July 2025: ηezo’s Big Rebrand, Yellow Vitamins and Laugh While you Learn
July 15, 2025
Kia ora from the ηezo HQ (formerly known as V‑Quest central),
We always say this but it feels like it's been another busy month. This month we’ve been on a mission: rebrand the company, reassemble the team, and relaunch into Australia. We’ve also been mixing mysterious yellow Korean vitamins with investor pitches, but don’t worry, no one’s passed out……. yet.
Oh and Finland called, they want our New Zealand solution- asap.
🔁 Rebrand Reveal: V‑Quest is now ηezo
We’re not just slapping a new logo on the door. We’re burying old habits. ηezo (pronounced neh‑zo) is more than a name, it’s a mission. A mashup of net‑zero (carbon + cost) and η, the symbol for efficiency.
What’s changing:
Brand name across our platform, docs, and planet-conquering decks
Same teal vibe, fresh-energy visual identity
Us — leaner, meaner, more on point
Why? Shorter. Sharper. Memorable. It nudges every interaction toward efficiency: faster design time, lower project cost, smaller carbon footprints. Expect to see ηezo everywhere — inbox, socials, t-shirts, baseball caps and maybe even on the odd office dog.
(You learn fast in business land, usually the hard way. V-Quest felt like genius wordplay at the time… until we realised no one got it, everyone asked if we were a bank or why our logo looked like it had been pulled from a 1997 Microsoft Publisher template. Please don’t ask what it stood for, we've long since forgotten - the scars will heal).
🌱 Aurora Climate Lab: 300+ Investors, a Summit, and Barry’s Comedy Debut
After 12 weeks in Creative HQ's Aurora Climate Accelerator (NZ’s high-octane climate-tech accelerator that compresses a year's worth of startup growth into 3 months), we landed at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Concert Hall. Picture this, 300 people (investors, angels, curious onlookers) staring up at us. Barry stepped up, did his thing, and got a few real laughs, not “awkward chuckle from your office mate” laughs, but proper audience giggles. "If people are laughing, they are listening, then I hit them with the knowledge, they don't even know they are learning". We hear your Barry but maybe stick to helping the rest of us build ηezo out!
Pitch highlights:
Problem: Construction hasn’t just slept on cost+carbon; it’s face-planted. We base the next project on the last 100 inefficient projects.
Hero: Architects, are secretly fighting climate change daily. Barry leaned into that, and people felt it. They are the material king maker, the power plays, the lords of change!
Solution: ηezo is not a carbon management API, it’s a full cloud based platform, that has its future deeply embedded design efficiency SaaS, digital supplier marketplace & IaaS.
Reward: ηezo is the only platform delivering ROI while helping both users and asset owners slash time, money, and emissions. Everybody wins!
You can see the ηezo three minute pitch here.
If you are keen to hear the full event and hear about mushroom leather, phytoplankton decarbonisation, sugar from CO2, low carbon concrete alternatives and more - click here.
A shout out here to the pivotal Creative HQ team of Holly Beals, Colm Kearney, Chloe Narain & the legendary Warren Sue. What this accelerator helped us achieve was game changing.
🧑💼 Team Update: Eoin’s Back & Intern Energy Floods Office
Eoin the COO has officially returned, after 15 months of remote existence, he’s reunited with Barry (CEO) in Christchurch Arts Centre. It's like getting Pinky & the Brain back together (Gen Z read as Rick & Morty). Being shoulder to shoulder again means that they get things done quicker, decisions become easier and they can again share those "Oh fuck we broke it - again" moments in person. Even better are the AH-HA moments - we fixed it before anyone noticed.
We’re also pumped to have Byeongmin Oh (Min) join the V‑Quest | ηezo crew through the Ara Institute of Canterbury’s Work Integrated Learning Programme.
Min’s diving in as our Quantity Surveying intern, bringing precision to our cost data, expanding material coverage, and making our front-end database smoother, smarter, and stacked with more intel than ever.
Now for the wild part: before joining us, Min was estimating materials and costs for missile and torpedo manufacturing in South Korea. That’s right, literal guided weapons. So when we say he’s helping us launch our data expansion, it’s not just a metaphor — it’s muscle memory. Big background. Bigger potential.
Min also showed up with a mysterious yellow packet of Korean vitamins and generously dosed the entire team. Honestly, we’ve never seen that much Vitamin C packed into something so small and suspiciously energetic. It hit like a citrus-flavoured torpedo to the solar plexus. Productivity spiked. Morale soared. No one sneezed for three days straight.
