Photo caption: UC student interns Jacob Crume (Left) and Hugh Thompson (Right).
A global SaaS company and leader in document collaboration, Lumin is transforming the way the world works with agreements. Founded by UC Engineering graduate Max Ferguson in 2014, the company is firmly rooted in Christchurch and strongly committed to its future.
As well as employing Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) graduates in their team, Lumin runs a summer intern programme that draws heavily from UC’s talent pool.
Interns like UC students Hugh Thompson and Jacob Crume are relishing the chance to contribute to Lumin’s research and development projects. Both are UC Outstanding Impact Scholars, who took up their internships at the end of their first-year engineering studies.
“I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity,” says Thompson. “We’ve been looking at the future and where developing trends in technology are taking us. It’s cool to be at the forefront of that.”
Building on that commitment to emerging talent, this year also sees the launch of a new Lumin Undergraduate Scholarship at UC – an initiative designed to support future tech leaders and strengthen pathways into the sector.
“We launched the Lumin Undergraduate Scholarship because we wanted to remove financial barriers for top talent,” says Ferguson. “By providing financial support and the pathway to employment we are trying to keep New Zealand’s best brains in the sector. My vision for Christchurch is a thriving technology hub where students know they don’t have to leave the country to work on cutting-edge software.”
The scholarship is available to eligible students in their third year of a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) programme, particularly in software, computer or mechatronics engineering. It is also open to second year students in a Bachelor of Data Science or a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. It also includes an opportunity for paid summer employment at the end of the scholarship’s tenure.
“It’s very exciting as there are few other targeted undergraduate scholarships like this available for our students at that second or third year level,” says UC Professor Tanja Mitrovic, Head of Department, Computer Science and Software Engineering. “They will be very happy to hear about this opportunity.”
Lumin founder Max Ferguson built the first version of Lumin (then Lumin PDF) while looking for a better way to interact with documents in the cloud. He credits his UC Engineering studies for providing him with the fundamental toolkit needed to problem-solve and innovate - foundations that helped fuel Lumin’s rapid growth in response to skyrocketing demand.
“Today, we have over 130 million users across three products areas – Lumin PDF, Lumin Sign and Lumin AI,” says Ferguson, who describes UC as an engine room for talent and the company’s biggest strategic advantage, allowing Lumin to stay local while competing on a global stage.
He values the strong theoretical foundation and pragmatic outlook that UC graduates on his team bring to Lumin.
“They’ve been instrumental in rolling out some of our most complex features and, because they come from a culture of innovation, they aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo or suggest a better way of doing things.”
As well as working on prototyping projects, Crume says it has been very rewarding to contribute as part of an experienced team. “We’ve both had to do a presentation and talk about what we’ve been doing to the whole company,” he says.
For UC’s software engineering students, work placements are a compulsory part of their degree.
Professor Mitrovic says internships like those at Lumin give students far more than workplace experience — they offer exposure to cutting-edge innovation and the chance to apply their skills in a fast-moving global tech environment. “We very much value our relationship with businesses in the industry and helping students to grow and build their networks,” she says.
Students at Lumin are pushing code to production, participating in code reviews and building software with AI tools like Cursor. “[And] It equips them with the soft skills that you can’t fully simulate in a lecture theatre and makes them more employable from day one,” Ferguson says.
Looking ahead, he is “incredibly excited” about the integration of AI into document management. It’s a new frontier for Lumin, which is expanding its Christchurch team. “We are also actively building out our R&D team in Christchurch. I’m looking forward to seeing the next cohort of UC graduates help us build the future of work.”
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