The Caffeine Prize is an ongoing effort to identify the startup and scale up companies who’ve cracked the code of how to build enterprise value in the most exceptional way.

The prize recognises one thing: genuine value creation. That means revenue, growth, profitability, and scale — measured properly, across every stage of a company’s development. Not vibes. Not potential. Not how good the deck looks. The numbers.

Why this matters

In the mid 2030’s, technology will become New Zealand’s largest export. This presents an exciting potential future – an export sector that’s more economically productive than dairy alone.

And it presents a challenge – we have a ‘right to win’ in dairy, and we’ve exploited that right to win to build a large, stable diary export industry. However, we don’t have the same right to win in tech.

To have a large, stable tech export industry, we’ll need to earn our right to win simply by being extraordinarily good at growing and operating large, valuable tech companies.

To get there, we need to learn from the founders and companies who are doing the very best job of building their companies. We need honest, rigorous, public evidence of what good actually looks like. And we need to learn from that evidence from the people who’ve created it.

How it works

We start with nominations. Fifty carefully selected nominators — people with genuine insight into New Zealand’s startup world, covering every region, industry, and stage — each put forward companies they believe are creating real value. To nominate a company, you have to be able to speak to what they’ve actually built. That keeps the list honest.

Nominated companies are then asked to share basic financial data: revenue across the last two years, gross and net profit, staff numbers, and the markets they sell into. That data goes into a ranking formula that places each company into one of seven revenue-band categories, from pre-$1M through to $100M+. The top companies in each category become the shortlist.

Shortlisted companies provide more detail — richer financial context, and the story of how they got there. A panel of judges reviews everything and selects one winner per category.

The winners are announced at a public ceremony in November. Each one gives a short talk about what they built, how they built it, and what they’d tell other founders. Those talks are filmed, published, and kept online — because the point isn’t a trophy, it’s a record.

What we’re looking for

Every winner will be different. A $10M business growing at 300% year-on-year is doing something extraordinary. So is a $500M business owning its category with 40% net margins. The prize is designed to see both of them.

We’re not looking for the most fundable company, or the one with the best story, or the one that fits a particular model of what a startup should be. We’re looking for the companies that have done the hard thing: created real, lasting economic value. From New Zealand, for New Zealand.