Kami is a cloud-based platform that allows educators and students to annotate, view, edit, and collaborate on digital documents from anywhere, transforming the way educators engage and interact with their students.

Kami began in 2012 when its three founders, engineering and arts students, developed their idea through the University of Auckland’s free Velocity entrepreneurship development programme. They made the finals of the Velocity $100k Challenge competition and gained a place in its Launchpad programme where they had access to resources and support to further develop their start-up.

Kami experienced astronomical growth in 2020 as schools around the world quickly responded to Covid-19 by adopting digital solutions to engage with students remotely. That year, they grew from 8 to 22 million users in 180 countries, welcoming an average of one million new users per week during the height of global Covid-19 lockdowns. Kami now have over 35 million users and in 2022 were named one of the world’s most influential companies by TIME magazine.

“Velocity was great for us to test and know more about entrepreneurship,” says co-founder Alliv. “We learned so much in a short period of time while also meeting a lot of important people. It was through Velocity that we met our Chairman and Chief Revenue Officer. When you join Velocity, you don’t just join to win. You learn and grow every aspect of your business and entrepreneurial life.”

Galvanising support from both senior leadership and students expands the growth of both supply and demand of entrepreneurial activities at a university. Creating an entrepreneurial culture means needing to ensure commitment from the top-down, as well as from the bottom-up. The University of Auckland achieves this through actively ensuring representation from a broad range of areas. This is in ways such as the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Board of Advisors comprising of Deans and Deputy Vice Chancellors from faculties ranging from the Creative Arts to Science. Students are given a voice through leadership roles in the Velocity entrepreneurship development committee and Momentum student-led investment committee.

Students and staff of all faculties and areas of the University are encouraged to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and innovative capability through a wide variety of methods. This includes making co-curricular innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities available for free to students and staff of all faculties to remove barriers to participation, and ensuring that under-represented groups are encouraged to participate through diversity initiatives.

Showcasing entrepreneurship as a way to turn knowledge and research into a tangible tool that addresses big problems has been vital in growing participation rates in entrepreneurship education activities at the University. Students and staff are hungry to be able to do good and solve problems in a very problematic time in the world. Incorporating the UNSDGs as a teaching framework to introduce concepts around the potential for entrepreneurship has helped attract a wide array of people into entrepreneurship education activities.

The University of Auckland (UoA) has recently scaled up participation in entrepreneurial education opportunities through increasing co-curricular programming. Now, curricular programming is being addressed. UoA is currently undertaking a curriculum transformation project to reimagine the delivery of university education for contemporary times. One of the areas of work for this is Transdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship (TIE) which looks at how innovation and entrepreneurship can be incorporated into a wide range of subject areas across the university, and how to draw together students and staff to collaborate across subject areas rather than in subject silos.
UniServices is UoA’s commercialisation company. It has a 2030 vision to create global, sustainable impact from transdisciplinary, integrated research in New Zealand. UniServices has two definitions of sustainable. It aims to be independently sustainable from the University, achieving financial self-reliance and earning more freedom an investing and growing the research that leads to impact. UniServices aims to earn 50% of revenue from new areas launched in the preceding five years. UniServices also aspires to environmental sustainability. It has a clear commitment to achieving net-zero carbon status, alongside the University. UniServices is working towards carbon-accounting and establishing and tracking resource consumption and SDG measures.

UoA continues to grow it’s campus to accommodate entrepreneurship activities, with the establishment of a MedTech precinct and the growth of the Newmarket Innovation Precinct anticipated.

UoA is committed to ensuring that Māori (indigenous New Zealanders) are served through creating new initiatives in partnership and in respect of indigenous knowledge and values.