Tech Startup Helps Wineries

A New Zealand tech company is set to disrupt the wine industry globally. Winely, a startup working out of Otago and Marlborough is the world’s first precision wine technology company. Winely launched in 2018 has made tracks locally and in Australia providing technology to help winemakers track their wine ferments using smart sensors. “The big push for our technology was the labour shortages doing this monotonous and unsafe task. Our goal is to help the winemakers get more data and remove the need to do manual wine sampling.” CEO and founder Jacob Manning explains. Since the completion of their technology in 2018 and first harvest February this year, Winely has received a large number of local and overseas requests for their technology.

Winely has interest from wineries across New Zealand, Barossa, South Australia and California. “These regions are experiencing a shortage in labour and increased pressure around improving health and safety practices.” Abbe Hyde, Winelys CTO reports, “The Northern Hemisphere vintage is just under way and we’re receiving inbound requests from wineries where only half their team has turned up to work.”

“We are in discussions with strategic customers and we will be fitting out their sites in 2020 and 2021. These customers have hundreds of wineries globally.” Jacob says. Winely’s team will begin installing units soon for 2020 harvest and already have interest for further fitouts in 2021.

Abbe Hyde, Winely’s CTO in one of their customers sites.

“The payback period that our customers are projecting is incredibly short” said Manning, “because our product can do tests in seconds that currently take hours, to be done manually.”

After receiving numerous international and local awards and investment interest, Winely is now building a bigger team to help develop future emerging wine industry technologies. “We’re excited about what our technology can bring to the wine industry, we’re already planning new sensors to monitor additional ferment attributes based on customer requests” explains Hyde, “we anticipate winemakers to be able to make faster and more accurate decisions on ferment interventions from the real-time data Winely provides”.