A teenage entrepreneur is turning years spent online gaming into a mission to change how investigators fight cybercrime.
Caden Scott grew up creating and playing games on Roblox. He also loved Minecraft and Halo. But when a friend was groomed and exploited online, he began to see the darker side of the games he had spent years using.
Now 19, Caden is co-founder of Azonic, a start-up developing technology to help law enforcement investigate online crime.
The idea took shape while he was studying commerce at the University of Auckland Business School, where he joined Business Navigators, a programme that gives students the chance to learn from experienced entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators. Among them were Crimson Education co-founder Jamie Beaton and Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck.
Azonic, now valued at $6.1 million after raising $1 million in a pre-seed round, brings the tools, data and processes investigators use into one platform and is designed to help them prioritise cases, gather intelligence and connect online identities with people in the real world.
It’s being developed for investigations involving online harm, violent extremism, fraud and money laundering.
Caden left Waitākere College at 14.
“It was during Covid, so with all the lockdowns my attendance was already pretty low, and we’d moved quite far away, out to Karekare,” he says.
“I’d been talking to my Dad about wanting to get into game development and trying to convince my parents to let me be homeschooled. Eventually they agreed, and I went all in on getting better at game development.
“I think my Dad was really sold once I started my first company. He’d been an entrepreneur himself and run different companies, so he understood what I was trying to do. He’s been really helpful and given me a lot of advice.”
Caden’s first start-up was a game studio that sought to create branded games for companies and brands. It eventually folded. A second gaming start-up raised some capital before also shutting down.
He learnt a lot of lessons, especially about entrepreneurship and the business world. Then, he decided he wanted to get out of the house a bit more and do something. So when he was 16, Caden went to Unitec and got his university entrance.
Later he reached out to a few lecturers at the University of Auckland and met entrepreneurship and innovation lecturer Dr Stefan Korber.
“I told him about my journey and what I’d worked on, and based on those first entrepreneurial experiences I’d had, Stefan invited me to do a guest lecture in 2024.
“It was a great experience, and I got to really share my story; all the failures I went through and what really shaped my entrepreneurial journey.”
At the same time, Caden was becoming increasingly concerned about the harm he was seeing on the online platforms he had grown up with.
“Gaming platforms and the online world in general had been going downhill quite significantly in terms of child safety. Cases of child sexual exploitation and even violent extremism were growing exponentially, and I’d seen directly how it affected people.
“I realised that these platforms aren’t doing anything about it. I thought, ‘someone needs to do something’.”
He built software to identify accounts suspected of being involved in child exploitation and says the project eventually flagged more than a million accounts. But without the platforms’ support, there was little he could do with the information.
He then switched his focus to helping victims directly, setting up a hotline that grew into the International Online Crime Coordination Centre (IOC3), with a team of around 50 people across law enforcement, intelligence, and trust and safety backgrounds.
Through that work, he says saw how investigators were struggling with the volume of online crime.
“They didn’t have the capacity to keep up with the sheer scale of online crime in recent times, while criminals often utilised state-of-the-art AI models.”
That experience gave him the idea for Azonic.
Caden began a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Auckland in 2025 and joined the first intake of Business Navigators.
“Business Navigators was an exceptional experience. It’s such a great opportunity to be in the room with some of New Zealand’s greatest start-up CEOs and founders and to ask them questions and bounce ideas off them.”
Caden often approached Beaton after class to talk about what he was working on and says the entrepreneur continued to offer advice after the programme ended.
The programme also put Caden in the room with investors. At the University’s Unleash Space, he discussed his idea with Sam Gowen, the founder of student-run venture capital fund Flatmate Ventures.
“He was like, ‘Why don’t you make it a start-up?'”
In November, Caden met software engineer and University of Auckland computer science graduate Thomas Holdom. They talked through the idea, and Thomas began sketching out how the system could work on a whiteboard.
Around Christmas, Thomas was in touch with Caden to let him know he had built a prototype.
The pair teamed up and began raising capital in January.
Azonic is now working through entering the market, with Caden reporting interest across New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK.
They’re also exploring how banks and other financial institutions could use the technology.
Meanwhile, they’ve recently hired two University of Auckland students: final-year mechatronics student Adam Wright as a software engineer and final-year chemistry student Gabriel Lau, who works across content and marketing.
“I want to see Azonic truly revolutionise the law enforcement space and level out the playing field for investigators fighting against online crime,” says Caden.
“I want to see a difference in the world with that.”
And he doesn’t expect Azonic to be the last thing he builds.
“I don’t think you can go back to a normal life after being an entrepreneur. I think you’ll always try and build something new.”
