The Problem
New Zealand teachers are resource-rich and time-poor. The 2023 curriculum refresh introduced new achievement objectives across almost every learning area. For classroom teachers — many of whom are new to the profession, many of whom are managing 30+ ākonga across mixed year groups — that refresh meant relearning what "good alignment" looks like while still teaching full time.
The result is a familiar pattern: teachers search Google, find something that looks right, spend twenty minutes checking whether it actually aligns with the correct achievement objective, discover it doesn't, and start again. Multiply that by every lesson, every week. The problem isn't a shortage of teaching resources. It's the cost of finding, evaluating, and contextualising the right one for the right learner at the right moment.
This is not a marginal inefficiency. It is one of the biggest invisible taxes on the profession.
The Solution
Te Kete Ako ("the basket of knowledge") is an AI-powered teaching resource platform built specifically for the New Zealand curriculum. It runs a triple-search architecture — keyword, semantic graph, and vector — across 12,929 curriculum-aligned resources indexed against 10,500 verbatim achievement objectives from the NZ Curriculum.
A teacher searching for "whakapapa and identity, Year 9 Social Studies" doesn't get a Google result. They get resources that have been semantically matched to the correct achievement objective, filtered by year level and learning area, ranked by relevance. The search understands curriculum structure the way a curriculum coordinator would — because it was built by someone who is both a teacher and the engineer.
The platform is live at tekete.co.nz. It has paying subscribers. It runs on real infrastructure: Supabase for user management and Row-Level Security, Qdrant for vector search, Neo4j for graph traversal, Stripe for subscriptions. This is not a prototype or a proof of concept. It is a functioning product used by NZ teachers today.
Te Tiriti as Design Principle
Te Kete Ako is not "bicultural in places." Te Reo Māori is integrated throughout the platform interface, resource metadata, and search vocabulary. Curriculum content grounded in mātauranga Māori is tagged, indexed, and surfaced through the same search pathways as any other resource — not siloed into a separate section.
The platform embeds te reo naturally because its builder uses te reo naturally. That design choice matters: teachers who see a platform treating te reo as an afterthought will treat it as an afterthought in their own practice. The reverse is also true.
This reflects the commitment in Te Tiriti o Waitangi to tino rangatiratanga — the right of Māori to exercise authority over their own knowledge systems. A platform that serves NZ teachers has a responsibility to model that commitment structurally, not decoratively.
The Market
New Zealand has approximately 53,000 registered teachers. The platform currently targets secondary teachers (Years 9–13), a segment of roughly 18,000. At $18.40/month per subscriber, even 1% penetration represents $3.3M in annual recurring revenue.
The adjacent market is larger: primary teachers, teacher educators, school leadership teams, and the Ministry of Education's own curriculum support infrastructure. The platform's architecture is subject-agnostic — what works for Social Studies works for Science, Mathematics, or Technology.
Beyond subscriptions, Te Kete Ako runs a community AI workshop series for non-technical adults in Whaingāroa (Raglan) — café owners, artists, local business operators who want to understand and use AI without needing a computer science background. This creates a second revenue stream and builds the kind of community trust that a school-facing EdTech platform depends on.
Why This Founder
I am a practising secondary teacher completing my GDipTchg at Waipapa Taumata Rau this year, specialising in Social Studies and Digital Technologies. In my first year of classroom teaching, I helped lift literacy achievement by over a full stanine at a school carrying significant challenges — not through a programme, but through understanding what individual ākonga needed and building from there.
I built Te Kete Ako because I experienced the resource problem from the inside. I know what a teacher on a busy Tuesday morning actually needs — and I know what they will not pick up, however impressive the technology underneath. That understanding is not available to an EdTech company that has never taught a class.
I have been working with AI systems since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. I run three production MCP servers, a hybrid RAG pipeline, and a full-stack web platform — all built and maintained solo. The combination of classroom instinct and technical capability is what makes Te Kete Ako different from both teacher-made resources and enterprise EdTech products.
Where This Goes
The immediate goal is to deepen curriculum coverage, expand to primary learning areas, and grow the subscriber base. Within 18 months: a B2B offering for school clusters and kāhui ako, replacing the individual subscription model with institutional licensing. Within three years: the canonical curriculum intelligence layer for Aotearoa New Zealand — the platform every teacher, every kura, and every curriculum advisor reaches for first.
The Velocity Ideas Challenge is the start of a longer funding arc. This entry is the seed of a full business plan targeting the Velocity $100k Challenge in June, Callaghan Innovation R&D support, and NZTE market development funding as the platform scales toward export.
Te Kete Ako exists because NZ teachers deserve better tools — built by someone who understands the classroom, the curriculum, and the code.