Min doesn’t just boost data — he boosts immunity.
🦘 Australia Launch: Lets Network
August is the big month — Australia, here we come. Our CTO William Roberts & team are pushing data through the funnel:
Finalising the NSW data set and complete materials library.
Integrating the NABERS carbon framework directly into ηezo.
And somehow, between all that, he’s attending a DBI‑WSU workshop on Construction Digitisation to scope out where ηezo can fit in the Aussie climate-tech puzzle.
He will be attending the upcoming DBI-WSU Workshop on Construction Digitisation, exploring how digital technologies can be applied in practice to enable decarbonisation of buildings and infrastructure.
Here is a link, come along, meet Will, have a chat and lets see if there are opportunities for ηezo to enable you to efficiently design out cost and carbon on your projects - sign up here.
🔧 App Updates: Delivery APIs & Thermal Thrills
H1 Thermal Performance Calculator (mid‑Aug)
User feedback into May has shown a very real demand for a built-in thermal performance reporting tool. So we built one. Integrating data into design is what we do after all. Our upcoming H1 Thermal Performance Calculator will:
Generate compliant NZ H1 reports
Fast-track broader thermal modelling for international markets
Save architects tens of hours on every project
The beauty of this tool is that it automates NZ compliance reporting around thermal performance but is flexible enough to be used globally.
Trimble Connect + Tekla
Last month we virtually met with Trimble’s team and Tekla reps in Finland (land of saunas, Angry Birds, and sustainable construction wisdom). The result? They told us: “There is no tool available globally that can do what V-Quest does and its needed asap.” That’s the kind of validation that echoes all the way to Helsinki.
The discussion revolved around the possibility of integrating ηezo into manufacturing and site delivery pipelines via Trimble Connect & Tekla (software generally used in delivery, not pre-construction where we currently service), so over the next few months we will be actively researching demand and use cases. We’re especially pumped about working alongside Trimble Connect EU after our US collab.
🔧 World News: Good, Bad and Ugly
The past four months have delivered real momentum across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia’s construction sectors. Less noise, more action, and finally, signs of meaningful progress.
In New Zealand, Nelson Hospital made a quiet but significant shift: ditching coal for landfill gas. Not glamorous, but it’s a serious carbon cut in a complex building type. Meanwhile, Auckland’s Rosedale Park is turning stormwater runoff into native regeneration, a textbook example of nature-based carbon capture done right. Behind the scenes, Glenbrook Steel is pushing ahead with its electric arc furnace, setting the stage for lower-carbon structural steel.
Over in Australia, the big policy news is NSW locking in mandatory embodied carbon reporting for all government buildings from October 2025, a landmark shift that’s already reshaping how specs are written and suppliers are chosen. And a new materials passport framework launched in July, driven by Planet Ark and GBCA, aims to make recycled content traceable and trusted.
The mood has changed. Less fear about regulation, more focus on practical tools and partnerships. We're moving from measurement into management, and from ambition into execution. Decarbonisation is now being viewed by many as a way to examine design efficiency - exactly what ηezo does.
Here are a few stories about this momentum that tweaked our interest this month.
NZ House building costs rise at strongest rate in nearly two years, Cotality index shows. Cotality's Cordell Construction Cost Index showed a growth rate of 0.6 percent for the three months ended June, for an annual rate of 2.7 percent, the strongest since the third quarter of 2023.
Stockholm Wood City – World’s largest timber-built urban area. In Sickla, Stockholm, this massive development uses CLT and glulam for 2,000 homes and 7,000 offices, reducing construction emissions by ~40% and doubling build speed vs concrete. A global-scale decarbonisation benchmark.
NZCRB roadmap, India. Kerala’s capital launched a lifecycle‑based “Net Zero Carbon and Resilient Buildings” plan with 20 strategies—from material databases to demolition protocols. Includes solar rollout across public buildings (17 MW)
MCi Carbon’s CO₂-to-bricks facility (Australia). Researchers at RMIT are pyrolyzing used coffee grounds to replace a portion of sand in concrete. Results: ~30% stronger with lower environmental impact.
Urban mining in Belgium. Through urban-deconstruction efforts, reusable materials like wood, bricks, and metals are recovered and resold via Materialenbank. This aligns with Leuven’s broader goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.
That’s your July, served with extra attitude. Remember and spread it around - ηezo is no longer just a tool... it’s an efficiency statement. Same mission, same impact, but a brand that doesn't need an Enigma machine to decode it.
Onward, share alibis, pet dogs.
The full ηezo team.