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.<\/p>\n
Clearly the next chapter of New Zealand\u2019s relationship with India will be less about raw goods, and more about an innovation corridor focused on the co-creation of intellectual property.<\/p>\n
While a closer trade framework is a fresh catalyst for many newer businesses looking to scale, some of New Zealand\u2019s most established technology pioneers have been operating deep within India for years.<\/p>\n
India becomes a strategic partner<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
For each, the presence in India has evolved beyond transactional backend support into a central part of their intellectual property pipelines.<\/p>\n
Rakon\u2019s presence is long-standing. Chief executive Sinan Altug says: \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rakon chief executive Sinan Altug. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
That started when Rakon formed a joint venture with Indian-owned Centum Electronics. The deal saw Rakon products manufactured alongside Centum\u2019s frequency control products in Bangalore. This became a fully owned subsidiary, Rakon India, in 2018.<\/p>\n
Manufacturing becomes strategic<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Altug says the location allows the company to combine advanced manufacturing with deep technical talent.<\/p>\n
Rakon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Altug says New Zealand remains central to Rakon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carmen Vicelich sees a different aspect of India\u2019s scale in her property technology business.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, it\u2019s phenomenal. One Indian bank does in almost a month what all New Zealand banks combined do in an entire year,\u201d she says. \u201cThe State Bank of India, for example, has more customers than there are people in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Valocity’s Carmen Vicelich<\/p>\n
Valocity provides the property and collateral risk decision layer that complements the digital public infrastructure known as the India Stack.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 11-year track record of running 95% of New Zealand\u2019s regulated banking valuation market gave it the credibility needed to fill that gap.<\/p>\n
Valocity\u2019s role has expanded beyond simple transaction processing to handling complex automated decision-making.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started off as a valuation workflow. Because of the demand for customers to say this is the collateral risk, we don\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
That automated policy logic is now embedded directly into the software, creating an infrastructure layer that continuously adapts to incoming data.<\/p>\n
Vicelich points to the company\u2019s long-term client retention as evidence of how deeply embedded the platform has become for major financial institutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 11 years we have never lost an enterprise customer, which shows that we are the infrastructure, In India, that\u2019s very much how they see Aadhaar and the payments interface. Now that\u2019s how they see us. We\u2019ve evolved to this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Building banking infrastructure<\/p>\n
This deep integration into the banking system has changed the size and scope of Valocity\u2019s commercial work.<\/p>\n
Rather than testing single modules one at a time, major banks are now adopting Valocity\u2019s entire risk system at once. Following the 2025 business delegation led by the prime minister, the company finalised a deal with Axis Bank, India\u2019s third-largest private sector bank. It will roll out its full mortgage risk system, which includes property valuations, legal document checks and construction monitoring.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot turn up in India half-ready,\u201d says Vicelich. \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and the High Commission\u2019s 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\u2019s National Housing Bank.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be where we are without their phenomenal support, and the credibility they gave us introducing us to key stakeholders,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
This requirement for absolute readiness and high operational standards is shared by corporate travel management software provider Serko.<\/p>\n
Like Valocity, Serko\u2019s primary entry point into India came via a major global commercial move rather than traditional outsourcing.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Serko co-founder and chief executive, Darrin Grafton.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe choice people have is using someone else or doing it yourself,\u201d he says. \u201cWe wanted to do it ourselves. Specifically around specialist knowledge in AI and what we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Adding an Indian capability centre allows Serko to run a continuous, round-the-clock development cycle. The Bengaluru hub works alongside the company\u2019s offices in New Zealand, Australia, China and the United States in a \u201cfollow the sun\u201d engineering model.<\/p>\n
Faster development at global scale<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
This continuous engineering cycle is critical for a business that powers major international booking engines. Grafton notes that Serko\u2019s 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\u2019s established tech sector has directly altered how quickly the company can ship new outcomes to those global markets.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir specialist skills enable us to go faster in other areas. It\u2019s increasing capacity, but it\u2019s increasing velocity, which means we\u2019re able to produce more outcomes that matter to customers and to our partners at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grafton says this gives Serko the power to compete differently on the global stage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In Serko\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Integration means that even as manufacturing or deployment scales internationally, the central innovation pipeline remains.<\/p>\n
As Altug says when discussing Rakon\u2019s model, expanding in India does not mean stopping development at home. He sees New Zealand innovation and Indian market depth reinforcing each other.<\/p>\n
With politicians moving to finalise the free trade agreement legislation, commercial traffic between Auckland and Bengaluru is already well established.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Immediate benefits from trade delegations<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Vicelich says, \u201cIn 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\u2019s largest banks that would otherwise take months or years of networking to penetrate.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s visit. It leveraged the state visit to signal long-term commitment to the market.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving the Prime Minister there to officially open the office sent a powerful message to our local team and partners. It shows that this isn\u2019t just a corporate outpost; it\u2019s a recognised piece of the bilateral relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The traditional relationship between the two nations centred on commodities, education and migration. Yet during the discussions and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6726,32245,50496,25337,78,2344,194,13620,117,111,43,139,69,1118,370,145,223,24358,17450,80],"class_list":["post-521474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-become","tag-economies","tag-fastestgrowing","tag-firms","tag-in","tag-india","tag-kiwi","tag-leading","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-the","tag-wave","tag-worlds","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}