Dana McKenzie named New Zealand’s 2022 Arch Angel
Dana McKenzie has been awarded Angel Association New Zealand’s 2022 Arch Angel Award today at the 15th New Zealand Angel Summit in Queenstown.
The Arch Angel Award is the highest honour in New Zealand’s angel investment community, given to those who exemplify the quintessential angel and who advocate for the endeavour and make a significant difference to New Zealand’s start-up ecosystem. As well as their personal capital, Arch Angel recipients share their time, insights, deeply relevant skills and their networks with high growth startup companies.
Describing herself as a “corporate refugee” in a 2017 Startup Young Company Finance article, Dana is originally from Romania. She left her small home town in her twenties to study computer science at the University of Colorado in the United States and her first job was with Northrup Grumman designing air traffic control systems.
It was in 2008 while she was doing an MBA in Switzerland that she was introduced to angel investment through Brigitte Baumann who was setting up Go Beyond, an angel investment ‘network of networks’.
In 2014 Dana moved to New Zealand with her kiwi husband and began her journey with angel investment down under, joining Ice Angels where she was Vice Chair.
Speaking about her love of early stage venture investment in the 2017 article, Dana said “the entrepreneurial vibe has always been a magnet to me. I love the energy and sense of possibility that entrepreneurs exude; I respect the courage they have to delve into the unknown and chase their dreams and I admire their resilience and resourcefulness”.
Dana likes to get actively involved with the ventures she backs and has served as Chair of Dexibit, a startup providing analytical insights for the cultural sector, and supported the team through two rounds of funding. She is also on the board of Rebecca Page, a kiwi-founded, UK-based startup providing unique access to patterns and an online sewing community. And in her current role as chair of Alimetry, Dana has recently supported this medtech startup, which is delivering breakthrough technology to diagnose gastric disorders, to raise $16.3m.
Dana is a member of the Kiwinet Investment Committee, has served on the Matu Investment Committee, mentored students through Auckland University’s Velocity competition and is a member of the Angel Association’s Executive Committe.
Each year, the Arch Angel award recipient is chosen by the previous years’ winners.
Fellow Arch Angel and Chair of the Kiwinet Investment Committee, Debra Hall says “Dana brings a relentless intellectual rigour to her assessment of investment opportunities which she powerfully pairs with her experience and intuition for what will get traction in international markets. I am delighted to welcome Dana to the Arch Angel ranks – a group which is becoming increasingly diverse and representative of the very ‘wide church’ that is the angel investing community in New Zealand. Together, I hope we can all inspire future angel investors to ‘see what they can be’.”
Dana received her award at the 2022 annual Angel Summit being held at New Zealand High Country in Queenstown today.
Former Arch Angel winners include The Warehouse founder and K1W1 founder Stephen Tindall; Andy Hamilton, former chief executive of The Icehouse and IceAngels founder; US super angel Bill Payne; Movac Ventures founder Phil McCaw; veteran angel investor the late Dr Ray Thomson; prolific AngelHQ member Trevor Dickinson, former AANZ Chair Marcel van den Assum; ardent angel investor Debra Hall, champion for kiwi start-ups Dave Moskovitz and long-time Ice Angels member Scott Gilmour, SaaS champion, Serge van Dam, a member of AngelHQ and most recently Rudi Bublitz, founder and CEO of Flying Kiwi Angels.
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For more information, please contact:
Suse Reynolds, AANZ Executive Chair
mob: 021 490 974 or email: [email protected]
The Angel Association of New Zealand (AANZ)
The Angel Association is an organisation that aims to increase the quantity, quality and success of angel investments in New Zealand and in doing so create a greater pool of capital for innovative start-up companies. It was established in 2008 to bring together New Zealand angels and early-stage funds. AANZ currently has over 50 members representing over 900 individual angels associated with New Zealand’s key angel networks and funds. AANZ works closely with NZTE and Callaghan Innovation and a number of private sector partners including Jarden, PWC, Avid Legal, KiwiNet, Uniservices, Amazon Web Services, BNZ and NZX. For more, please visit: www.angelassociation.co.nz