The partners
Rimu Capital was founded by people who spent time inside education before they ever wrote a cheque. Between the three of us, we have worked in NZ Ministry of Education policy teams, built and shipped adaptive learning software used in schools across Australasia, and stood at the front of secondary school classrooms. That experience is not background colour — it is the reason the fund exists.
What we found, working inside education, is that the gap between what teachers and learners actually need and what most EdTech products offer is still very wide. Closing that gap requires founders who understand the institution — its procurement cycles, its trust dynamics, its curriculum constraints, its data governance expectations — not just founders who understand the technology. We look for that operator-founder fit in every company we back, and we try to model it ourselves.
Hannah Wairua
Founding Partner
Hannah spent five years as an education policy adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Education, working on digital learning strategy and LMS procurement frameworks at a time when New Zealand schools were navigating the shift from desktop-installed software to cloud-hosted platforms. That period gave her an unusually granular view of what institutional buyers in education actually evaluate — and how different that is from what most EdTech companies think they evaluate.
She moved into product at a NZ-founded SaaS company whose learning management platform was deployed across 3,000 schools in New Zealand and Australia. Scaling an LMS to that footprint is not primarily a technology problem — it is a trust problem, a data governance problem, a professional development problem, and an integration problem with every other system a school runs. Hannah led product through the period when the platform added AI-assisted planning and assessment tools, and saw firsthand which of those features teachers actually adopted and why.
She founded Rimu Capital in 2022 with a thesis formed from that experience: that the highest-leverage opportunity in education technology is not replacing existing workflows but building better infrastructure — the assessment layer, the knowledge management layer, the credentialling layer — that everything else can plug into. Rimu Fund I closed in June 2023 and is actively deploying across pre-seed and seed-stage companies in Australasia.
Hannah leads deal origination, LP relations, and portfolio support on go-to-market and institutional sales. She writes regularly on the Perspectives page about assessment infrastructure, knowledge platforms, and the structural dynamics of EdTech in the Pacific.
James Kopu
Partner
James spent eight years building education software before joining Rimu, most significantly as CTO of an Auckland-based edtech company where he architected and shipped the adaptive learning engine underpinning personalised maths curricula for 200,000 students across New Zealand and Australia. That engine used item response theory modelling and real-time mastery signals to adjust the difficulty and sequence of practice tasks — a meaningful implementation of adaptive learning rather than the pre-test-and-branch pattern that most platforms describe as personalisation.
Building that system gave James a precise understanding of what adaptive learning infrastructure actually requires: clean assessment data at high frequency, a well-structured item bank with calibrated difficulty parameters, and a recommendation engine that can respond to within-session signals rather than just session-level summaries. He has seen the gap between what founders claim their adaptive systems do and what the underlying architecture can actually support — and that scepticism is one of the most valuable things he brings to Rimu's technical diligence.
James joined Rimu in 2023. He leads technical diligence across the portfolio — evaluating the architecture of assessment engines, adaptive learning systems, and knowledge platform backends — and provides hands-on engineering support to portfolio companies navigating infrastructure decisions at the seed stage, when those choices are hardest to reverse.
He writes on the Perspectives page about assessment infrastructure, the EdTech exit landscape, and the engineering decisions that separate EdTech companies that scale from those that stall.
Aroha Mitchell
Principal
Aroha taught secondary school mathematics for four years before moving into investing — a sequence of experience that is unusual in EdTech venture and gives her a practitioner's instinct that is hard to acquire from the investor side alone. Teaching secondary maths is a precise test of what educational software actually changes: whether a student's conceptual understanding shifts, not just whether they can complete a worksheet faster. That distinction informs how she evaluates product claims.
She spent three years at a Wellington-based impact fund where her coverage included education technology, future-of-work platforms, and early-childhood learning tools. Working at an impact fund meant evaluating investments on dimensions that most VC funds don't formalise — learning outcomes, access equity, teacher workload effects — alongside the usual commercial metrics. That dual lens is directly relevant to EdTech, where the most durable companies tend to be the ones that genuinely improve what they claim to improve.
Aroha joined Rimu in 2024 to lead deal origination across AI-enhanced learning tools, knowledge platforms, and curriculum infrastructure. Her sourcing focus spans early-childhood and primary learning tools, AI-assisted curriculum design, and experiential learning platforms — parts of the EdTech stack that are often underinvested relative to their importance.
She writes on the Perspectives page about curriculum design, student data ethics, experiential learning, and the conditions under which AI-assisted pedagogy actually changes what students learn.
We back founders at pre-seed and seed stage who are building AI-native education technology and knowledge platforms in Australasia. We don't require warm introductions — cold emails from founders who have done their homework are welcome. Write to us at [email protected]