The Tellara Story

After a friend lost $100,000 on a property transaction, Jack Shennan and Michael Gomwe set out to make sure nobody got taken advantage of when buying a home. They built Shire AI, an AI property analyst that could surface hidden risks in LIMs, titles, and building reports. Jack, a Wellington native, had studied Finance and Economics at the University of Western Australia before returning to New Zealand and building a career at the intersection of technology commercialisation and business strategy. Michael completed a Mathematics and Computer Science degree from Victoria University of Wellington and deep experience building production machine learning systems. They had been working together in the New Zealand AI industry since 2019.

When Michael sent Jack a link to ChatGPT in its first week of release, they did not see a novelty. They saw the moment everything they had been building toward became commercially viable at scale. They were among the first 0.1% of users on the platform. They have been deploying large language models in production ever since.

The genesis for Tellara came from a conversation while demonstrating the Shire property analysis tool to Alex Vranyac-Wheeler, CEO of Master Electricians New Zealand. A pain point emerged. The brief was simple: turn 300 pages of dry electrical standards into something useful. They were asked to build a chatbot. They built a voice agent instead.

That decision to go further than the brief, to solve the real problem rather than the stated one, became the foundation of everything that followed. The voice agent became a phone system. The phone system gained tool-calling capabilities. Compliance certificates, knowledge lookups, department routing, and support queries all became things you could handle with a single call.

Today, Master Electricians NZ, a 100-year-old organisation with over 1,270 member businesses, runs Tellara technology in production across their compliance and support operations.