New Zealand’s top Angel honoured

Susan Lorns has been awarded Angel Association New Zealand’s 2024 Arch Angel Award at the 16th New Zealand Angel Summit in Auckland. 

This is the highest honour in New Zealand’s angel investment community, given to those who exemplify the quintessential angel and who advocate for the endeavour and make a significant difference to New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem. It was first awarded in 2009 to The Warehouse and K1W1 founder Sir Stephen Tindall.

As well as their personal capital, Arch Angel recipients share their time, insights, deeply relevant skills, and their networks with high growth startup companies.

Susan was first exposed to startup investment when she responded to an advertisement promoting the establishment of a new angel network in Wellington in 2007 and she attended the launch of AngelHQ at the NZX. She has been an active member ever since, serving two separate terms on the AngelHQ board and leading work to update the club’s founding documents.

Susan has backed nearly 50 startups and taken on governance roles with at least half a dozen of these companies. Currently she is on the board of Eight360, a Wellington-based startup building a motion simulator which has raised several rounds of venture capital.

One of the first supporters of New Zealand’s accelerator programmes, Susan was also an early investor in Lightning Lab and an active mentor for several of its participating startups.

A hands-on approach to angel investing is Susan’s modus operandi. She is a lynch pin of AngelHQ’s team who provide practical advice to founders through Flying Kiwi Angels ADI (Angel Drop In) clinic which operates across the country. Susan is especially supportive of women investors and works closely with others in the club to champion AngelHQ events advancing diversity and inclusion.

Each year, the Arch Angel award recipient is chosen by the previous years’ winners.

Fellow Arch Angel and chair of AngelHQ, Trevor Dickinson says “Susan and I have invested in a number of ventures together and I have been very grateful for her clear-eyed approach. Her experience enables her to add real value to the operations side of businesses.”

Susan also has a unique ability to focus on what’s practically needed, and she has special affinity for founders who do not fit conventional norms, he says. “Both characteristics make her a really effective angel investor.”

Achievements and contributions

At the Summit the winners of the Puawaitanga Award[1] and the Kotahaitanga Award[2] were also announced.

The Puawaitanga Award has been presented to Kara Technologies CEO Arash Tayebi and his team and well-known, Auckland-based, angel investor Ken Erskine, who has been the lead investor and a former chair of the venture backed startup.

Kara Technologies is building a more equitable and accessible global communications system for the deaf community through a combination of motion capture, AI and neural network algorithms. The team has developed digital humans – avatars with high fidelity faces and emotional expressions that are easily comprehensible to their audiences.

Arash and the team met Ken at Auckland University where they began early development of Kara’s technology. Ken has been an enthusiastic champion of the impact and value Kara Technologies has been creating for the world ever since.

In acknowledging the award, Angel Association Executive Chair, Suse Reynolds said Arash and his co-founders, Sahar Izadi and Farmehr Fahour together with Ken, who is now also listed as a co-founder on the website, powerfully exemplify how scaling the value in a venture backed company is always a team effort and how investor-founder alignment, mutual support and good governance can amplify the prospects of success for a startup.

The recipient of the Kotahitanga Award is Julian So – a long-standing member of Enterprise Angels and Flying Kiwi Angels. Julian is also the founder of CFO4U, providing specialist ‘chief financial officer’ support to startups. He has been a champion for startups and early-stage investment for well over a decade. His empathy for all those involved with startups makes him an incredibly effective investor and advocate for the asset class, including introducing new members to the angel networks where he is a member.

“Julian’s faith in, and commitment to, early-stage investment and startups thoroughly deserves to be recognised and should inspire others,” says Suse Reynolds.

“We are incredibly lucky to have people like him in our world – humble with a great sense of humour and shifting the needle for startups.”

[1] recognising founders and investor directors who exemplify what can be achieved when committed people draw on their collective skills and experience.

[2] recognising people in the angel community who have made an outstanding contribution to the industry.