An air of success

“If you don't collaborate, you won’t survive.”

Innovator David White, founder and Chief Science Officer for Goodair Nosebuds is a firm believer in the power of collaboration when it comes to succeeding in New Zealand’s uniquely supportive start-up eco-system.

“We're all coming from a place of underfunding, under-resourcing, under everything. It's always been that way because we don’t have the economic size and scale for anything else, but that drives behaviours and attracts a certain kind of personality,” he says.

“If everyone was well funded, people would be more territorial and less inclined to share and be supportive. We all realise we need each other and literally can’t afford to have those more defensive behaviours.”

White cites the recent NZ Hi-Tech Awards, in which Goodair was a finalist in the Startup Company of the Year category, as a great example. “At its core it’s just an amazing chance to connect with people. Everyone’s cross-feeding and helping each other.”

His own journey with Goodair reflects the value of learning from others. David, a University of Auckland alumnus, was previously a winner of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Velocity Ideas Challenge.

Goodair Nosebuds are the result of his comprehensive research into breathing and the benefits of nitric oxide gas for improved airway health without the intervention of medicines. The wearable device gently vibrates to massage upper airways to improve congestion and hydration to promote better breathing.

This work was carried out while an AUT lecturer and co-director of the Bio Design Lab.

“Breathing is poorly understood and yet has such a major impact on our health and wellbeing. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator, so it maintains vascular health, and it's also a bronchial dilator, so it helps prevent asthma and helps the oxygen get picked up in the blood. What a wonderful gas.”

Experiments and large-scale prototypes that looked at the effect of vibroacoustic stimulation on inhaled nitric oxide followed. “I looked at mechanising it through a speaker system, playing around with this rather large loudspeaker and a pipe going into the nose.

“Then, a colleague said, ‘it’s such a shame you can’t just make it into a small wearable’. That night, while I slept, I came up with the idea for what is now Goodair.”

The crucial intervention on the road to market came with the appointment of CEO Kerri McMaster, who recognised the incredible potential of White’s research, but realised it lay down a different path to the one he’d imagined.

“I had envisioned this as a medical device, but when Kerri came on board she did a lot of business research and said, ‘no, it’s going to be a wellbeing device for nasal congestion’.

“To begin with I wasn’t very happy about that but I quickly came to realise just what a stroke of brilliance it was,” he says.

“As an inventor and researcher, you can have tunnel vision on your aspirations, but businesses have to survive. There's a whole other world out there that an inventor doesn't always see in their first cycle through this process.

“You have to find business leaders who are trustworthy and then you have to trust in their experience and ability to take your idea and move into a market,” White says.

The shift to a wellbeing market was a key pivot point for Goodair, now a successful, growing business. It meant side-stepping the more strident, time-consuming and expensive regulatory requirements of a medical device, which helped the business go from establishment in early 2023 to selling in market by August 2025, with only a seed funding round under its belt.

“I did a television interview when we launched, and within ten minutes we’d sold out our first batch of about 1000 nosebuds,” White says.

The goal of creating a medical device with neurological and physiological applications with the Goodair technology remains part of White’s long-term plan as he balances his part-time CSO role with his full-time job as senior researcher at the NZ College of Chiropractic Studies. It’s all a long way from where White began his working life as an apprentice automotive engineer.

Though he’d gained a NZ Certificate in Engineering, in the 1990s he made the decision to study for a Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Auckland as an adult student. There, under the tutelage of Peter Hunter, Distinguished Professor and founder of the University’s Auckland Bioengineering Institute, he realised his engineering skills could be applied to helping people.

“I was quite taken aback by the realisation that biomedical engineering was really an application of my passion for mechanical engineering.”

These key interventions are just some of the collaborations that White says have helped shape his career and successes and are indicative of that cooperative nature of the New Zealand innovation eco-system.

“I think the eco-system has really matured over the last 15 years. We now have lots of organisations and innovators collaborating across these stratified layers that are now starting to work coherently.

“My best advice to those starting out is to connect with your local and national support networks. Don’t be afraid to reach out and start talking to people. You'll be pleasantly surprised how helpful everyone is.

“My other piece of advice for innovators is to have fun on the journey. Having fun and surrounding yourself with people who are fun creates an energy you’ll need to carry you through. There'll be highs and lows, but it’s worth it.”