Advancing M&A survey speed and insights: Survesy
Traditional due diligence surveys are slow, manual and may reveal insights too late to act on. Auckland-based startup Survesy is redefining survey design, speed and insight with AI. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, the company draws on a developer culture that thinks in systems rather than just sprints, to build a product with depth and substance.
6 October 2026
Founded in 2023 by Alex Zhang and Lars Wakefield, the company is setting out to revolutionise how finance companies and consulting firms manage due diligence in merger and acquisition (M&A) deals – specifically, the research that determines whether a deal goes ahead.
“Private equity firms only get about a month to carry out their entire due diligence process,” explains Alex Zhang, Survesy’s CEO. “Within that month they need to carve out time to do commercial negotiations, legal diligence, financial diligence. The market survey often requires two to three weeks, leaving the analysts only two to three days to crunch through all the findings. You may find some big discrepancies at this point, which places a lot of last-minute pressure on multimillion-dollar and billion-dollar deals.”
Zhang came out of consulting at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the top-tier global management consultancies, where he undertook commercial due diligence for private equity clients during M&A deals.
“The issue with traditional primary market research methods is they are incredibly manual and hard to replicate across deals,” says Zhang. “We saw an opportunity with AI to speed that process up, get much deeper insights, help train analysts doing diligence work, and surface information that human time constraints once made impossible. This directly impacts the quality of and confidence in the recommendation at the end.”
Giving analysts greater survey intelligence
Survesy co-founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer Lars Wakefield has designed the entire survey-building experience with intelligence layered throughout. “If you want to do something sophisticated – such as limit a particular market segment to a specific question – you can just describe it to the survey agent in natural language and it codes it for you,” he says.
The tool’s greatest value comes from its early and iterative analysis. Survesy crunches the data as results come in, surfacing insights and gaps so the analyst can respond and test assumptions early. And because the app helped build the survey from the start, it holds the full lineage of research questions and can surface insights within seconds of the survey closing.
“You can see the trends as they emerge mid-survey and can write follow-up questions, close narrative gaps before they become a problem. The speed and capability of AI now also allows you to surface the trends that weren’t in the scope and you can decide which are worth following up on. That’s a genuinely different category of insight,” says Zhang.
"The talent was here in Auckland and so was the real financial advantage of lower labour and office costs compared with tech centres in the US."
From generalists to specialists: how Auckland dev teams see the big picture
Zhang and Wakefield met at Xero in early 2016. Zhang was in the data team when Wakefield joined and they worked on business intelligence projects before Zhang moved to complete an MBA at Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, then joined BCG in Los Angeles in 2020. After nearly eight years at Xero, Wakefield left in 2023 to bootstrap Survesy with Zhang.
“The biggest part of growing a company is your people,” says Wakefield. “Without good people, you’ve just got an idea. The talent was here in Auckland and so was the real financial advantage of lower labour and office costs compared with tech centres in the US. Being based here meant we could actually grow a larger team and fund it ourselves.”
The pair are building something for the long term and care more about how they did business – not just how fast they could go – which makes the work culture in Auckland the right choice. “We value a team who take a step back and think about the overall solution – what the next two or three steps mean for the product two or three years down the track.”
Wakefield puts the culture down partly to how the market shapes developers here. “A small company in the US might have 50 people. Here, three or four developers is a decent-sized team,” he says. “By necessity, people become generalists. The good ones eventually find their specialisation, but carry that broader foundation with them.
“What it creates is a form of empathy for other areas of the technology, for the downstream effects of decisions. When you’ve lived part of someone else’s experience, you understand where they’re coming from. Culturally, it makes for an enjoyable and very collaborative office.” At the time of writing, the Survesy product team numbers 13, with headquarters in Grey Lynn, Auckland and developers in Germany and Australia.
“The pace isn’t New York or London. We grind and do the hard work, but with less financial pressure bearing down, you have the ability to step back and think about the longer term."
Auckland provides two degrees of separation for agility and innovation
Auckland is home to a third of New Zealand’s population and generates more than a third of the country’s GDP. As New Zealand’s economic centre, it’s also a highly concentrated and connected place for business, and home to the country’s top universities and talent pipeline.
“Everyone is one or two degrees of separation,” says Zhang. “When hiring for a novel skill set Survesy couldn’t internally assess, we reached out to the wider tech network for help. And it’s the same with funding. If you have a solid and meaningful value proposition, you can get an audience with the major local VC players here. Try walking into Sequoia or a16z cold, when they’re getting hundreds if not thousands of pitches a day – it’s much harder to break through.”
Auckland is an accessible city with a smaller ecosystem that leads to a shorter gap between idea and action. Combined with a pro-business environment and an ambitious, young and vibrant culture that is open to trying new ideas, Auckland is a practical and inspiring place to build something new.
“It’s easier to strike a balance in New Zealand,” concludes Zhang. “The pace isn’t New York or London. We grind and do the hard work, but with less financial pressure bearing down, you have the ability to step back and think about the longer term. We constantly look at how today’s decisions will move us closer to those larger business outcomes, and we’ve achieved this balance by building our business in this city.”
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