Anuj Paudel once got into trouble for being too helpful. While tutoring high school students, he was scolded for doing too much of their work himself. A capable pair of hands had become an obstacle to somebody else’s learning. For an engineer inclined to get involved, it was an awkward lesson: completing the task could mean missing the point.
He now co-leads Avarni, a Sydney company that builds carbon accounting software. The distance between a tutoring session and an enterprise software business is considerable. The temptation to reach across the table and solve everything yourself travels remarkably well.
Paudel has described himself as an overthinker, someone learning to move with 70% of the information. That admission gives his career a useful tension. Here is a builder whose work depends on precision, trying to become comfortable with decisions that arrive before certainty does.
The lesson before the title
His route into the company ran through information technology. He studied at the University of Technology Sydney between 2016 and 2020, concentrating on enterprise systems development and cyber security. His working life included cloud network engineering at Macquarie Telecom Group and a lead tutoring role at Brainy Bee Education Centre. He also co-founded Airshuffler, with that chapter running from late 2019 into early 2021.
The combination matters. Enterprise systems concern the machinery of organisations: information moving between people, permissions, processes and software. Tutoring concerns the person who has to understand what is happening. A useful business product eventually encounters both. It needs to work, and somebody other than its maker needs to be able to use it.
In early 2021, Paudel joined Antler. Avarni launched that year. The early team had three distinct titles: Tony Yammine as CEO, Misha Cajic as chief of product and Paudel as CTO. His responsibility had acquired a company around it.
A product with other people in it
The early proposition already contained a revealing choice. Avarni wanted companies to calculate and share carbon information with customers and suppliers. Participation in the network mattered enough that joining and doing emissions calculations were offered free in its early model. Supplier invitations were part of the product’s logic.
Think about the engineering implication. A company’s carbon picture reaches beyond the systems it owns. The information needed to complete it can belong to another company, working to another timetable, with its own priorities. A calculation engine has to sit inside a workable exchange between organisations.
Within its first seven months, Avarni was describing KPMG as both a customer and a partner. That was an early sign of where the product could fit: alongside people whose working lives already involved helping businesses organise difficult information. The platform’s usefulness would be tested in those relationships, long after the first demonstration was over.
Paudel and Cajic had been building things since their teenage years. Avarni’s carbon idea changed shape along the way, including an early consumer concept connected to a bank card. Their eventual focus was business carbon accounting. Paudel’s explanation of the lesson was economical: We needed to find a problem that was both urgent and solvable.
He identified Excel as a principal competitor. It is a pleasantly untheatrical opponent. A spreadsheet does not need a launch campaign; it already has a place on the customer’s computer. Displacing it means understanding why people keep using it, and what finally makes the familiar arrangement too cumbersome.
For Paudel, the opportunity lay in making environmental information easier for businesses to understand. The company’s later work extended into the UK, including the City of London Corporation. An engineering problem conceived in Sydney was meeting the procurement habits of institutions a long way away.
“We needed to find a problem that was both urgent and solvable.”
Anuj Paudel
Twenty-five invitations
The City of London partnership makes that work tangible. Announced in March 2023, it involved onboarding the Corporation’s top 25 carbon-intensive suppliers, excluding construction, onto Avarni for free. The aim was to support modelling and forecasting as the institution worked towards net zero across its value chain by 2040.
Purchased goods and services were its third-largest emissions category. Here was a buyer with an incentive to understand what happened beyond its own operations, and a defined group of suppliers to begin with. The project gave the software a practical assignment, rather than an abstract promise about changing business.
It also reveals why a platform like Paudel’s needs cooperation as well as computation. An estimate based on spending and information reported by a supplier offer different views of the same relationship. Helping people improve the information available to them becomes part of the technical job. The invitation is the beginning of that process.
Free onboarding for the City of London Corporation’s selected suppliers, excluding construction.
By October 2023, a joint webinar was walking through the supplier-engagement work. Its hosts were Kristina Jackson, the City of London Corporation’s sustainable supply chain manager, and David Tan, Avarni’s head of customer success. The people explaining the product were people using it and helping others use it.
That is an instructive development in a founder’s story. Paudel’s engineering had become something other colleagues could carry into a conversation with a customer. A company needs that transfer of understanding. Otherwise every question eventually finds its way back to the same desk.
Money for the next version
Avarni announced a A$2.5 million funding extension in November 2023, backed by returning investor Main Sequence and new investors Sprint Ventures and AfterWork Ventures. It put cumulative funding at A$6.1 million. Money supplied time and resources for the company’s continuing work; it also brought more people with a stake in how that work progressed.
That year, the team more than doubled, extending its presence beyond Sydney and Manila to Melbourne, London and Phoenix. Avarni also became available through AWS Marketplace. For customers already buying cloud infrastructure there, purchasing the software could fit into an existing billing arrangement.
These are modestly dressed details with considerable consequences. A founder’s early job can be to persuade somebody that a product should exist. Later, the company has to make it straightforward to buy, support across time zones and develop with a larger team. The work acquires more moving parts than any founding engineer can hold personally.
The weekly work of keeping up
By February 2025, Avarni had added a feature for tracking suppliers’ Science Based Targets initiative commitments. It identified suppliers with SBTi-aligned targets and updated every Friday in step with the SBTi database. The calendar detail is rather good. An ambitious climate proposition had acquired a weekly appointment.
A supplier’s target is one piece of information in a changing relationship. Keeping it current helps a buyer understand which partners have made commitments and where further conversations might be needed. A feature like this earns its place by reducing a recurring administrative task.
For Paudel’s company, it was another step beyond the initial calculation. Customers needed to follow developments over time and connect the numbers with decisions about suppliers. A snapshot has a date. The working process continues after it. The software has to accommodate that continuation, including the distinctly ordinary business of checking again next week.
The following February brought a different kind of milestone: Avarni announced SOC 2 Type II compliance. The report assessed the operational effectiveness of security controls over an extended period, building on its previous Type I work. The distinction fits the company’s stage of life. A system has to keep behaving as intended after the demonstration ends.
Paudel put the emphasis on customer information and long-term trust. His phrase was direct: security and reliability are non-negotiable
. Corporate emissions software handles data that customers depend on for their own reporting. Their confidence rests partly on the processes surrounding the calculations.
The former cloud network engineer was speaking here as co-CEO. Technical discipline had become an obligation shared with the whole organisation. Keeping promises about data requires repeated work by a team, and the discipline to keep doing it when there is no announcement to make.
- 2021Build a carbon accounting platform.
- 2023Bring suppliers into the process.
- 2025Keep supplier commitments current.
- 2026Demonstrate operating discipline.
The work he cannot do alone
Avarni now lists Paudel and Cajic as co-founders and co-CEOs. Around them are a CFO, chairman, investor-director and senior carbon adviser. The business describes its purpose in terms of helping finance, compliance and sustainability teams handle reporting. The audience has job titles, responsibilities and deadlines of its own.
That is a useful place to locate Paudel’s ambition. The engineering needs to become useful in other people’s hands: colleagues developing and supporting it, advisers helping shape it, customers bringing their own data and questions. A technically capable founder still has to make room for that participation.
In September 2026, Avarni announced that it had been named a Financial Review Sustainability Leaders finalist in the Telecommunications, Media & Technology category. It had also been recognised by the program in 2023. The more recent announcement described software that brings together activity and spending data, connects with finance and procurement systems, and provides audit trails.
The vocabulary is less romantic than the usual language of starting a company. It is also closer to the work customers have to finish. Paudel’s business has grown into a setting where useful answers must survive questions from several departments.
Outside the company, he has spoken about returning to flamenco guitar. There is something fitting about a hands-on builder keeping an exacting creative practice. His professional lesson, meanwhile, remains open: leave enough room for another person to learn, contribute and carry the work forward. The tutor’s unfinished problem has become a company’s daily business.