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Better vocational outcomes for a rapidly changing workforce

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By David Beard, Partner

Co-Founder and CEO of SupaHuman – Dave Howden

AI is reshaping the skills the workforce needs, and vocational education is where much of that retraining will happen. SupaHuman automates the most repetitive, compliance-critical parts of the sector, giving providers time back to focus on their learners. That's why we're leading SupaHuman's seed round with a $1.3m investment in their $2.6m round, through our Emerge Fund 4.

The story of SupaHuman
SupaHuman started in early 2024 as an AI engineering agency, bringing large language models into complex, regulated workflows. VETos, their "Vocational Education and Training operating system" and first vertical AI product, was spun out of that experience.

Vocational providers operate under strict regulatory oversight, and compliance and administration take up around half of their workload. Every course has to be backed by assessment and moderation documents that hold up at audit. Because these materials are tied to legislation, a single upstream change, such as a new working-at-heights rule, can flow through hundreds or thousands of documents. For most providers, keeping on top of this remains a slow, manual process.

The solution
SupaHuman has built an AI-enabled compliance and authoring layer for vocational education providers. It maps the national qualifications framework and codifies each provider's own way of working, so it can generate audit-defensible assessments, assessor guides and moderation documents that match how that provider operates. SupaHuman's latest platform, Nova 5, turns these materials into hands-on, immersive learning for training providers and workplace L&D teams.

The investment case
VETos has grown rapidly since launch, winning contracts with both public and private providers across New Zealand and Australia. The platform is also seeing emerging signs of which assessment and learning design approaches work best for students, and that insight will deepen as more providers come on board. The new funding will build out the Australian go-to-market team, expand product and engineering, and support future international expansion.

Final thoughts

We were pleased to see Movac Partner, David Beard join the Board as Investor Director. The investment builds on the education sector conviction we formed backing Crimson Education and Kindo, and we can't wait to see where Dave, Blair and Zane take SupaHuman as they scale into Australia and beyond. We're proud to support another standout New Zealand-founded EdTech company.

Written by:
David Beard, Partner