Sunrise Aotearoa 2026 is a one-day startup festival presented by venture firm Blackbird, held on 29 October 2026 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre in Auckland, across keynote and workshop stages with networking and an afterparty.
Sunrise Aotearoa 2026 is a one-day startup festival taking place on Thursday 29 October 2026 at the ASB Waterfront Theatre in Auckland, running from 9:00am to 7:00pm with registration opening at 8:00am (organiser). Rather than a conventional business conference, the organiser frames Sunrise as a cultural celebration of the startup community, describing it as Blackbird's "love letter to founders."
The festival is presented by Blackbird, a venture capital firm that invests in Australian and New Zealand startups (organiser). According to Blackbird, it created the Sunrise festival in 2014, and the New Zealand edition has run before: a 2022 outing was held at the same ASB Waterfront Theatre in Auckland, and the event returned in 2024. The 2026 programme lists partners and sponsors including Airwallex, HSBC Innovation Banking, OpenAI, Stripe, Deel, LegalVision and Notion, with the Blackbird Foundation as a community partner (organiser).
The organiser describes the audience as the wider startup community: founders, operators, investors, creatives and students, with a focus on Kiwi and Australian participants. The programme is split across two stages. The Visions Stage carries keynotes and talks from speakers including Tim Doyle (Eucalyptus), Andrew Fraser and Malindi Maclean (Halter), Connor Archbold (Tracksuit), Ben Shewry (Attica) and Sean Gourley (Primer). The Explorations Stage hosts hands-on workshops, including an AI optimisation session with OpenAI, a fundraising workshop and a brand workshop for technical founders (organiser). Alongside the stages, the event offers networking, 1:1 matchmaking through the Brella app, catering across the day and a closing Sunset Afterparty.
The ASB Waterfront Theatre sits in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter on the city's waterfront, within the inner-city precinct near Halsey Street and a short walk from the Viaduct Harbour and the central business district. Its waterfront location places delegates within walking distance of a dense cluster of CBD and Viaduct hotels, and close to central Auckland's public transport and ferry connections. Auckland Airport, New Zealand's largest international gateway, lies roughly 20 kilometres south of the city centre, making the venue straightforward to reach for trans-Tasman attendees arriving for a single-day event.
Sunrise Aotearoa is one of the anchor dates on New Zealand's technology and startup calendar, and its trans-Tasman pull (Blackbird operates across Australia and New Zealand) brings an Australian delegate flow into Auckland. As a recurring, organiser-backed festival that has repeatedly chosen a purpose-built Auckland waterfront theatre, it illustrates the role single-day, high-profile sector gatherings play in drawing domestic and Australian business visitors into the Auckland CBD.
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