Another FKA Friday ● 24 July 2026#25

Angelic news from the NZ group that says it how it is □

« 24 July 2026 #25 » 1,641 Readers • 49% Mailchimp • 51% LinkedIn  James from Mindhive and Arash from Kara gave a great update each on Tuesday. It is always interesting to see the reactions of new angels who where not around for the earlier rounds. Mindhive has only just raised $5M last year, but Kara is in talks with potential US leads for a round later this year.  AuraScope is first off the rank with the pitch video from Tuesday. Derrek and Mish reckon that AI Search will open a new battle ground between Online Travel Agents and hotel. With AuraScope they are siding with the hotels. Here comes Misha's pitch, and you can also check out Derrek's podcast. Great pitches also from Apercure and Thread. More from them next week. Mayor Wayne Brown on our portfolio company Kitea Health. Watch out for the Trump-like linguistic somersault about hydrocephalus. Watch him! He does all these startup posts, of course, in preparation of the Auckland Startup Week in August. Register for the launch event HERE! GEN NZ’s Unconference and Awards are in August. Join founders, investors, operators and ecosystem builders in Wellington on Monday 24 August. Find out more and get your ticket. In any case, get nominating, no winners without nominations. GO! FKA passed on SafeStack before it went on to raise NZ$2.3 million pre-seed round in October 2021, led by Jelix Ventures. SafeStack has now been acquired by NINJIO which raised a US$5.5 Series A in 2021 according to Pitchbook, with annuals sales of US$15m according to zoominfo. Well done Laura Bell and team! □ When your raise well you have a war chest to grow sales and product by acquisition. See more! Rogue AI Agents are sadly underreported. At Alibaba an AI Agent started a side hustle subverting the firewall and diverting GPU capacity to mining cryptocurrencies. READ MORE! More than 1,000 startups a year to benefit from refreshed support programme. MBIE giving startups wings. Essentially, Startup Aotearoa lives another day. See more!  Creative HQ spending on advertising with the best of them. That's what every good business does to drive sales, the ROI of advertising. See here!