No place to hide: Mana Tupu Capital NZ Venture Fund I is now an approved AIP investment

August 27, 2026 5 min read

Last week a paper called No Place to Hide? Regional Resilience and Vulnerability to Global Catastrophic Risk was published in the journal Global Challenges. Florian Jehn and colleagues reviewed 152 sources against seven catastrophic hazards — nuclear war, pandemics, volcanic eruption, near-Earth objects, cyberattack, electromagnetic pulse, geomagnetic storm — grouped into three families: abrupt loss of sunlight, loss of global infrastructure, and global biological risk.

Three countries showed evidence of resilience across all three families. Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Australia came first, and the authors said so directly: plausibly the most resilient place on Earth.

We are not going to pretend otherwise. We run a New Zealand fund and the study puts Australia ahead of us. That is what it says.

What the study says next is the part that matters

The authors’ own framing is in the title. No place to hide. Their conclusion is that there is no complete refuge from global catastrophic risk anywhere, and that most of the resilience factors a country can actually change are currently trending the wrong way.

So the honest version of the finding is not “create a bolt-hole in the Southern Hemisphere.” It is closer to: geography buys you a starting position, and everything after that is what a country builds. Food production. Energy. Industrial capacity. Institutions that still function under stress. Those are not scenery. They are things people make, and things people stop making.

That is a reasonable description of what a venture fund does.

The practical asymmetry

There is one more thing the study does not measure, because it was not asking: whether you can go there.

Australia closed its Business Innovation and Investment Program — the Significant Investor Visa among it — to new applications in July 2024, and replaced it with the talent-based National Innovation visa. Japan’s pathways are not built for this either. Of the three countries the study places in its top tier, New Zealand is the one with an open, published, investment-led residence pathway.

That pathway is the Active Investor Plus (AIP) visa. And on 24 August 2026, Invest New Zealand confirmed that Mana Tupu Capital NZ Venture Fund I had met the eligibility criteria and is an approved fund. It has now been added to its Acceptable Managed Fund List.

What the list actually is

The AIP category asks applicants to place capital into investments meeting criteria set out in Appendix 15 to the Immigration New Zealand instructions — covering the nature of the underlying assets, where they sit, and how the investment is held and evidenced. Under the Growth category, that means a minimum of NZD 5 million held for at least three years, with a residence requirement of 21 days in New Zealand across the investment period.

Assembling a qualifying portfolio directly is demanding. An applicant has to source the investments, satisfy themselves the assets qualify, hold them through the required period, and evidence all of it to Immigration New Zealand’s standard — in a jurisdiction they are not yet resident in.

Invest New Zealand maintains a public list of managed funds assessed as meeting those criteria. The list is not a shortcut around the immigration requirements; every applicant still has to satisfy Immigration New Zealand on their own merits. What it removes is construction risk. An investor commits to a fund already assessed against the published criteria, and the fund does the qualifying work.

What Fund I is

Fund I is a venture capital fund. We invest in early and growth-stage New Zealand companies, principally at or around Series A and Series B, concentrated in four sectors where we believe New Zealand has genuine and durable advantage:

  • Financial technology — a small, sophisticated domestic market that has repeatedly produced companies that export well
  • Artificial intelligence — applied, vertical AI built on real industry data rather than general-purpose platforms
  • Agritech — the technology layer over an agricultural sector that is already world-class, and under real pressure to decarbonise
  • Clean technology — built on one of the highest renewable-electricity shares in the OECD

Read that list against the study’s resilience factors and the overlap is not a coincidence. Food production under stress is an agritech problem. Energy independence is a cleantech problem. Functioning payments and credit when systems are disrupted is a fintech problem.

Our thesis is that these four sectors can produce New Zealand companies that are world-class from a standing start, because the domestic industries they grow out of already are. 

How we are structured

Institutional governance was a design decision from the outset, not a response to the assessment.

  • A five-member independent investment committee, with investment decisions made against a documented mandate
  • Independent fund administration and audit
  • An investor portal giving real-time visibility of capital called, capital deployed, and portfolio holdings
  • Reporting built to serve two audiences at once: the investor, and — where relevant — their immigration adviser

That last point matters more than it sounds. An investor on the AIP pathway is running an investment and an application in parallel, on different clocks, for different readers. We report so that neither has to be reconstructed after the fact.

Fund I is open

Venture Fund I is open for commitments now, with a minimum commitment of NZD 5 million. Our second strategy, a private equity fund acquiring majority positions in established New Zealand SMEs, follows. 

“The study everyone read last week is a study about what countries have already built. Australia is ahead of us on it, and we should be honest about that. What it doesn’t measure is what gets built next — and that is the only part any of us can do anything about. That’s Mana Tupu Venture Fund I.”

 

John Hanna, Investment Committee , Mana Tupu Capital

Next steps

If you are considering the Active Investor Plus pathway, or advising a client who is, we would welcome the conversation.

Mana Tupu Capital NZ Venture Fund I was approved as an acceptable managed fund on 24 August 2026 and added to Invest New Zealand’s published list. Inclusion on that list does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of the fund or its manager by Invest New Zealand, Immigration New Zealand, or the New Zealand Government. Nothing on this page is financial advice, immigration advice, or an offer of securities. Target returns are objectives, not forecasts or guarantees; capital is at risk and investors may lose some or all of the amount invested. Eligibility for the Active Investor Plus visa is determined solely by Immigration New Zealand against the instructions in force at the time of application. Visa settings in New Zealand and other jurisdictions change; the comparisons in this post are current as at the date of publication and should not be relied on. Prospective investors should take independent financial, legal, tax and immigration advice.

Sources referenced in the post

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