A government agency renewed the same maintenance decision nine years running, because auditing the original choice was deemed too expensive. When the portfolio was finally tested, A$20.4 million of low value spend was identified in a single year. Kepa Software’s capital governance platform was built to expose and eliminate precisely these boardroom blind spots.

For nine consecutive years, an Australian public sector agency quietly signed off on a A$37 million annual asset maintenance budget. Every cycle, the board rubber-stamped the allocation on the assumption that because the decision was approved last year, it must still be correct. Auditing the underlying business case, officials reasoned, would require time, consultants, and money they were unwilling to spend.

When Kepa Software’s capital governance platform, APO, was brought in to evaluate the portfolio, the reality was laid bare. In the year examined, A$20.4 million of the A$37 million maintenance budget, 55 per cent of the total, was being directed to low-value, non-strategic outcomes. Nine consecutive renewals of a decision that had never been tested, with A$20.4 million of low value spend identified when it finally was.

The 55 per cent figure is an outlier. Garrard notes that across APO deployments the platform typically identifies around 5 per cent of a portfolio as low-value allocation. The agency case sits at the extreme end of the range, which is what makes it instructive, but the 5 per cent figure is the more representative measure of what organisations should expect to find.

This single case study captures the core premise behind Kepa Software, an Australian enterprise software firm founded by technology veteran Ken Garrard.

“The original decision was made nine years earlier and renewed eight times on the assumption that it must have been right at first,” says Garrard. “Organisations don’t lack goodwill, they lack an objective, transparent process to audit and reprioritise decisions once they’ve been made.”

Boardrooms routinely weigh vastly different funding proposals against one another: a A$40 million cybersecurity overhaul on one side of the table versus a A$40 million commercial growth initiative on the other. Because traditional tools struggle to compare inherently dissimilar projects, funding allocations frequently come down to whoever advocates the hardest in the room rather than objective value creation.

Garrard, whose 17 years of work in enterprise transformation spans banking, energy, infrastructure, and government, outlines the global scale of this inefficiency:

While Garrard spent 17 years developing the theoretical frameworks around multi-criteria decision science and value modelling, the APO platform itself is the result of six years of dedicated software development.

Unlike conventional enterprise tools, APO is built specifically to prioritise non-homogeneous portfolios without forcing intangible metrics onto a dollar scale or breaking investments down into artificial clusters.

This structural architecture creates clear differentiation against other players in the decision analytics space:

Kepa Software’s decision framework has been applied across enterprise and government portfolios. Two deployments illustrate the range of outcomes:

While Ken Garrard’s 17 years of domain expertise provided the initial vision for APO, Kepa Software is backed by an established executive and technical team:

This multi-disciplinary team has productised APO’s workflow engines and AI onboarding assistants, ensuring the platform’s capability, deployment, and IP extend beyond its founder.

Kepa Software has generated approximately A$750,000 in revenue to date through commercial contracts and enterprise pilot engagements.

To accelerate its next phase of growth, Kepa Software is currently raising A$5 million at a A$15 million pre-money valuation via Capital HQ.

Key objectives for the raise include:

With approximately A$750k in revenue already banked, documented deployment case studies, and a defensible position in capital governance, Kepa Software is raising to convert pipeline demand into multi-year recurring contracts.

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