Misha Cajic and the business of filling in the blanks

A missing electricity bill is a small thing to put at the centre of a founder’s story. It has none of the glamour of a funding round, and nobody hangs its absence on an office wall. Yet Misha Cajic’s September 2026 product update for Avarni spends time on precisely this problem: a business can have an emissions dashboard and still lack the records needed to trust it.

The update introduces a grid that shows whether energy data has arrived for each facility, source and month. Complete, partial, missing, awaited. Four ordinary words with consequences for the person assembling the report. Cajic’s work has brought him from simulated airports to this decidedly earthbound task. Along the way, he has built software, sold it, changed direction and learned to ask customers more useful questions.

Airports assembled by hand

Before carbon accounting, there was aviation software. Cajic began creating flight simulation products as a freelance developer in 2013. These were landscapes for people who wanted their computer flights to pass through recognisable places. The work required an eye for appearances and the technical ability to make them function. A convincing terminal is pleasant; a convincing terminal that brings the simulator to a halt is a rather expensive postcard.

His Santa Barbara Municipal Airport scenery gives the earlier work a concrete shape. Released in 2018, it was his tenth Orbx airport project. Its coverage extended beyond the airport into Santa Barbara, Goleta and the surrounding mountains. Cajic’s responsibilities included 3D modelling, texturing, ground imagery and other scenery construction. He also wrote the user guide. Even a virtual airport needs someone to explain how to get around.

The guide describes a balancing act familiar to anyone who makes software: richer detail consumes computing power, and users have different machines. It provides settings and controls so that people can adjust the experience. This is an early example of Cajic building something for customers with practical constraints, rather than simply producing an attractive object.

By his early twenties, his independent software business had passed a million dollars in revenue. He also studied engineering at UNSW and worked in product management at Atlassian. The route combined formal study, a larger software organisation and the education available when somebody pays for a product you made. Each offers a different answer to the question of what “finished” means.

The queue before the carbon report

Airshuffler was another attempt to make aviation’s surrounding inconveniences easier to manage. Cajic co-founded it with Anuj Paudel. The two had known each other since high school, where their technical interests overlapped in Industrial Technology class. Their eventual working partnership grew out of a relationship that preceded Avarni by years.

In September 2020, Cajic described an Airshuffler prototype that let someone join a queue through a web link before reaching the location. Geolocation and their position in line would determine when they should head over. The proposed improvement was wonderfully mundane: spend less of your life standing somewhere because everybody else is standing there too.

The original concept had been an airport information app, bringing together flight updates and maps. Startup costs were high, and the disruption to travel in 2020 complicated the plan. Virtual queuing had been part of the original product. The founders chose to focus on that component and potential customers who were easier to reach.

There is something revealing in that decision. The available technology did not settle who would buy it. Cajic was already describing experimentation and a search for early adopters. An airport services idea had become a smaller proposition that could be put in front of people. The ambition survived by changing its form.

A customer with a reason to care

Cajic and Paudel joined Antler in early 2021. The first carbon concept was a bank card that estimated the emissions associated with personal spending. It became an API for banks, then a business carbon-tracking product. Jon Collins at KPMG helped the founders understand what an early user needed. The changes narrowed the distance between an interesting idea and a customer’s working day.

Avarni’s original founding team also included Tony Yammine, who brought experience from KPMG. In the company’s December 2022 announcement, Yammine was CEO, Cajic was chief product officer and Paudel was chief technology officer. Cajic’s current title is co-founder and co-CEO, shared with Paudel. The earlier titles show the mix of commercial, product and technical experience assembled around the problem.

That problem was supply-chain emissions. A company trying to understand its carbon footprint needs information that extends beyond its own walls. Purchased goods and services connect its accounting to other businesses. A promise made in a boardroom can therefore depend on records kept by suppliers who have their own systems, priorities and reporting habits.

Avarni built software to organise those inputs and support emissions measurement. Its early relationships included KPMG Australia and a technology partnership at the McKinsey Digital Capability Center. Working through professional services firms offered a route to customers already seeking advice. It also put the software beside people responsible for interpreting the results.

