Exaba secures NZ$12M seed for sovereignty-first cloud storage
What's the deal? Exaba, a New Zealand data centre startup backed by billionaire Guy Haddleton, has raised NZ$12M in seed funding to build locally hosted, sovereignty-first cloud storage. The company promises to store New Zealand data on New Zealand soil at prices it claims are over 50% below those of major hyperscalers like AWS.
Haddleton, Exaba's largest shareholder with a 27% stake, called it "the most exciting opportunity I have seen since Anaplan" — a reference to one of two software firms he sold earlier in his career. The seed money will fund product co-development with local managed service providers (MSPs) and expansion into Australia and North America.
Why now? Data sovereignty has gone from a nice-to-have to a regulatory and commercial imperative. Banks, governments, and large enterprises increasingly demand to know exactly where their data lives and under whose jurisdiction it falls.
Exaba was founded in 2024 from the remains of Nyriad, a Cambridge-based firm originally tied to the multinational Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project. After Nyriad's US pivot failed to gain traction, Haddleton bankrolled a bid by two former executives — Dr Stuart Inglis and Peter Boyle — to acquire its patents and a high-capacity data centre in Hamilton.
The company's LocalScaler architecture is designed to keep data on local soil while offering S3-compatible storage — meaning it speaks the same language as Amazon Web Services, easing migration for customers already in the cloud.
What could go wrong? Exaba is picking a fight with the world's biggest tech companies. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have spent billions building data centres in New Zealand to address the same sovereignty concerns. Competing on price alone is precarious — hyperscalers offer complex, volume-dependent pricing that can undercut smaller rivals at scale.
Haddleton's track record also carries some asterisks. His medical cannabis startup Helius Therapeutics went into voluntary administration in March 2025.
Chief customer officer AJ Tills says Exaba prices storage at NZ$2 per terabyte per month, compared to over NZ$20 for a similar hyperscaler tier — with no extraction fees. But the hyperscaler market is a graveyard of startups that underestimated the incumbents' ability to match pricing and bundle services.
The signal: Exaba reflects a broader global push to localise cloud infrastructure, driven by tightening data residency laws and growing unease about offshore data control. For a small market like New Zealand, the bet is that sovereignty, transparency, and cost can outweigh the ecosystem advantages of AWS or Azure.
If Exaba can prove its model works domestically and replicate it in Australia and North America through MSP partnerships, it could tap into a wave of demand from mid-market companies unwilling to hand their data — and margins — to Big Tech.
Read more: nzherald.co.nz
