Impact VC Case study - Kara Technologies
Soul Capital Impact Venture Capital Case Study | August 2026
Kara Technologies × Soul Capital
Backing the Deaf community's right to information, from day one, and what eight years of staged, conviction-led capital looks like in practice. The case for real returns, made by solving problems the market had overlooked.
At a glance
4+ new co-investors
Soul Capital invested in Kara Technologies across two funds (Awhi and Te Pae ki te Rangi) because the Deaf community's right to equity and inclusion sits at the heart of Soul's mission to support innovations for a more equitable economy, well before there was an established investor category for what Kara was building. First investing at pre-seed, Soul has deployed capital across four events over eight years, from an initial convertible note in 2018 to leading priced rounds. Along the way it helped mobilise co-investors by demonstrating that the commercial opportunity was every bit as large as the impact case and supported the company's progression from a promising idea to a commercially deployed product used in emergency broadcasts, public services and beyond.
This is a story about early conviction rooted in mission; about crowding in capital by proving the size of an opportunity others saw as niche; and about aligned partnership that has stayed the course, including through the hard stretches, as Kara scales globally without losing its community-led approach. It's also a classic venture capital story in that the impact case and the commercial case were never in tension.
"They exhibited what we look for in social entrepreneurs. When co-founder Arash Tayebi suffered his hearing loss, it compelled him to go deep in understanding the problem at the community level. And from day one the team ensured they were serving the Deaf community first and foremost, despite their customers being large companies and governments." Jamie Newth, CEO, Soul Capital
The problem: access
Sign Language is the primary language for Deaf people, not a supplement to written communication. For the roughly 70 million Deaf people globally, and the estimated 24,000 New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) users in Aotearoa, information in any other format isn't full access.
Closed captions don't solve this. The average reading level of a Deaf adult in America is around fourth to fifth grade: a direct consequence of inaccessible education systems. Captions assume a fluency the education system itself has denied many Deaf people, and captions were never designed with the Deaf community in mind.
Human interpreters come closer, but they're expensive, scarce and unscalable. Roughly 100 accredited NZSL interpreters serve the entire signing community in Aotearoa. They can't be everywhere at once, translating every streaming platform, conference call, customer-service interaction, emergency alert and education resource in the world.
If information isn't in accurate, understandable Sign Language, it isn't fully accessible. And accuracy isn't a given: it depends on high-fidelity digital humans and rigorous, community-led quality control. That's the gap Kara Technologies was built to close. It's a large gap, and interpreters alone can't close it.
Kara Technologies: deep tech, community-led
Kara builds AI-powered digital humans that translate content into Sign Language in real time: hyper-realistic, fully expressive digital humans capable of signing video, audio or text into NZSL, ASL, Auslan and more.
Under the hood this is deep tech, not a thin AI wrapper. Native Deaf signers are motion-captured and their movements encoded in Kara's patent-granted notation system. A language-model layer handles semantic translation behind a human-in-the-loop quality gate, and a real-time render pipeline produces digital humans whose facial grammar carries most of the linguistic nuance. Bringing motion capture in-house is cutting production costs by an order of magnitude. The sign library is scaling toward 15,000 signs in American Sign Language (ASL), 9,000 New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and 1,000 Australian Sign Language (AUSLAN), several times the depth of competing systems, and an accurate translation can be produced in under a minute.
The company was founded by Arash Tayebi, Sahar Izadi, Farmehr Farhour and Ken Erskine out of the University of Auckland's Velocity programme, where they won the $100k Challenge in 2017. The founding story is personal: Arash experienced hearing loss while completing his PhD in electrical engineering and understood the problem from lived experience before building any technology.
That co-design approach, building with rather than just for the Deaf community, is as central to Kara's competitive advantage as its technology. It shaped a product that reflects lived experience, earns community trust and reaches real-world use cases others couldn't. Work is now underway with the National Foundation for Deaf and Hard of Hearing and Turi Māori community members to bring Māori signs and concepts into the digital human system.
"Soul Capital believed in our mission, not just our numbers. Their ongoing support gave us the confidence to keep the Deaf community at the heart of Kara while building something that can create lasting global impact."Arash Tayebi, CEO
Recognition and deployment. Kara won Best Hi-Tech Solution for the Public Good and the AmCham Social Impact Award in 2024 and was named New Zealand's Hi-Tech Startup Company of the Year in 2026. Its technology has been deployed with partners and customers including a top three US education provider, one of the world's largest media streaming services, Auckland Transport, Mediacorp in Singapore, and Red Cross in Australia, among others.
