Somewhere in Australia right now, a CFO is staring down a deadline they didn’t choose, for a report they’ve never produced, in a format that will be audited like the rest of their accounts. Multiply that CFO by roughly 6,000, and you have a sense of what’s about to hit corporate Australia.

Climate disclosure used to be voluntary. Something the biggest listed companies did to look good in their annual reports, and everyone else ignored. That changed on 1 January, 2025. Australia’s largest entities are now legally required to produce a Sustainability Report under AASB S2, on the same timetable and held to the same standard as their financial accounts. Two more waves of companies follow in 2026 and 2027. By the time the rollout is done, around 6,000 organisations will be filing climate numbers that sit next to their balance sheet and get scrutinised by an auditor.

Here’s what struck us: almost none of them are set up to do this well. Most are leaning on consultants and spreadsheets that were never built to be repeated, audited and reconciled year after year.

That’s the gap Avarni was built to close, and it’s why MooCoo Ventures has backed the company’s seed round. Avarni was built to close that gap, and it is why we backed the company’s capital raise.

What Avarni does

Avarni is a finance-grade layer for climate disclosures, and it plugs directly into the systems mid-market companies already run their finance and operations on (SAP, Workday, NetSuite, Power BI). It auto-categorises business activities into emissions categories, matches the right emissions intensity factors, and applies the same rules year-on-year.

Repeatability is where we see the real value lying. Auditors are not looking for a good-looking dashboard; they want a sustainability report that applies consistent rules across periods and where the numbers reconcile. Avarni’s rules engine and controls exist for exactly that purpose, which is also why the company sits at a meaningful distance from a myriad of tools that currently populate this space.

Avarni has also built a substantial proprietary dataset from processing a very large volume of emissions and activity data, which it uses to sharpen categorisation and factor-matching accuracy. That dataset compounds over time and is something don’t think can be replicated easily and quickly.

Why we invested

Before MooCoo, I spent years as a partner at PwC, where the audit practice was not a small part of the business, it was the very foundation of the firm. I worked closely with the audit team, and came to understand the weight of the process: the controls, the reconciliations, the consistency across periods, the audit trail. An audit report is never just a report, it is an artefact built to withstand challenge.

When I looked at Avarni, I immediately recognised what was coming. The same rigour that financial reporting demands was now being applied to climate data. Not eventually. Now, by legislation. And the way most companies were preparing for it (consultants, spreadsheets, one-off exercises) was exactly how annual reporting used to be done twenty years ago before systems of record arrived.

In the same way that Xero became the system of record for small business finances and SAP became the backbone of enterprise reporting, Avarni has the potential to become the underlying record for climate disclosures.

The current manual approach will not survive audit scrutiny at scale. A platform built to apply consistent rules, integrate with existing finance systems, and produce an audit-ready output will. If Avarni achieves category ownership early, the switching costs are significant.

As investors we like to see traction and several recent enterprise wins came against competitors pricing at roughly a quarter of Avarni’s rate. The buyers chose the more expensive option because the cheaper one could not survive an audit. That is revealed preference from the people who understand the stakes.

The people behind it

Avarni was founded by Misha Cajic and Anuj Paudel, who together operate as co-CEOs.

Misha’s path into software started early. He launched his first business at 14 and scaled it to 65,000 customers over seven years. He later refined his product and commercial instincts at Atlassian and WiseTech, giving him a blend of founder-led execution and experience inside world-class software organisations.

Anuj brings a complementary background from Macquarie Technology Group, where he engineered systems for government clients. These environments demand a level of accountability and auditability that closely mirrors what AASB S2 is now introducing to the private sector.

What emerges from this pairing is a combination that is difficult to replicate: product intuition shaped in high-performance software companies, alongside direct experience building infrastructure-grade systems that hold up under audit in practice.

The opportunity

Normally, when we look at investments like this, we are on the lookout for interesting numbers such as the size of the market or annualised revenue. In this case, the interesting number is the date.

Government committed to enforcing Australia’s climate disclosure regime over six years, and the phase-in dates are written into legislation, not market sentiment. Group 1 entities are reporting now. Group 2, a substantially larger cohort, is required to report from 1 July 2026. Group 3 follows in 2027.

Avarni’s initial focus is Australian mid-market enterprises with revenue between $50 million and $2 billion i.e. those companies caught by mandatory reporting, and almost always too small to have an in-house team capable of producing audit-grade disclosures without external help. The company estimates this as a $200–500 million SaaS opportunity, concentrated in construction, manufacturing, retail, and financial services.

The other number that stood out was annual recurring revenue ticking over the $1m mark with landed enterprise customers including CSL, Latitude, Hutchies, 99 Bikes, and Cement Australia, plus strategic partnerships with BDO and Schneider Electric.

Where Avarni sits

Below Avarni, you find SME tools built for ease of use over rigour, useful for getting something filed, not for getting it audited. Above it sit enterprise suites with the rigour but the cost and complexity of a full ERP rollout. Avarni occupies the gap between those two.

Misha sometimes describes the business as a deliberately “boring” category to be in. We like RegTech. We like companies that sell into problems businesses cannot opt out of. When the regulatory obligation arrives, budgets get approved and churn drops, because the software becomes part of a workflow the business is legally required to run every year. A strong team of backers stand behind Avarni, including us, Main Sequence Ventures, and Sprint Ventures.

Interested in deals like this?

Avarni is part of a pattern we keep seeing: RegTech businesses built for problems companies cannot opt out of. MooCoo takes a deal-by-deal approach, backing companies built for the moment regulation arrives, alongside co-investors and syndicate members who bring genuine strategic value beyond capital.

To explore upcoming opportunities, visit moocoo.vc/investment-opportunities or get in touch.

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