The Kiwi at the heart of a US$1.45 billion AI bet

One of the biggest AI cheques written this year has a Kiwi name on the term sheet.

Odyssey, the AI lab co-founded by Auckland-raised engineer Jeff Hawke, has closed a US$310 million Series B at a US$1.45 billion valuation, which BusinessDesk puts at around NZ$2.5 billion. The round was announced in mid-June and has been picked up enthusiastically across New Zealand media over the past fortnight, with the Herald reporting the raise at roughly NZ$529 million. Natural Capital led the round, with Amazon, AMD Ventures and Google’s venture arm GV among the backers.

Odyssey builds what the industry calls world models: AI systems that learn from the physical world rather than from text, and can simulate it with accurate physics. TechCrunch reports the company has sent people out with camera backpacks to gather real-world data, an approach it likens to how Google Earth was built. The models are aimed at video game creation, robotics, and generating rich interactive video from text prompts. Amazon’s involvement comes with a practical twist too: AWS becomes Odyssey’s preferred cloud, with the models optimised to run on Amazon’s Trainium chips.

The New Zealand threads run right through this one. Hawke, who grew up in Mt Albert, worked as an engineer at UK self-driving startup Wayve before co-founding Odyssey in 2023 alongside Oliver Cameron, the founder of autonomous vehicle company Voyage and later a product executive at Cruise. And New Zealand money is on the cap table. Icehouse Ventures joined the round, with local reporting putting its ticket at NZ$4.7 million, so a slice of the upside from one of the year’s landmark AI deals flows back home. RNZ reports the fresh capital will accelerate research and push the technology into robotics, gaming and science.

The same week the Odyssey news landed here, local business press reported a pleasing cluster of Auckland raises alongside it. Hyades, founded by three University of Auckland graduates, banked a $1.5 million seed round from Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown, Sir Stephen Tindall and Icehouse Ventures to turn messy geospatial data, think satellite imagery and drone footage, into machine-learning-ready formats for insurers modelling flood, cyclone and wildfire risk. Atomic Tessellator, another Auckland startup, closed a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners with Icehouse and Outset Ventures among those aboard, applying AI to the search for alternatives to rare earth elements.

For senior tech leaders there are two signals worth taking from all this. The first is that world models are shaping up as a serious new layer of the AI stack, one that matters for anyone watching where robotics, simulation and physical-world automation are heading. New Zealand now has a founder, and New Zealand capital, sitting at that frontier rather than reading about it later.

The second is what the surrounding wave says about the local ecosystem. The same investor networks writing cheques into a US$1.45 billion global round are simultaneously seeding Auckland firms in spatial data and materials discovery. That is a healthy pipeline: global wins pulling capital, confidence and connections back into the local scene, and local founders building in areas where New Zealand has genuine credibility.

Small country, long reach. It is a good week to be reminded of both.