Internet of Things
About this event
The Hardware Meetup NZ held its event on 16 July 2025 for a relaxed evening at Outset Ventures in Parnell, where it showcased several companies leading the way in Innovation in the Internet of Things.
It featured a fireside chat with founders and builders, who are building interesting products from Aotearoa to hear about their products, their journey so far and their dreams for the future.
Our events are designed to bring together a wide range of the community, from startup founders and execs, to subject-matter experts, investors, students and general startup enthusiasts not only in Auckland but from all around NZ.
From Cows to Coolers: IOT Tech in Action at the Hardware Meetup
Auckland’s latest Hardware Meetup brought together innovators across embedded systems, energy tech, IoT, and agritech — showing off the vibrant, complex world of physical technology startups in Aotearoa. Hosted at Outset Ventures, the evening celebrated New Zealand’s hardware scene with talks that ranged from refrigeration controllers to cow wearables and smart energy systems.
🎙️Kicking Things Off
The event opened with Mikayla Stokes welcoming a packed room of attendees—some veterans, some newcomers—to an evening of hardware storytelling.
❄️ AoFrio: When Refrigerators Talk
A standout talk came from John at AoFrio, a New Zealand company making commercial refrigeration control systems for clients like Coca-Cola and Heineken. What began as a motor manufacturer in 1986 is now shipping 700,000 IoT devices annually and generating $80 million in revenue.
John outlined the evolution of their product—from simple temperature controllers to Bluetooth and cellular-connected devices that help global beverage brands monitor energy use, fridge contents (aka “purity”), and asset location. One killer feature: helping Coke detect if a retailer has sneakily stocked Pepsi in their branded fridge.
From his deep dive emerged a larger insight: IoT products generally fall into two categories—those with inherent standalone value that are enhanced by connectivity (like AoFrio’s coolers), and those that only exist to provide data (like air quality sensors). The customer’s perceived value depends heavily on which side of that spectrum the product sits.
🔋 Smart Energy, Smarter Schools
Next up, Rob from Ecologic and Local Energy took us on a tour of New Zealand’s school heat pumps, solar-powered roofs, and broken energy infrastructure. Their platform helps reduce costs, flatten peak loads, and store energy smartly using advanced control systems and predictive algorithms.
One of their initiatives monitors 70,000 heat pumps across schools, aiming to save $10–20 million annually while also reducing carbon emissions. They’re now rolling out V2G (vehicle-to-grid) tech and working toward manufacturing their own hardware with firmware tailored for local networks and conditions.
Rob also raised the crucial question: how do we make smart energy systems invisible to the user, so hot water always flows and EVs always charge—without overwhelming everyday consumers?
🐄 Cow Tech Gets the Spotlight: Protag
In a Kiwi twist, the evening’s final speaker, Baden from Protag, showed how AI-powered livestock wearables are revolutionising animal monitoring. Their ear tag — just 30g — tracks real-time behaviour and location using accelerometers, GPS, and magnetometers.
Backed by Sprout and Gallagher, Protag has gone through a gritty journey of prototype failures (hello, water ingress) to sleek, solar-powered, satellite-connected tags. Their system analyses patterns of grazing, sleeping, and ruminating, offering farmers previously unimaginable insights—and helping reduce compliance overhead and improve welfare.
They even demoed a cow’s daily behavioural timeline on a dashboard, and how tag orientation, weld symmetry, and acoustic properties affect product success. Wearables, it turns out, are a science of tiny details with huge consequences.
🎯 Final Thoughts
This Hardware Meetup made one thing clear: New Zealand’s hardware scene is alive, inventive, and highly collaborative. From energy resilience to ethical IoT, and from wearable tech for livestock to power optimisation in schools, the future is being built — one prototype, one partnership, one firmware update at a time.
Speakers
Speaker 1: John Wagner from aofrio
John Wagner is a Product Manager at AoFrio where he leads the development of IoT technologies for the global beverage industry, powering connected solutions for brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. His work focuses on embedding intelligence into everyday assets, turning bottler coolers into smart, data-driven devices that deliver commercial insights at scale. With a background in environmental science, working in the air quality space, and a passion for all things hardware, John loves the interplay between hardware and software, how the combination of this creates value for the user and how it returns the value back to the organisation.
Speaker 2: Rob Willcox from Eco Logical
Rob Willcox is the Co-Founder of Eco Logical Automation, a company delivering smart energy, automation, and security solutions for homes, schools, and workplaces across Aotearoa. With a strong background in product development and smart home technologies, Rob has spent years building connected systems that make spaces more efficient, secure, and sustainable. From founding Smartlife and Smartlife Energy to developing hybrid software teams with OutSmart Hub, Rob brings deep experience in turning bold ideas into reliable, real-world solutions.
Speaker 3: Baden Parr from Protag
Baden Parr is the CTO and co-founder of ProTag, a New Zealand Agritech company developing some of the world’s most advanced livestock wearables. Drawing on his deep technical background and a childhood spent on a Dunedin sheep farm, Baden leads all facets of ProTag’s product development; from mechanical and electronic design to firmware, cloud infrastructure, and mobile app development. He holds a PhD in precision agriculture from Massey University and is passionate about applying cutting-edge technology to solve meaningful problems for farmers worldwide.
MC: Mikayla Stokes
Mikayla Stokes is a mechatronics engineer at Crown Equipment making autonomous forklifts. She loves using tech to make cool wearable things like a light-up dress or 3D printed earrings. She's passionate about creating an inclusive community where any kid can pursue a future in STEM, and is the two time overall female winner of the BrightSparks inventing competition.
Event Sponsors
Lune Digital
Lune Digital is an embedded systems expert specialising in high-tech, IoT and wearable solutions. For the past 10 years, Lune Digital has been assisting visionary companies with hardware design, electronics engineering, embedded software development, and technical advice. They excel in optimizing battery life, boosting power efficiency, enhancing wireless connectivity, and creating scalable, future-proof systems.
Outset Ventures
Outset Ventures are committed to empowering overlooked science and engineering innovators to transform their ideas into groundbreaking ventures, helping them succeed at the critical early stages. As New Zealand's center of gravity for science and engineering startups and scaleups, Outset is home to a community of 40+ founder-led companies, 5000 square meters of laboratory and workshop spaces, and the country's most active deep technology investment fund.
Blender
Blender is a product design and development consultancy. Their collaborative approach, strategic design process and technical know-how deliver engineered, purpose-made products. Since 2006 Blender partnered with many incredible companies, helping them to realise their vision and shape the future, by supporting them with exceptional product design, prototyping, engineering, and manufacturing services.
Lowndes Jordan
Lowndes Jordan is a top niche law firm with corporate, commercial, property, employment, IP and litigation service offerings. The firm acts for a wide range of organisations across the spectrum of maturity from startups through to listed companies/multinationals. Lowndes Jordan has deep expertise in the startup space, having acted for startups, founders, investors and employees of startup companies on a wide range of matters including capital raising (including crowdfunding), ESOPs, shareholders’ agreements and disputes, IP protection and licensing, commercial contracts, US flips, acquisitions and IPOs.
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