Ian and Ben Tairea got their start with a win at Manawatū's Agritech Hackathon design competition last year, which resulted in a budding start-up company.

And over the past couple of weeks, the brothers split up to enter and win two separate hackathons on consecutive weekends – Ian at New Zealand's first Māori-focused hackathon in Gisborne and Ben at an international space technology competition in Christchurch.

Now, Ben is about to head to France to pitch his team's orbital-repair robot start-up to the European Space Agency.