Hengjie Wang gave Kami a classroom to grow in

A PDF rarely announces itself as the beginning of an adventure. It sits there, solemn and unhelpful, waiting for somebody to print it. For Hengjie Wang and his fellow students at the University of Auckland, the distance between a digital document and a useful set of shared notes was irritating enough to do something about. They began making their own tool. The classroom business came later.

That order matters. Wang’s story starts with people trying to make their own working lives easier. The company that became Kami would eventually acquire customers around the world, attract an American investment partner and buy another education business. Its first assignment was rather less grand: make the notes behave.

The useful inconvenience

Wang had been teaching himself to program since he was twelve. He has described a childhood household with limited resources, where building things yourself was part of being resourceful. Software gave that instinct somewhere to go. A computer could become a workshop without requiring a new set of materials for every experiment.

At university, the interest became a shared pursuit. He and his future co-founders liked technology and spent what they could on new gadgets. Their course materials were less accommodating. Having a modern device was one thing; getting the curriculum to work comfortably with it was another. The gap offered an engineering problem close enough to understand without commissioning a report.

Wang studied software engineering, earning a Bachelor of Engineering. The student project took shape in 2012; the company followed in 2013. Its early document tool was known as Notable PDF. Kami’s beginnings included work in co-founder Jordan Thoms’ living room. An international business can have a surprisingly domestic first address.

A finalist, without the cheque

The university’s $100k Challenge gave the young team a place to put its idea in front of other people. Wang, Thoms and Alliv Samson reached the finals. They did not win. A neat entrepreneurial biography might prefer a triumphant photograph at this point. The more useful development was a conversation.

Bob Drummond, a judge with experience in technology businesses, was interested in the people even though the initial proposal had not entirely persuaded him. After the competition, they met in a café to discuss making a business of it. Drummond joined the founding group, bringing commercial experience to a team already equipped to build.

The early financing also involved other people taking a chance. Chintaka Ranatunga and David Russell were among the early investors, with further backing following from angel groups and investment funds. The work of making software and the work of making a company were proceeding together. A useful application still needed a route to customers, and somebody had to pay for the time spent finding it.

Choosing the classroom

Finding users did not immediately settle the question of direction. Kami appealed to lawyers, real estate agents, architects and media businesses, as well as teachers. Wang recalled a stage when 99% of revenue came from outside education. Different customers wanted the product to become different things. The possibilities were plentiful; the team’s attention was finite.

Drummond pressed for a choice. The founders committed to education, where teachers were sending encouraging feedback as devices such as Chromebooks and iPads spread. The decision gave their development work a common destination. It also required them to pass up business that might have looked perfectly attractive on its own.

For Wang, this was an education in the cost of opportunity. Every additional audience brought another version of what the software ought to do. Concentrating on classrooms allowed the team to ask more exact questions about the same users. The choice made the problem smaller enough to work on, while leaving a very large number of people who might benefit.

The teacher on the other end

The product’s practical appeal was straightforward. Teachers and students could work on learning materials digitally, adding annotations and collaborating rather than circulating an inert file. Its integrations with tools including Google Classroom, Schoology and Canvas placed it alongside systems schools were already using. The existing document became something people could work on together.

That is a modest description of software, but classrooms have plenty of use for modest improvements that work. An assignment needs to reach the right person. A student needs a way to respond. Feedback needs to be visible and usable. Each little handover is part of a teacher’s working day, and a product earns its place by helping those handovers happen.

In 2022, Wang described reserving morning time to talk with teachers using Kami. The conversations covered improvements, problems and the ordinary business of classrooms. He also described regular check-ins with staff. It is an approachable picture of a chief executive’s job: somebody has used the thing you built, and now you should listen to what happened.

“Empathetically set high standards for yourself and your team.”

Hengjie Wang, 2022

A company grows up

Kami’s expansion turned that attention to detail into a much larger operating task. Its 2021 Deloitte Fast 50 result put it first in New Zealand, with three-year revenue growth of 1,177%. By 2022, it was reporting 34 million users across 180 countries. Recognition arrived after years of work on a product whose basic subject remained the everyday document.

The figures describe different things. Revenue growth measures the business over a period; user totals describe the audience at a particular moment. Neither, by itself, tells you what a teacher thought of Tuesday’s lesson. Together, they show how far the company had travelled from the student project, and why serving that audience required an organisation as well as an application.

Wang’s advice about managing growth included watching costs and hiring deliberately, so new staff could be properly brought into the business. He favoured capital efficiency, an unglamorous subject until a company needs some. Kami reached profitability in its fifth year. The living-room experiment had acquired the obligation to keep paying its own way.

There was also a concrete thank-you for the people doing the work. Following the Deloitte recognition, the company surprised more than fifty team members with NZ$10,000 bonuses, Wang said in 2022. Corporate gratitude can become rather airy. A bank transfer has the advantage of being difficult to mistake for a slogan.

An award, and an excellent misunderstanding

When news came that Kami had made the 2022 TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, Wang initially wondered whether it was an April Fool’s Day joke. It took time to absorb the company’s appearance alongside familiar international names. After years of making something useful, the unfamiliar part was seeing other people regard it as consequential.

His advice to other New Zealand founders was to think internationally from the start. Kami had used feedback from a global audience to keep improving its product, with North America becoming its largest market. The headquarters did not have to move to Silicon Valley for the customers to live far away. Geography was a practical consideration, rather than the limit of the idea.

Another award followed in 2025, when Wang and Samson jointly won New Zealand’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year. The shared recognition suited a story built around a founding team. Wang was the chief executive, but the company’s beginnings, commercial choices and subsequent growth involved collaborators with different responsibilities. The trophy had room for two names; the work had involved rather more.

Beyond the PDF

In August 2024, BV Investment Partners announced its investment in Kami. The announcement described a platform serving more than forty million teachers and students, with ambitions to deepen its American presence and expand elsewhere. For Wang, the business now had an established investment partner with experience in software and education companies.

In September 2025, he announced that Book Creator had joined the Kami family. His explanation connected three products: Kami for interactive learning and classroom workflows, Book Creator for student expression, and Kami Companion for access and learning across the web. The PDF tool’s descendants were being assembled into a broader classroom offering.

He described an ambition to help students participate, express themselves and demonstrate what they had learned, while giving teachers more time. The acquisition announcement also told existing customers to keep using their products as before, with accounts, content and billing unchanged. A grander company plan still had to leave tomorrow’s lesson workable. That is a sensible constraint for an education business.

Back to the place that started it

By April 2026, the University of Auckland described Kami’s products as supporting more than seventy million users across 180 countries. Wang and Samson were also returning something to the institution where their company’s idea had developed. Through their family office, Hiraya Ventures, they gave $30,000 to establish the CIE Alumni Fund.

The contribution would be distributed over three years, helping support Velocity and other entrepreneurship programmes. It provided a way for future alumni and supporters to contribute too. The original competition had given Wang’s team a setting in which to test an idea and meet somebody useful. The new fund helped preserve that possibility for students following them.

There is a pleasing circularity here. Wang began as a student trying to improve the tools in front of him. Years later, part of his work involved improving the conditions in which another student might begin. The next useful irritation could already be sitting in somebody’s lecture notes, waiting for a person impatient enough to open a laptop.