How the project moved from challenge to measurable outcome
Exaba’s founders saw a gap in the global cloud market: organisations were locked into centralised, hyperscale platforms with little control over where their data lived or how it performed. The solution — a distributed cloud architecture that lets service providers build locally controlled, high-performance data networks — required both deep technical capability and a constant pipeline of sharp engineering talent. Being embedded at Hiko Hub delivered both.
The challenge
The hyperscale cloud model is fast and powerful, but it centralises data far from the people and systems that use it. For managed service providers, that means performance trade-offs, data sovereignty risks, and limited control. Exaba’s founders believed a better model was possible — but building it required world-class computing expertise and engineers willing to work on genuinely hard problems.
What we changed
Exaba set up its headquarters and engineering teams inside Hiko Hub on the University of Waikato’s Hamilton campus. The co-location gave the company immediate access to the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences — one of the world’s leading AI and computing research environments.
Exaba provides hardware and resources to support university research in AI, storage, and distributed systems; the university provides the talent and technical depth to support Exaba’s product development.
More than 30 students work across Exaba’s product and engineering teams through internships, part-time roles, and supervised research projects.
