We believe engineers, product developers and entrepreneurs in New Zealand are building world-leading products.

In response, Hardware Meetup AKL has been bringing together some of New Zealand's brightest engineers, hardware entrepreneurs, product designers and enthusiasts to meet each other and celebrate our achievements. Our regular events, held at GridAKL, are showcasing some of New Zealand's most exciting products and founders. We aim to create an environment for open conversations, opportunities, and shared resources. For the last two years we've also trialled diversity initiatives, choosing to focus on gender diversity first. 50% of our tickets for in-person events are reserved for women and non-binary folks, and 50% for General Admittance.

Over the last four years we've showcased around 30 companies, bought together hundreds of hardware founders, engineers, backyard tinkerers and enthusiasts from around New Zealand. Often people are travelling from out-of-town for our events. Each one sells out at around 100 (our max capacity for the venue). We just held our first online event telling the Flamingo Scooter story with founders Nick and Jacksen, and now have the ability to live-stream all future in-person events. Our diversity initiatives have also been successful, and we've had multiple events where we've had 50% attendance by women and non-binary folks. We also actively give away tickets to students and do outreach to minority groups such as Maori and Pacific Island people. Our organising team contains multiple female engineers and we try very hard to have at least one female founder and/or engineer showcasing their company/product at each event.