Bex Twemlow is facing an important eight-minute gig this week.
Tomorrow night, Mrs Twemlow will address an audience of 350 potential investors in Auckland.
During her eight-minute slot, she will ''sell her story'' and endeavour to attract $500,000 investment in Hail, the software-as-a-service start-up that she founded.
The New Zealand Angel Investment Showcase, which was launched by the ICE Angels in 2011, has become an annual event.
Fifty-five start-ups have presented to a collective audience of more than 1300 investors, raising more than $16.7 million.
Last year's event featured 14 start-ups and $5.2million was invested in nine companies.
Hail, which was officially launched in February, is the only Dunedin-based business to pitch at this year's event, while Mrs Twemlow is the only woman presenting.
The companies invited to take part were at various stages in their life cycles and Hail was at a very early stage, she said.
The $500,000 investment being sought would enable the company to ''go international with a bang''.
Mrs Twemlow has big plans for Hail, projecting it being a $30 million company in 2017. While that was going to take hard work, the company was ''well on the way''.
It had a fully working product, paying customers ''that already love it'', a committed team, and a San Francisco-based investor with Silicon Valley contacts.
With a focus on the education sector, Hail helped schools and organisations tell their stories through the creation of digital communications, including automatically generated websites, newsletters, digital magazines and yearbooks.
It created an environment for teams to work on content collaboratively.
There was some conflict, as much of what Mrs Twemlow believed was the future for Hail worked against where her digital design and marketing company, Firebrand, was placed.
''I'm being brutally honest when I say the roots of Firebrand are in the line of fire of Hail,'' she said.
Web design agencies such as Firebrand needed to reposition themselves in the high end of the market, or embrace Hail as a platform to build content solutions for small businesses.
Hail was originally designed and developed for Logan Park High School to write content for newsletters and end-of-year yearbooks.
Mrs Twemlow believed schools were underresourced and underfunded.
If Hail could improve communications and reduce costs so that money could be spent on things that were important for the education of young people, then that was very positive.
No Safe Limit, a campaign concerned with empowering parents to guide teenagers around alcohol, was being served by Hail.
She described Hail as a ''beautiful crossover'' supporting young people and technology.
Hail was launched with its own API (application program interface) which meant any web developer agency could work with all of the content from the organisation.
Everything Hail produced could be used on any device ''beautifully and easily'', she said.
The market was global and ''massive''. Hail was an international company providing 24-hour service and support.
Creative director Tom Barnett was based in Bolivia.
It has been a big year for both Firebrand and Hail - named after a communications tool in the Star Trek films - and it had also been a hugely exciting year, she said.
While taking it one day at a time, Mrs Twemlow always had an eye on the future.
''You can't live in the future. You have to remain real, but always have that eye on where things are going.''
