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Alliv Samson and Hengjie Wang
EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2026 finalists, New Zealand
Co-founder and Chief of Staff & Strategy, Kami
Co-founder and CEO, Kami
Alliv Samson and Hengjie Wang are making learning easier for every student.
Alliv Samson and Hengjie Wang began their entrepreneurial journey as Auckland University students who saw how much time teachers and students lost to printing, annotating and sharing documents. Along with two co-founders, they set out to build a more intuitive way to learn and work. What started as an experiment across different markets soon revealed its clear purpose: education needed a simpler, more accessible digital workflow.
That insight led to Kami, an intuitive digital learning platform that turns static documents into interactive, collaborative learning tools used in classrooms around the world. By focusing on a clean, effective user experience and operating with discipline in its early years, the team built a product that solved everyday challenges for teachers, helping them engage students, personalize lessons and reduce administrative workload. Today, Kami serves more than 70 million users in 190 countries and is used by 92% of US schools. Its growth has accelerated through strategic investments and acquisitions, including the 2025 addition of UK-based Book Creator.
Samson and Wang have continued to champion innovation beyond Kami with the launch of Hiraya Ventures in 2025. The NZ$10 million fund supports globally minded founders from New Zealand reflecting their belief that transformative companies can be built from anywhere.
Kami didn’t grow because we were perfect founders; it grew because the problem we cared about was real, urgent and deeply human.
Building Kami from scratch by listening to teachers and students, navigating uncertainty, and scaling from a small idea to a global platform has taught me to stay curious, adaptable and grounded in real impact.