Kami is a leading digital classroom app built to transform any existing document into an interactive learning experience. Kami’s technology makes online education easier than ever for both teacher and student. Kami’s users have increased significantly since the pandemic, and have soared to reach over 14 millions users today.
Kami is the jewel on the crown of Zino Ventures’ investments. Their path to success is an extraordinary story of an underdog start-up coming out of New Zealand and achieving global influence.
Zino Ventures’ Chairman George Gong met the three Kami founders in 2015. They were recent University of Auckland Kiwi college graduates from multicultural backgrounds (Chinese, Thai and European) who had a strong technology acumen and a huge passion for transforming the world. At the time, Kami had 300,000 free users.
However, the founders did not know how to connect the technology to revenue generation and the team did not have any business experience. For this reason, 9 out of 10 investors decided not to invest in them. But the Zino Ventures team saw something different and decided to give them a chance. They saw an opportunity to invest in a technology that could unleash humankind’s ability for the common good-- which was in line with George’s personal investment philosophy.
Today, Kami celebrates over 40 million users who are utilizing their technology— including 175 countries and 18,000 U.S. school districts who have relied on it as a critical educational tool during the pandemic.
“I believe that Kami’s success reflects the potential for New Zealand and other non-U.S. startups to grow globally and to follow Kami’s example. However, I feel that our founders have been undervaluing their path to global impact and have been too shy and too slow to access U.S. and global markets, in part because they are unfamiliar with the market and do not have access to investors, mentors and connectors. This is the motivation behind launching the Zino’s U.S. Fund, KungHo.” - George Gong, CEO, KungHo Fund, Chairman, Zino Ventures
E-commerce Portfolio Feature: Parrot Analytics
Auckland, New Zealand
Parrot Analytics is a data science company that measures and predicts global demand for content, across all platforms, around the world. With the world’s largest audience attention datasets, the company currently tracks more than a trillion expressions of demand in over 100 languages from 200+ countries to reveal what consumers engage with and watch the most across platforms.
When Zino Ventures invested in Parrot Analytics in 2018, the world had no knowledge of the impending COVID-19 pandemic and how it would impact the entertainment industry. Zino Ventures invested in the New Zealand-based E-commerce startup because they saw how audiences were becoming fragmented across numerous devices and platforms, making audience measurement tools less predictive. Parrot Analytics was well-positioned to provide much needed solutions to the industry in a world that was becoming more and more digital.
Parrot Analytics’ solution uses big data and data science technologies to help inform TV content-related decisions along the entire content value chain. They partnered with companies– from agencies to global direct-to-consumer platforms– and helped to drive better production, distribution, acquisition and marketing decisions, as well as increased subscriber growth and retention.
Today, Parrot Analytics is a trusted partner to some of the biggest media companies and content creators in the world, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney and Auckland.
“By capturing audience demand from 2 Billion+ people globally, Parrot Analytics has developed a metric to rate not only the number of viewers for a given show, but the likelihood of attracting subscribers to a streaming service. When Zino Ventures invested in Parrot Analytics in 2018, we could not have imagined the landscape of streaming services today, but we did believe that the way of entertaining was changing dramatically and rapidly. We believed that Parrot Analytics would become a star by providing revolutionary services to help the industry.” - George Gong, CEO, KungHo Fund, Chairman, Zino Ventures
Fintech Portfolio Feature: Minitable
New York, NY, USA
Minitable offers a stable, all-in-one, AI-powered solution that helps local businesses build their own platforms and manage their traffic. It is an on-demand and fully functional SaaS platform for front-of-house and customer engagement without having to replace the current POS machine. Minitable supports on-line orders, reservations, digital menu, scan table ordering, organization of guest data, integration with third party apps and more.
When it launched in mid-2019, New York city-based Minitable offered a 'Restaurant-Friendly' SaaS to help the owners of independent restaurants and other businesses by providing flexible modularized business solutions. Based on a proven model that was incredibly successful with independent businesses in China, they sought to empower local businesses to generate revenue and improve customer loyalty with an affordable and data-driven operations, marketing, and guest engagement platform.
When he met Minitable's founders, Zino Ventures’ Chairman George Gong was intrigued by this startup, understanding that centralized delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub were eating into the profit margin of independent restaurants and businesses and threatening to shutter them. With these big platforms, restaurants were stuck at the bottom of the value chain and often lost money as a result of high fees. While Minitable was more than just a platform for online ordering, they acquired many new users by touting savings of up to 30% on takeout orders for restaurants who used their technology instead of using the larger delivery platforms. And these savings not only benefited the businesses, but were passed along to the customers as well, adding to their loyalty and retention.
With the advent of COVID-19 in early 2020, the need for Minitable’s technology skyrocketed as nearly every New Yorker sought to do everything digitally and contactless. Further, founded by Chinese, Minitable was well-positioned to capture Chinese-owned businesses who were often familiar with such platforms in China, where the market for such technology was much more mature. Minitable’s technology also appealed to Korean and Latinx-owned establishments who were eager for more affordable and easy-to-use platforms as well. Today, millions of customers in restaurants, bars and bubble tea shops are using Online Order, Digital Menu, Waitlist and Reserve and Scan-Table solutions from Minitable, and the company has expanded to additional cities.
“When I think back to the investment made in Minitable, I am of course pleased for their success. But, the return on the investment is not just financial for me. With all of the investments of the Zino Ventures family, I hope to see something positive come out of it for humanity. Technology is not just for big guys–it should, will, and can be helpful for little guys as well.” - George Gong, CEO, KungHo Fund, Chairman, Zino Ventures
Our Track Record
Zino Ventures Family Portfolio
Since 2016, the Zino Ventures family has invested in many successful start-ups in New Zealand and the USA in particular. With overlapping leadership between Zino Ventures and KungHo Fund, you can expect a similar track record of choosing promising companies.
Below you will find a sample of our notable investments in Edtech, Fintech, and eCommerce.
