‘New Zealand data on New Zealand soil’
“Exaba sits at a pivotal moment in technology: the rise of true data sovereignty,” Haddleton tells the Herald.
“Individuals, companies, and governments are demanding to know where their data lives and who controls it – and sovereignty has shifted from optional to essential.
“Exaba’s LocalScaler architecture answers that call, keeping New Zealand’s data stored on New Zealand soil at over 50% below hyperscaler pricing.
“It is the most exciting opportunity I have seen since Anaplan,” Haddleton says, in a reference to one of two business software firms he sold earlier in his career – helping to push his wealth to $1 billion, according to the 2025 NBR Rich List (although like every entrepreneur he’s also had his misses).
Haddleton’s medical cannabis start-up Helius Therapeutics went into voluntary administration in March.
Exaba was founded in 2024 from the bones of Nyriad, a firm started in Cambridge in 2014 in orbit around New Zealand’s involvement in a multi-country bid for a multibillion-dollar radio telescope project called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
Nyriad’s focus was on using graphical processing units for next-generation storage – but years before Nvidia would push GPUs into the mainstream lexicon.
After New Zealand pulled out of the SKA at the turn of the decade, Nyriad made a play for the US corporate market, but never gained traction.
Haddleton arrived late in the piece as a white knight.
Nyriad’s by-then Austin, Texas-based business was beyond salvage, but the rich lister backrolled a bit by two Nyriad executives – Dr Stuart Inglis and head of development Peter Boyle – to buy patents, plus a high-capacity data centre in Hamilton.
The multinational hyperscalers have spent billions building their own data centres here or co-locating with rivals, in part for performance reasons, but also to satisfy the data sovereignty demands of the likes of banks and large Government agencies.
“There’s a difference between data sovereignty and data residency,” Boyle says.
“A LocalScaler means your data is not only just down the road from you, but you’ll know all of the jurisdiction that your data is stored under as well.”
Exaba also says it’s cheaper, albeit in a world where the hyperscalers offer a multitude of plans, which vary with volume and other factors.
“We price our storage at $2 per terabyte per month … the general hyperscaler price for a similar tier of data is going to be over $20,” chief customer data officer AJ Tills says.
There’s also no bill shock if you want to extract your data, he says.
Exaba also promises new levels of transparency (with some limits; in common with the hyperscalers): it will allow its data centre to be photographed.
The $12m in seed money will be used to continue co-development of Exaba’s product with local managed service providers (MSPs), and launches in Australia and North America – where it will also partner closely with MSPs.
Tills, who joined in January, will spearhead the US push. It’s a market the King’s College old-boy is familiar with through earlier roles as chief marketing officer for Jamie Beaton’s Crimson and chief of staff, US and Canada marketing, during a stint working for Uber in New York.
In commercial terms, Exaba says it can offer MSPs a high margin.
In tech terms, the start-up makes a lot of noise about being “S3-compatible”.
S3-compatible means a storage system uses the exact same API or language to store and retrieve data as Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (aka S3), seen as a universal standard for object storage.
That means, ”you can plug our storage into your existing apps, and they won’t even notice we aren’t Amazon”.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
