The traditional relationship between the two nations centred on commodities, education and migration. Yet during the discussions and negotiations technology moved from being a footnote to being a main agenda item.
Clearly the next chapter of New Zealand’s relationship with India will be less about raw goods, and more about an innovation corridor focused on the co-creation of intellectual property.
While a closer trade framework is a fresh catalyst for many newer businesses looking to scale, some of New Zealand’s most established technology pioneers have been operating deep within India for years.
India becomes a strategic partner
Rakon is one of several Auckland-based technology companies with major operations in India. Alongside travel management software provider Serko and property valuation platform Valocity, these companies operate across a range of advanced sectors including aerospace component manufacturing, corporate travel software and fintech.
For each, the presence in India has evolved beyond transactional backend support into a central part of their intellectual property pipelines.
Rakon’s presence is long-standing. Chief executive Sinan Altug says: “For us, it certainly precedes the FTA or recent developments. Rakon is a New Zealand-founded tech company, and we are global, but India is not an outsourcing story for us. It is a strategic story that started all the way back in 2008.”
Rakon chief executive Sinan Altug. Photo / Dean Purcell
That started when Rakon formed a joint venture with Indian-owned Centum Electronics. The deal saw Rakon products manufactured alongside Centum’s frequency control products in Bangalore. This became a fully owned subsidiary, Rakon India, in 2018.
Manufacturing becomes strategic
Rather than establishing a back-office service desk or software centre, the company built a factory in Bengaluru. In 2023, Rakon expanded this footprint by opening a new manufacturing facility located within an aerospace park, positioning its operations alongside companies such as Boeing and Collins Aerospace.
Altug says the location allows the company to combine advanced manufacturing with deep technical talent.
Rakon’s Indian operations supply precision timing components to international telecom networks, local subcontractors for some of the largest AI hardware makers and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The company has a 15-year history of designing and manufacturing components for ISRO missions, including the Chandrayaan lunar programme.
Altug says New Zealand remains central to Rakon’s advanced product development while the operation in France remains critical for its space ecosystem and space business. The presence in India gives the company scale, manufacturing depth along with access to the Indian market.
“It gives us supply chain resilience as well. For many of our products it is not an either-or. We are not stopping production in New Zealand to transfer it to India. We actually develop resilience.”
Carmen Vicelich sees a different aspect of India’s scale in her property technology business.
“For us, it’s phenomenal. One Indian bank does in almost a month what all New Zealand banks combined do in an entire year,” she says. “The State Bank of India, for example, has more customers than there are people in the United States.”
Valocity’s Carmen Vicelich
Valocity provides the property and collateral risk decision layer that complements the digital public infrastructure known as the India Stack.
Vicelich says India had already established frameworks like the Aadhaar unique identity system and the Unified Lending Interface for payments. Yet it lacked a unified digital property data layer. Valocity’s 11-year track record of running 95% of New Zealand’s regulated banking valuation market gave it the credibility needed to fill that gap.
Valocity’s role has expanded beyond simple transaction processing to handling complex automated decision-making.
“We started off as a valuation workflow. Because of the demand for customers to say this is the collateral risk, we don’t just want you to do the pipe and get an answer back. Well, actually, when will you say yes, and when will you say no? How do we digitise your decisioning policy?”
That automated policy logic is now embedded directly into the software, creating an infrastructure layer that continuously adapts to incoming data.
Vicelich points to the company’s long-term client retention as evidence of how deeply embedded the platform has become for major financial institutions.
“In 11 years we have never lost an enterprise customer, which shows that we are the infrastructure, In India, that’s very much how they see Aadhaar and the payments interface. Now that’s how they see us. We’ve evolved to this.”
Building banking infrastructure
This deep integration into the banking system has changed the size and scope of Valocity’s commercial work.
Rather than testing single modules one at a time, major banks are now adopting Valocity’s entire risk system at once. Following the 2025 business delegation led by the prime minister, the company finalised a deal with Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private sector bank. It will roll out its full mortgage risk system, which includes property valuations, legal document checks and construction monitoring.
Vicelich says operating at this level of the financial sector puts to rest any lingering Western assumptions that doing business in India allows for loose operational standards. Navigating the tightly regulated banking environment requires meeting extremely strict compliance rules.
