Co-Founder & Chief Technology OfficerNick Foley
The finance and supply-chain leader who became the CTO that builds it all.
Nick Foley is Longcloud's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, and the person who turns ideas into working software that solves real business problems. A father of two who grew up on a small farm in Whanganui, Nick brings a number eight wire mindset to technology: practical, inventive and focused on solutions that actually work in the real world. He moved to the Waikato in 2013 and counts himself a true Waikato local, raised in a little river city and now raising his family in the big river city.
Before Longcloud, Nick spent more than 15 years across finance, operations and commercial roles, including over a decade at Fonterra in New Zealand and Chicago. There he led transformation and turnaround programmes in supply chain and operations, giving him a deep understanding of how large organisations really work. It was in Fonterra's procurement team in 2015 that Paul and Nick first worked together, and they discovered how naturally their strengths complemented each other. Paul brought commercial strategy, negotiation and enterprise leadership; Nick brought technical depth, systems thinking and product vision. That partnership became the backbone of Longcloud.
Nick's path to becoming a CTO is unusual, and one of Longcloud's advantages. Trained as an accountant and having worked across operational roles, he has lived the business problems he now builds for. From 2015 he was building financial models and dashboards in Microsoft Excel and Tableau, and by 2018 he was applying AI inside Power BI to forecast spend data and run major analytics programmes, long before AI became the industry's favourite buzzword.
Nick is also deeply committed to staying ahead of technology development, not for the sake of novelty but to understand what is genuinely useful. He constantly tests emerging tools, frameworks and AI capabilities, filtering out the noise and focusing on what will actually move the needle for clients. That instinct still shapes how Longcloud builds: software that solves the real business problem, not just the technical one, AI-assisted where it adds value, shipped fast and free of hype.
Alongside Longcloud, Nick owns Foley & Co, his Hamilton business advisory practice, and chairs Connect Waikato. His rule is simple: real operators, shipping real results, ethically and responsibly.
