have been slow and New Zealand is falling behind the rest of the world with open banking.”
They want NZ to make up for lost time with bold moves. But the consultation paper emphasises potential security and privacy issues and careful consideration in an ecosystem of “many moving parts”.
“Our view is that next-generation payments infrastructure should begin with a small, centralised core payments capability that can be built out over time in modules to bring next-generation digital capabilities to all of Aotearoa,” says Payment NZ chief executive Steve Wiggins in the introduction.
Bayly may be weighing at what point the “caution” becomes foot-dragging, and whether to lean harder on the industry to move things along.
Speaking of the ability to take your phone number with you when you switch to a new phone company, that competition-enhancing perk was introduced following lobbying by the Telecommunications Users Association of NZ as it was known in 2007 (the “T” now stands for “Tech”, reflecting the advocacy group’s broader group’s broader brief these days).
Tuanz is currently fighting the good fight on rural broadband and other issues.
Its September AGM saw Kari Jones (chief data officer at Te Whatu Ora/Health NZ) Garth Spencer (CCO at Māori spectrum agency Tū Ātea) and Andrew Cushen (best known as InternetNZ’s longtime policy honcho but now chief executive of the Climate Forestry Association) elected to the Tuanz board. They joined existing members Tristan Ilich Tsquared), Zoe Udy (with mobile app developer PaperKite), Caitlin Metz (with Connexa, the firm formed to run Spark and 2degrees’ sold-off cell towers) Annaliese Atina (MD of Ford NZ), Matthew Harrison (owner of Taranaki-based wireless internet provider Primo), Paul Littlefair (Acuity Partners), Sid Kumar (N4L) and David Matheson (VisionWest Communities Trust).
Exiting stage left were Kaity Mitchell (Enable Fibre Broadband), Andy Edwards (CommsLearning) and Vaughan Baker (cofounder of Singapore-based MyRepublic, which sold its NZ broadband business to 2degrees last year).
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.
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