Hamish Gowans, chief operating officer at Ki Tua Fund, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Hamish Gowans has worked for the New Zealand multinational dairy cooperative Fonterra, on and off, since he joined their graduate programme in 1999. Between 2008 and 2021, he led Fonterra’s business in Southeast Asia, based in India and Singapore, where he was exposed to the vibrant Asian startup ecosystem.
This exposure, and his science background, drew him to corporate venturing, where he saw the opportunity to “look beyond the business of today” as chief operating officer of Ki Tua Fund, Fonterra’s CVC arm. Gowans made the business case that led to Fonterra establishing the fund in 2023; it now manages over $100m and has nine portfolio companies.
“The opportunity to engage extraordinary founders and startups solving really difficult problems is exciting,” he says.
Strategic investment areas for a dairy cooperative are surprisingly broad. Ki Tua’s focus includes emerging technologies in bio manufacturing, health startups looking at the gut microbiome, synthetic biology and agricultural innovations improving on farm productivity.
“The opportunity to engage extraordinary founders and startups solving really difficult problems is exciting”
An initial challenge for Gowans when he started the fund was what he calls “the tyranny of distance.”
“New Zealand is far from a lot of places in the world, and certainly in terms of the centre of gravity of where startups and the more developed ecosystems are in the US, in Europe. A big challenge was to build those external connections.”
The solution was to make the effort to travel by plane to build relationships. The fund has also expanded to new offices: one in the US and another two in Europe, which gives it a foothold in these regions.
Gowans says that people new to corporate venturing should be aware that failure is inevitable, but that it should be learned from.
“Make sure these failures are in some way unique. Because not everything is going to be successful, and that’s ok. I think it’s just about how you learn [and] incorporate these learnings back into what you’re doing.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
