AUCKLAND, Friday: Homegrown marketing intelligence platform Accelerator has landed a finalist spot in the Excellence in Innovation category at the 2026 Auckland Business Awards Central.
Built in Auckland specifically for New Zealand businesses, Accelerator offers a locally engineered alternative to marketing tools developed for much larger offshore markets.
Its starting point was refreshingly straightforward: New Zealand behaves differently, so why keep forcing local businesses into systems designed somewhere else?
Rather than reshaping an imported platform, the Accelerator team built its own using local market data, privacy-first architecture and direct integration with New Zealand’s publisher ecosystem.
The platform also draws on more than 20 years of agency-side experience, with its strategic frameworks focused firmly on the work that produces genuine commercial results.
Accelerator takes a similarly grounded approach to artificial intelligence, treating it as an amplifier for proven marketing fundamentals rather than a clever shortcut around them.
That means AI works alongside established research, reliable data structures and tested frameworks — a slightly calmer approach amid the current stampede towards anything bearing an AI label.
We backed a simple idea: that New Zealand businesses deserve marketing intelligence designed for this market, not borrowed from somewhere else.” – Natalia Taylor, Founder and CEO, Accelerator
Early results suggest the philosophy is paying off. During beta testing, Accelerator delivered a 54% improvement in cost-per-acquisition and a 15% lift in return on advertising spend.
Brands using the platform also recorded a 13% lift in sales.
Founder and CEO Natalia Taylor said the finalist recognition validated both the platform and the reason the team chose to build it locally.
“Being named a finalist for Excellence in Innovation is real validation – not just of what we’ve built, but of why we built it. We backed a simple idea: that New Zealand businesses deserve marketing intelligence designed for this market, not borrowed from somewhere else. To have that recognised alongside such a strong field of Tāmaki Makaurau innovators means a great deal. I’m proud of our team, and we’re only getting started.”
Accelerator is led by Taylor alongside Managing Partner Chris Daley.
The 2degrees Auckland Business Awards are run by the Auckland Business Chamber and have celebrated business excellence across Tāmaki Makaurau for more than 25 years.
Accelerator joins Anagenix, HikoTerra, PhaseFoam, Picobyte Solutions and RosterLab among the Excellence in Innovation finalists. The category is sponsored by Z.
Regional winners will be celebrated at cocktail events in September, before the overall winners are announced at a gala dinner in November.
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