“You cannot turn up in India half-ready,” says Vicelich. “In some Western markets, entrepreneurs can raise money on a PowerPoint presentation and fake it until they make it. You cannot do that in India. The level of sign-off, compliance and InfoSec due diligence is phenomenal. It is a highly regulated market with strong governance, because they have cracked down heavily on fraud.”
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and the High Commission’s team on the ground were central to that credibility, she says, along with a local advisory board that includes Manoj Kohli, the former CEO of SoftBank, and a former chairman of India’s National Housing Bank.
“We wouldn’t be where we are without their phenomenal support, and the credibility they gave us introducing us to key stakeholders,” she says.
This requirement for absolute readiness and high operational standards is shared by corporate travel management software provider Serko.
Like Valocity, Serko’s primary entry point into India came via a major global commercial move rather than traditional outsourcing.
Co-founder and chief executive Darrin Grafton says Serko established its Bengaluru operation after buying a major US-based online travel platform. It came with an existing, high-performing technology team based in India. Instead of using a third-party contractor, Serko chose to build this team into its own dedicated capability centre.
Serko co-founder and chief executive, Darrin Grafton.
“The choice people have is using someone else or doing it yourself,” he says. “We wanted to do it ourselves. Specifically around specialist knowledge in AI and what we’re building in this new platform world. Because we had an established base of people there, it made sense to push the green light to go further.
Adding an Indian capability centre allows Serko to run a continuous, round-the-clock development cycle. The Bengaluru hub works alongside the company’s offices in New Zealand, Australia, China and the United States in a “follow the sun” engineering model.
Faster development at global scale
“When you think about software engineering, software capacity and support structures, we have pretty much nearly every time zone covered. In theory we can be building software, not only with AI, 24/7, but innovating at the same time.”
This continuous engineering cycle is critical for a business that powers major international booking engines. Grafton notes that Serko’s software is used in approximately 180 countries. Serko says its systems can onboard thousands of corporate customers overnight. Using AI development talent out of India’s established tech sector has directly altered how quickly the company can ship new outcomes to those global markets.
“Their specialist skills enable us to go faster in other areas. It’s increasing capacity, but it’s increasing velocity, which means we’re able to produce more outcomes that matter to customers and to our partners at the same time.”
Grafton says this gives Serko the power to compete differently on the global stage.
The ability to compete differently is what is driving the modern New Zealand-India relationship. For Serko, Valocity and Rakon, doing business in India bears no resemblance to the old model of delegating repetitive tasks to a distant workforce. Instead, they are looking for an expansion of technical expertise that gets them to another level.
In Serko’s case it is using advanced software skills to speed up deployment. For Valocity it means embedding machine learning directly into Indian banking systems. In all three cases it means using local teams that operate as peers to create new technology and value.
Integration means that even as manufacturing or deployment scales internationally, the central innovation pipeline remains.
As Altug says when discussing Rakon’s model, expanding in India does not mean stopping development at home. He sees New Zealand innovation and Indian market depth reinforcing each other.
With politicians moving to finalise the free trade agreement legislation, commercial traffic between Auckland and Bengaluru is already well established.
The businesses making the most significant gains are not those that view India as a transactional destination, but companies using it as a sophisticated partner that operates at a scale that cannot be replicated locally.
For these companies, India is no longer primarily a source of lower-cost labour. Instead it has become part of their product development and innovation strategies.
Immediate benefits from trade delegations
Serko chief executive Darrin Grafton and Valocity founder Carmen Vicelich accompanied Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on the 2025 business mission to India. There they experienced firsthand the immense cultural and corporate value placed on government endorsement.
Vicelich says, “In India, hierarchy, status and respect are paramount. When you turn up with the Prime Minister, it gives you a level of credibility that money simply cannot buy. It opens doors to the highest levels of India’s largest banks that would otherwise take months or years of networking to penetrate.”
Grafton agrees that the political alignment acts as a catalyst. Serko timed the official opening of its new Bengaluru capability centre to coincide with the prime minister’s visit. It leveraged the state visit to signal long-term commitment to the market.
“Having the Prime Minister there to officially open the office sent a powerful message to our local team and partners. It shows that this isn’t just a corporate outpost; it’s a recognised piece of the bilateral relationship.”