The Soul Capital playbook: four capital events, eight years
First cheque by Soul Capital, via convertible note, when no investor category existed for Sign Language technology.
What it bought → validation of the science: comprehension testing with Deaf audiences, first school pilots.
Topped up through COVID so Kara could keep building rather than pivot to survive.
What it bought → productisation: NZSL children's books shipped, Callaghan Innovation R&D support, Epic MegaGrant, TIN early-stage Top-10.
Soul led the seed round and took a board seat, with impact-reporting and diversity-and-inclusion conditions attached to the investment.
What it bought → the core technology completed; patent filed; government pilots validated motion capture.
Soul led the Pre-Series A bringing in Icehouse Ventures as a co-lead.
What it bought → scale: international pipeline, national awards, te reo Māori integration underway.
Staged conviction: Soul's cheque per event
Instruments migrated as the company de-risked: convertible note → follow-on → priced equity → growth capital. Each larger cheque followed milestones met, not momentum.
Crowding in capital
Soul's early conviction began with impact; its diligence then demonstrated a commercial opportunity big enough for others to back. Below are some of the co-investors convened across the journey:
Round after round brought new external investors to the table: independent validation, repeated.
The hard part
The record includes the difficult stretches, most visibly a COVID-era top-up when the world stopped and enterprise contracts were still maturing. Deep tech serving an underserved community doesn't grow in a straight line. Staying in, with discipline, against milestones, is the point. Not investing in those years could have ended the entire endeavour.
How the capital compounds into equity
Impact is underwritten
Soul Capital's diligence applies the Five Dimensions of Impact (Impact Management Project), with a theory-of-change model developed with Ākina and quarterly impact reporting, such as contracts signed and people reached by emergency messaging, built into investment conditions alongside diversity-and-inclusion requirements.
"When information is provided in NZSL, I can receive it directly in my own language. I'm not relying on captions or having to translate written English in my head first. That makes a real difference, especially when information is important or time-sensitive. It gives me greater confidence, independence and equal access."Anonymous Deaf Community Member from Wellington
Two ways to read this case study
If you're finance-first
- Entered at pre-seed and scaled the cheque as milestones retired risk: a ~20× escalation with instrument discipline.
- New external co-investors validated every round.
- A defensible moat: granted patent, proprietary data, community trust competitors can't copy.
- Market-rate underwriting throughout. No concessionary pricing was needed to make the deal work.
If you're impact-first
- First institutional backer of a community-led company no category existed for.
- Additionality twice over: capital others wouldn't provide, then co-investors mobilised who wouldn't have come alone.
- Impact underwritten with recognised frameworks and reported quarterly, as an investment condition, not a courtesy.
- The impact deepens as the company scales: the same product that wins contracts shifts the burden of access onto institutions.
What this tells us about impact investing
Early conviction matters. The companies most likely to generate durable impact often don't fit existing investor frameworks, because the problems they solve are the ones those frameworks overlook. Getting in early requires a different diligence: one that centres community insight, founder depth and problem framing, not just the financial model.
Continuity of capital is a form of impact. Staying in across four capital events is a strategic commitment to the outcome.
Additionality is more than what a company does. It includes who else shows up to fund it, and whether they would have without you. Kara was, on the numbers, a market-rate opportunity; the additionality was in the early, impact-led conviction and the diligence that followed, not in accepting a lower return.
Scalability and depth are different shapes of impact. A digital product can reach millions at falling marginal cost; place-based real-asset investments deliver depth for fewer people. A portfolio holding both chooses breadth in one and depth in the other, not more impact versus less.
Impact depends on deployment. The technology that matters is the technology that reaches the people it was built for. Kara's presence in emergency broadcasts, public services and education is where the investment thesis becomes a Deaf person accessing information in their first language.
The playbook, generalised
Source through community
Find founders with lived insight into problems mainstream frameworks overlook.
Underwrite both curves
Diligence the impact with recognised frameworks and the commercial case at market rate.
Invest with conditions
Impact reporting, inclusion requirements and governance attached to the cheque.
Stay in with discipline
Follow on against milestones, through the hard developmental years, not around them.
Crowd in capital
Prove the opportunity, then convene the co-investors who scale it beyond one fund.
"Instead of placing the onus on the Deaf community to adapt, Kara gives institutions the tools to be inclusive by default. That's not just accessibility: that's equity."
Impact and return ride one curve: each round widened the moat and deepened the outcome. Patient, staged, conviction-led capital is the mechanism that lets both compound.