Hannah Hardy-Jones co-founded Contented in 2023 alongside Lucy Pink, but the partnership began somewhere else entirely: Christchurch’s Ministry of Awesome incubator programme, where the two were independently building separate businesses. Hardy-Jones was working on The Kite Program, a mental health app, while Pink, a self-taught developer, was running an ethical fashion startup called Onyou. As generative AI tools like ChatGPT became widely accessible in 2023, the pair recognized a shared opportunity and pivoted together to build a dedicated AI company.
That company, Contented, is an AI tool that captures conversations from meetings, video calls, and in-person discussions, then converts them into documentation and business insights through customizable templates. A University of Canterbury graduate, Hardy-Jones has framed the company’s mission around accessibility — building AI tools that don’t require specialized governance or technical expertise, so that small and medium-sized organizations, not just large corporations, can benefit from them. Clients now range from growing SMEs to major New Zealand organizations, including meat exporter Alliance Group, which uses Contented to document everything from plant-floor meetings to boardroom discussions.
Bootstrapped in its early years, Contented closed an oversubscribed $4.1 million seed funding round led by Altered Capital, with additional backing from Shearwater Capital, K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Aspire NZ Seed Fund, Phase One Ventures, and Exhort Ventures — a raise that valued the company at $16 million. Hardy-Jones and Pink remain majority shareholders. The funding is aimed at expanding Contented’s feature set and pushing into new markets, including the UK and US, with Hardy-Jones citing ambitions to support conversations involving major global institutions such as the United Nations.
Alongside building Contented, Hardy-Jones has maintained a long-running public commitment to mental health advocacy, writing and speaking regularly on the subject, and continues to describe herself as an “AI optimist” focused on technology that solves genuine problems rather than adding complexity.
