Who we are
Play80Studio is a New Zealand AI consultancy built specifically for the harness racing industry.
We started because we watched capable trainers — people running serious racing operations — get buried under the same friction every week. Data that never got captured. Decisions made on memory. Hours lost to admin that should have been solved years ago.
We don’t think that’s good enough. And we’re doing something about it.
Strategy · Execution · Momentum.
That's how we move.
How we work
We show up. We move at your pace. We prove it works before we ask you to scale it.
We’re currently working with a Canterbury racing stable — building their tools, validating the model, and making sure what we build actually sticks before we take it further.
That’s the Play80 way. Earn it first.
Meet Natalie
Natalie Rasmussen has spent 25+ years winning the biggest races in harness racing and now she's applying that same standard to how stables run.
She's the only woman in the sport's history to train and drive an Inter Dominion Champion and she did it four times, aboard the legendary Blacks A Fake. At 30, she became the youngest driver, and the only woman, inducted into the Inter Dominion Hall of Fame.
She's built and driven winners across New Zealand's biggest races — the Auckland Pacing Cup, the New Zealand Trotting Derby and has the greatest big-race record of any female driver in the sport's history. NZ media call her the "Queen of Harness Racing." It's not a stretch.
Now she's back in the industry she loves, and this time she's building something for it, not just competing in it. Natalie co-founded Rein because she's lived the problem it solves — too much of a trainer's day lost to paperwork that should take minutes, not hours. Rein is her decades of stable knowledge, welfare standards, and race-day instinct, built into software every trainer can use.
Off the track, she's at home with her two rescue dogs — and lately, taking on a very different kind of handicap on the golf course.