The company announced a $3 million funding round in December 2022, led by Main Sequence with existing investors Vulpes Ventures and Common Sense Ventures. A $2.5 million extension followed in November 2023, with Sprint Ventures and AfterWork Ventures joining Main Sequence. These were company milestones. For Cajic, they also meant continuing to build a product other people had committed money and time to support.

A founder on the other side of the questions

One way to watch Cajic work is to watch him interview somebody else. In Avarni’s carbon accounting conversations, he asks practitioners about the decisions behind their work. The setting offers fewer opportunities for a sweeping founder speech. It requires interest in another person’s sequence of tasks.

In a conversation recorded in Melbourne in October 2024, he asked BDO’s Aletta Boshoff about the challenges clients were bringing to her as sustainability reporting requirements developed. Her answer centred on a simple need: a roadmap. Clients wanted to know what to do next. That is a useful test for software, too. A platform’s capabilities matter less to a new user if the next action remains obscure.

His discussion with Schneider Electric’s Lloyd Lee explored the realities of messy business data. Cajic subsequently highlighted the usefulness of beginning with a rough estimate when the alternative was having no data. The observation fits a practical problem: the reporting process has to begin somewhere, while leaving room for better information and review.

“a very empowering skill”

Cajic on building software, January 2023

By August 2026, his questions were reaching into the invoice pile. Green by Nature’s Christopher Carter described collecting information from more than a thousand utility invoices across over twenty depots. The company had been transferring records into spreadsheets. In their conversation, Cajic asked Carter to walk through what that process actually involved.

Carter described loading a year of environmental data in roughly six to eight weeks using Avarni, with an ERP integration planned as a next step. It is a customer account, with all the specificity that gives such an account value. The difficulty has locations, documents and people attached to it. Cajic’s questions keep returning to those particulars.

The missing month in the grid

His product writing follows the same direction. Avarni’s December 2025 review described an expanded invoice extraction engine supporting more than fifty vendors. The company reported 96 percent extraction accuracy in testing across nearly twelve thousand data points. Those figures describe that test, rather than a guarantee for every document a customer might upload.

The point of extracting invoice data is to make the underlying record easier to use. A broad spending estimate and an invoice containing activity information offer different levels of detail. The record also gives somebody reviewing the calculation a place to start. The practical question becomes whether the software preserves enough of the trail for another person to follow it.

The September 2026 update adds another check before a user relies on the emissions total: whether the inputs are complete. Facilities are ordered by emissions so that gaps with a potentially greater effect appear first. Clicking a cell takes the user to the relevant underlying records. It is a small journey through an interface, designed around a larger question about confidence.

The same update addresses overlapping suggestions for general-ledger rules. Proposals can waste time if several cover the same transactions or conflict in their order. Avarni revised how it organises those suggestions. Users still review and accept them. The division of labour is visible: software proposes; a person decides what to apply.

Keep the question small enough to answer

Cajic’s help documentation provides another glimpse of his approach. In guidance on employee commuting surveys, he recommends asking for travel mode, distance and frequency. He advises keeping the survey short and avoiding unnecessary requests for home postcodes or exact vehicle details. It is product work expressed as a set of questions people might actually answer.

His interests still include aviation. UNSW’s Airshuffler profile mentions guitar playing and flying small planes from Bankstown Airport; he has also described himself publicly as a cycling commuter. These details give the career a life outside funding announcements. There is room for a tune, a flight and the ordinary trip to work.

Avarni’s stated purpose is to help companies understand emissions and work with suppliers toward their net-zero targets. For Cajic, that broad ambition now comes with narrow daily responsibilities: make a data request clearer, organise a rule, expose a missing record. The progression is recognisable from his earlier products. Give someone a complicated place to navigate, then work on the parts that help them move through it.

The airport scenery needed textures, controls and a guide. The carbon inventory needs documents, review and an intelligible next step. Somewhere inside the second task is that missing electricity bill. It is still an unglamorous object. Finding it might be the most useful thing the software does that morning.