A timber framing system and anti-parasite product are among the technologies to have emerged from Victoria University of Wellington during the past fiscal year.

Wellington UniVentures, the commercialisation arm of Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, formed four new spinouts during the 2019-2020 fiscal year.
The spinouts were named as multiple sclerosis therapy producer Rekover Therapeutics,  timber framing system producer X-Frame, battery technology spinout Tasmanlon and Bonta Bio, a developer of anti-parasite products for pets and farm livestock.
All four have received co-investments of undisclosed size from Wellington UniVentures in conjunction with NZ Innovation Booster, a NZ$10m ($6.8m) match funding partnership initially between Victoria University and financial tracking software provider Booster Financial Services, which has since also added University of Otago’s commercialisation arm Otago Innovation.
The development comes as Wellington UniVentures has promoted Julie Crisford to become its first full-time contracts and portfolio manager.
Crisford joined Wellington UniVentures – then called Viclink – from New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development in 2009, initially serving as an IP manager before adding commercialisation deals to her remit in 2012.
She will be expected to steer Wellington UniVentures’s dealflow in her new role to make it more efficient while also managing existing innovation assets.
Wellington UniVentures also announced a new postgraduate scholarship for education and environment-related research: the Jeremy Bloomfield Memorial Scholarship.
The $13,500 scholarship is dedicated to the memory of Jeremy Bloomfield, former senior education program manager at Wellington UniVentures, who passed away in 2019.
Hamish Findlay, general manager for commercialisation at Wellington UniVentures, said: “We need to be strategic about the way we manage our IP portfolio to ensure we are able to achieve scale, and grow the value of that portfolio.”