// About us
Why we started this 🥝
"AI is amazingly powerful, but it can be isolating."
You prompt, you tweak, you deploy — it's just you and the machine, heads-down at midnight with a cold cuppa. Brilliant, but lonely as. That's never been how Kiwis build: we build in sheds with the neighbour leaning over the fence, we yarn at smoko, we turn up with a plate.
So we wanted to bring Kiwis back together — swap the half-finished prompts, demo the thing that almost works, laugh about the thing that fell over, and celebrate the wins like we just got the bach network going. The machine's great company, but it'll never bring a plate. 🥝
"Everyone's an AI expert these days — it's hard to keep up."
Heard that one? Us too. Every week there's a new model, a new tool, a new meetup, a new hot take. The good stuff is out there — Aotearoa has brilliant newsletters, generous communities and people building genuinely clever things — but it's scattered across a dozen inboxes and feeds.
So we made one place to stay on top of the lay of the land: a curated map of NZ's AI ecosystem, a showcase of what Kiwis are actually building, and one warm room where you can ask anything. We don't reinvent what already works — we connect it, credit it, and point you at it.
Whether you're a total beginner or you ship models for a living: come as you are, bring your half-baked ideas. Chur.
"We wanted a place where the community's the focus — not the pipeline."
There are loads of great AI spaces springing up around Aotearoa — genuinely good ones. But we kept hitting the same wall: sooner or later one wants your accounts-payable email, another wants a credit card, and a few quietly turn you into a sales lead. It never quite sat right with us — people aren't cattle to be herded through a funnel.
So here, the community comes first, full stop. No paywalls, no sales pipelines, no quietly on-selling your details for a job-referral fee — just Kiwis figuring out AI together, because they want to. 🥝
