Analytical revolution

Errol Brandt knows that his has been a very unconventional career; one which would now be impossible to replicate, starting with landing a graduate accountant position with Nestlé in the 1990s – an era when computers weren’t found on every desk.

“In 1993, I discovered a way of getting into the back end of the Nestlé mainframe to write my own queries and managed to automate a large part of my job as a production analyst,” Brandt tells The CEO Magazine.

All was going well, until he became too zealous and overwrote some of the master files.

“That crashed the whole mainframe and we ended up having to fly a tape in from Sydney to restore,” he says.

Brandt thought his career was over before it had really begun, but Nestlé recognized his potential and assigned him to an international project designing a new costing system using IBM technologies. He would go on to spend the next 10 years traveling around Africa, Asia and Oceania developing and implementing production systems, finishing up as Regional Head of Analytics in the Middle East.

A better way

Brandt returned to Australia in 2010 to take up a role with packaging solutions business Amcor, in a division that was losing US$654,000 a week when he joined. Over the next five years, that figure turned into a US$22.9 million profit.

“My role in that was providing the analytical horsepower to identify areas of underperformance,” he explains.

It was around this time that he started playing with AI through IBM Watson.

“Just like when I was a graduate, I immediately started to find a way to automate my job,” he recalls.

This time, however, it wasn’t production variances, it was the entire organization’s knowledge base.

“I realized there was a fundamental weakness with large language models, and I started to wonder if there was a better way that we could train models to provide high-value analytics.”

Brandt approached the problem from a non-technical angle and found a shortcut that others had missed.

“I don’t want to explain how I did it, but if I’m right, it means that we won’t need to be investing so heavily in data centers,” he explains. “We could do much more of the AI processing using resources currently at our disposal.”

To prove the approach, Brandt and Deena Yuille co-founded Kiraa to provide commercial validation for this analytical data frame technology.

“Fundamentally, the problem that most business leaders face is that they can’t get hold of the knowledge they need to act more quickly,” he explains.

Generative AI, he adds, can solve this problem.

The company was built to give medium-size enterprises AI-powered business analytics and has been live in Australia on the Vercel cloud platform since April 2025. While its analytical data frame concept is currently the subject of its patent-pending technology, clients such as Oji Fibre Solutions are already turning to Kiraa for real-time analytics that enable sales figures on day zero.

A lifetime’s work

Brandt, who admits he’s been thinking about this for a lifetime, reveals it’s taken 10 years to design, five years to program, three years to fine-tune and one year to train. He’s poured his life savings into the company, which he says was born from a painful and tragic personal loss.

“The original product was called Knowledge Orchestrator, because I wanted to protect organizations from catastrophic knowledge loss and I wanted to stay away from the AI hype,” he explains.

In 2016, he woke to the news that a colleague in his team had died.

“We then discovered the entire organization’s budget was run on 37 linked spreadsheets and nobody knew how they worked,” he admits.

That painful experience of rebuilding enterprise knowledge was the tragic spark he needed to design the analytical data frame concept.

“My colleague Fred’s death revealed the cost of catastrophic knowledge loss, and the secret sauce for Kiraa came from that pain,” he confirms.

The decision to change the name from Knowledge Orchestrator to Kiraa in January 2025 is another of the company’s pivotal moments.

“Nobody was interested in knowledge, so I took the decision to rebuild Knowledge Orchestrator as Kiraa,” he says.

Brandt made the decision while his Co-Founder Yuille was away, knowing she might disagree.

“When she returned, she understood instantly. That act of alignment sealed our partnership,” he says.

Consolidation and scale

The next 18 months are about consolidation and scale, with Brandt’s current focus on the seed round of funding.

“We’re raising A$10 million [US$6.6 million] in seed capital to establish operations, expand our team and prepare for deployment in the United States,” he explains.

There’s also a suite of new features for Kiraa, including Kiraa Intelligence, the fourth iteration of the core algorithm.

“With the help of Amazon Web Services, we’re extremely impressed at the generation speeds, which are well over 100 times what we were achieving 18 months ago,” Brandt points out.

Another new feature is the release of Apple applications, starting with Kiraa for MacOS as well as iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro versions. He predicts it will “open people’s eyes.”

The strategy is to ensure the product is right at home in Australia first, before launching into the United States in 2027 with five high-value use cases.

“Three of those launch cases and foundation partners have been identified in sales analytics, procurement analytics and financial analytics,” he explains, adding that the company is currently recruiting for the few remaining spots and investigating opportunities in mining and education.

“We’re open to ideas, but prefer to stay close to manufacturing, logistics and retail.”

Brandt appreciates that it’s too soon for people to understand that Kiraa is a fundamental challenge to the way that business analytics is generated today.

“We now have an economic alternative to low-value analytical work,” he explains. “Rather than recruit a junior to write analytical reports that nobody reads, businesses can use Kiraa to do this.”

For Brandt, Kiraa is a culmination of a career’s worth of experiences as a person who provided analytical services to senior leaders in companies.

“I always thought that the role of accountant was a storyteller, explaining financial performance to business leaders,” he says. “But more accountants’ lives are miserable, spent trawling through spreadsheets and dashboards.”

When he arrived at Nestlé Middle East, the first change he implemented was a region-wide sales report, showing every brand and every channel each day.

“It was my pleasure to hand-deliver this report to the CEO every morning at 8am,” he says. “He would ask for the two-minute summary and I told him everything he needed to know.”

He always thought this is what his role should be – and it’s what he wants Kiraa to become.

“I’m so proud to have had the chance to build this. It’s an incredible opportunity.”