Start small: one ledger, one project, and a path to 500 startups

21 December 2025

What is SMUNZ? #

Over the past six months, I’ve completed what I’d call three sprints worth of founder work to build a new fiscal hosting provider for New Zealand–based startups: StartMeUp.NZ Limited, or SMUNZ for short.

If you’re unfamiliar with fundholding or fiscal hosting the basic idea is: a fiscal host allows early-stage projects to receive, hold, and spend money before they’re ready (or willing) to incorporate.

In Aotearoa, there are already excellent examples of this model in action: