Cascade

The strategy is finished. That was always the easy part.

Somewhere right now a leadership team is closing a laptop after an offsite. There is a deck. There is a vision statement. There is a slide with arrows on it. Everyone nods. Then they walk back into the building, and the plan starts evaporating - one missed handoff, one quarterly reorg, one team that never heard about it at a time.

Cascade exists for the moment after the offsite. It is a strategy execution platform: one place where the goals, the projects, the metrics and the actual progress all live together, visible to the people expected to deliver them. AstraZeneca uses it. So do Porsche, American Express, Caterpillar and UNICEF. Thousands of teams across more than 100 countries log in not to write a strategy, but to find out whether the one they already wrote is working.

Most software helps you make a plan. Cascade is interested in the unglamorous bit afterward, where plans go to die.

Roughly nine in ten strategies fail. Not in the writing.

The number Cascade likes to quote is that around 90% of strategies fail during execution. You can argue about the exact figure - everyone does - but the shape of the problem is hard to dispute. Strategy is created at the top, in a room with good coffee and expensive consultants. Execution happens everywhere else, in tools that have nothing to do with the deck: spreadsheets, project trackers, a KPI dashboard nobody opens, a town hall slide from six months ago.

The strategy and the work drift apart. The CEO thinks the plan is on track because the last update said so. The team on the ground stopped following it in March. Nobody is lying. The information simply lives in different places, and by the time the gap surfaces, the quarter is gone.

The traditional fix was to hire more consultants to re-align everyone, which is a bit like solving a leak by buying more buckets. Cascade's argument is that the leak is structural: strategy that lives in a document instead of a system will always lose to the daily work that lives in software.

Get strategy out of the boardroom.

Tom Wright did not come from the strategy-consulting world. He came from financial services - Bank of America, Marks & Spencer, HSBC - watching big organizations set ambitious plans and then struggle to make them stick. He founded Cascade in 2017 and, alongside COO and General Manager Karim Zuhri, built it the unfashionable way: bootstrapped, no early venture money, growing to more than 60 countries by 2019 before taking a cent of outside capital.

The bet was simple and slightly heretical. If 90% of strategies fail in execution, then the valuable software is not the planning tool - it is the execution system. Build the place where strategy becomes daily, visible, trackable work for everyone, not a quarterly ritual for the few. Make the deck obsolete.

In 2022 that bet attracted US$29M (reported locally as around A$40M) in Series A funding, led by former Sequoia investor Mickey Arabelovic's Telescope Partners, with Five V Capital and Carthona Capital joining. The headline on the announcement was not about features. It was a manifesto: get strategy out of boardrooms and make it available to everyone.

One system instead of a filing cabinet of good intentions

Open Cascade and the strategy is no longer a document - it is a structure. Goals connect to the projects meant to deliver them. Projects connect to the KPIs that prove they worked. Dashboards roll the whole thing up so an executive can see, at a glance, whether the plan is healthy or quietly drifting. The point is connection: nothing sits in its own silo waiting to be forgotten.

It is, in essence, a system of record for the question executives are most afraid to ask out loud: is our strategy actually working?

From vaccine supply chains to the fastest car on the grid

Cascade's customer stories read less like a software case study and more like a list of hard problems. Teams have used it while establishing supply chains for COVID-19 vaccines, while working against the AIDS epidemic, and while building a Formula One car engineered to be the fastest on the track. The common thread is not industry - it is stakes. When the plan genuinely has to land, the gap between strategy and execution stops being an abstraction.

Democratize strategy, or at least stop hoarding it

Strategy has long been a luxury good - written by the few, owned by the few, explained to everyone else in a town hall. Cascade's mission is to flatten that: turn static plans into living systems that anyone in the organization can see, contribute to, and be measured against. The internal values point the same direction - "Be Present," "Do Fewer Things Better," "Face Problems Head On," "Make it Count" - which is roughly what you would tell a team that has too many priorities and not enough follow-through.

There is a quieter ambition underneath the product, too: to make a chunk of management consulting unnecessary. If the software keeps a strategy aligned and honest on its own, you need fewer outside firms flown in to re-align it. That is a large and slightly cheeky thing to attempt, which is presumably why investors found it interesting.

AI can write the plan now. Someone still has to keep it honest.

Here is the twist the next few years hand Cascade. AI is making strategies cheaper than ever to produce - any model can now generate a competent plan in seconds. Which means the world is about to be flooded with even more strategies, and the bottleneck moves entirely to execution. The deck was never the scarce thing. Follow-through was.

Cascade's 2025 move into AI - the Tapestry suite, the "AI-Driven Strategy. Better Decisions." positioning - is aimed squarely at that shift. Not just AI that drafts the plan, but AI that watches whether the plan is drifting, scores its health, and flags the risk before the quarter quietly slips. In a world drowning in machine-generated strategy, the valuable layer is the one that tells you the truth about what's happening.

Back to that leadership team closing the laptop after the offsite. The difference now is that the plan doesn't evaporate on the walk back to the building. It's already in the system, already assigned, already being watched. The deck was never the point. Cascade just built the thing that comes after it.