Why
Manawaroa comes from te reo Māori, the language of the Māori people of Aotearoa New Zealand. It means resilience and endurance.
We don't do this for the money. We do it because there is always a better way, and finding it changes someone's day.
We started Manawaroa after years of grit at companies that cared more about the dollar than about the people who make a business worth anything, its customers and the people doing the work. We gave those companies years of our lives. Manawaroa is our chance to put that effort where it's wanted.
Our founders took different paths. One went after how things work, starting with a first website in 1996, before high school. It was a place to share photos of friends and weekends, because nothing like it existed yet. A few years later, others made the same idea more popular. No hard feelings. A content management system followed at 18, online stores before 20, and industry-revolutionizing legal software launches by 25. Since then there has been plenty of data big enough to make a spreadsheet cry and, more recently, hardware nobody could reboot from a desk.
The other found the beauty in everything: classical art, architecture, furniture design, interior design, crafts, and artwork in more styles than fit in one sentence. Some of that came from formal training and the rest from making things. That eye is now on our work. It shapes how the software looks and feels to use, works out what people actually need before anything gets built, and says no when something is ugly or clumsy.
The two paths ran apart for years, until Manawaroa. One of us is the brains and the beauty. The other one makes it run.
Now we'd rather work for businesses where the owner answers the phone, because we answer ours; okay, texts get answered faster. In a business that size, one better system changes somebody's whole workday.
Everyone who works on a Manawaroa project meets the same bar, and it isn't easy to clear. They need the skill to build what most teams can't, and they need to care whether it helps the person using it. The second is harder to find. It's also why we finish what we start.
We're picky about clients too. We want to work with businesses that want better days for their staff and their customers. If the goal is an AI slide for the next board meeting, we're not the right fit.
That history matters for AI work. Most AI projects stall on old systems and messy data, and we have spent two decades inside both. We use AI where it does the job better than what you have now. If a plain script or a better form solves the problem, we build that instead. No AI for show.
We build with AI tools ourselves, and we hold them to the same rule. A senior engineer reads and tests everything before it reaches you. The AI writes faster. It doesn't get the final say.
We aren't perfect. We keep looking for the better way, because the people who use the software and the people who build it are the ones who feel the difference.
Services
Manawaroa offers one service: software development consulting. In practice, that covers the work below.
AI in your workflows
We look for the manual work that fills your week, such as reading documents, copying data between systems, and sorting incoming requests. We automate the steps where AI does the job reliably and leave the rest alone.
Connecting your systems
Most businesses run on several systems that do not talk to each other, so someone copies data between them by hand. We connect them, whether that means a modern API, a webhook, a file transfer, or an old system whose only way out is a nightly spreadsheet export.
We build each connection to report its own failures, so a broken sync gets noticed the same day instead of at month end. Connected systems are also what make AI useful, because a model can only work with data it can reach.
New custom software
Web applications and internal tools, built around how your business works when no off-the-shelf product fits.
Extending existing systems
New features and performance work on software already in production.
Modernizing legacy systems
Every business has one system nobody wants to touch, and it is usually the one holding the data AI needs. We start by working out what it actually does, what it costs to keep, and what replacing it would take. You get that as a written assessment you can act on with or without us.
Then we move it to code a current team can maintain. The business keeps running while we do it.
Support plans
Software needs looking after once it launches. A monthly support plan covers the hosting, maintenance, and updates that keep it running, plus ongoing access to tools we provide, such as an AI assistant. Cancelling a monthly plan takes 30 days notice, so you keep it because it is useful.
Stalled projects
If a project lost its developers or stopped moving, we can take it over. First we tell you whether finishing it costs less than starting again.
Contact
Email is the fastest way to reach us.
Tell us what your current system does and what annoys you most about it.
Billing questions and refunds
Email with your invoice number. See the refund and dispute policy.