A single turn of exit multiple compression on a €50M platform is a €50M value swing. The technical risk that causes it can be identified and eliminated in two weeks — for less than a rounding error on your deal costs.
Keld Partners works with PE operating partners and portfolio leadership to eliminate platform risk inside the hold period — with senior industrial architecture judgment and AI-native delivery at a fraction of large SI cost and timeline.
You inherited a platform that engineering can't get ahead of. Maintenance is consuming 70% of capacity. The product is drifting. You need an external view with domain credibility — not a junior-heavy SI team.
You know where the bodies are buried. You need a partner who can help you clean it up, document it properly, and present it credibly — before the acquirer finds it themselves.
You're 2–5 years into a hold period. The value creation plan assumed platform scale that isn't there. The buy-and-build thesis is stalling. You need architecture resolution, not transformation theatre.
Nordic and European PE hold periods now average 5–7 years. The value creation window is narrower than it appears. Platform risk that isn't addressed inside the hold period becomes the acquirer's negotiating position — and yours becomes the worst one to be in.
Every engagement is underwritten against one number: what does this risk cost at exit? We size the engagement against that number. The audit is almost always the cheapest diligence decision an operating partner makes in a given year.
"We scope every engagement the same way: what is the exit multiple impact of doing nothing? The answer is never comfortable."
— Bernt Reinhardt, Founding PartnerAcquirers apply a technical risk discount or walk away entirely when diligence reveals undocumented, brittle codebases. The platform you didn't fix becomes the justification for a lower offer — or no offer at all.
Feature velocity flatlines. The product drifts behind the competition without any single visible failure — just compound decline that surfaces in NRR, churn, and eventually in diligence.
When financial and operational data lives in Excel or legacy pipelines, utilisation reporting is guesswork. Capital allocation is built on assumptions. Cash leakage stays invisible until it isn't.
A buy-and-build strategy stalls when the core platform cannot handle integration, volume, or new market requirements. The architecture becomes the ceiling on IRR — and that ceiling is invisible until you hit it.
We do not run transformation programmes. We run defined engagements — scoped, priced, and delivered in weeks, not quarters.
Every engagement starts with the audit. You receive a complete technical risk assessment, a risk-scored remediation roadmap, and a board-ready business case — priced to be approved without a board meeting. No obligation to continue. A deliverable you own regardless.
If you proceed to the modernisation sprint, delivery is AI-native and production-hardened — with CI/CD, security architecture, and documentation your CTO can present in diligence. Not a proof of concept. A system that holds up under scrutiny.
For portfolio-wide mandates, we work with operating partners to deploy across multiple assets — combining the audit framework with commercial assessment and go-to-market recommendations where relevant.
Two-week fixed engagement. Full codebase and architecture assessment, technical debt inventory with risk scoring, prioritised roadmap, and a board-ready business case quantifying exit multiple impact.
Eight to twelve weeks. Backend refactoring, data pipeline modernisation, reporting infrastructure, or full-stack rewrite — scoped from audit output with a fixed deliverable your team inherits clean.
Three months. Complete architectural decomposition and rebuild — with commercial assessment, reporting infrastructure, and diligence-ready documentation. Delivered at 50% of large SI cost.
Ongoing advisory across multiple portfolio assets. Audit prioritisation, operating partner briefings, platform risk tracking through hold period. Combines technical and commercial assessment.
End-to-end solution architecture and delivery for one of the world's largest energy services companies across complex industrial data environments. Production-hardened systems with full documentation and security architecture.
Replaced opaque vendor AI with a deterministic, fully auditable tag extraction system across heterogeneous plant data. Scalable ingestion pipelines — TypeScript, Azure Functions, CI/CD, ML contextualisation. Complete technical ownership from architecture to production delivery.
Ten-plus years of enterprise sales in one of the most rigorous commercial environments that exists. Consistent delivery across complex stakeholder structures, clinical and procurement decision-making, and multi-year account relationships.
This is not a team of junior developers managed from a distance. Every scoping call, every audit, every sprint is led by one of the two partners. The judgment you engage is the judgment you get.
Structural engineer by training (UCL). Data scientist by practice. Solution architect by delivery — across SLB, Cognite, CGI, and Capgemini — in energy, industrial, and maritime sectors over more than a decade.
Bernt speaks OPC UA, Modbus, plant data semantics, IAPWS thermodynamics, and builds with Python, TypeScript, Azure, Databricks, React, and FastAPI. The combination of deep industrial domain fluency and AI-native delivery is what makes modernisation succeed where generalist shops stall.
No junior delivery. No knowledge transfer overhead. The architecture that comes out of the engagement is one a CTO can present in diligence.
Ten years at Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices — one of the most rigorous enterprise sales environments that exists — followed by senior commercial roles in industrial analytics and B2B SaaS. Carola has sold complex technical solutions into multi-stakeholder enterprise environments across her entire career.
Her combination of industrial analytics domain knowledge (Arundo, Asolvi) and elite enterprise commercial experience means she understands both what the platform actually does and how to build the business case that makes an operating partner approve the engagement.
Carola leads all commercial engagements, portfolio operating partner relationships, and go-to-market advisory within modernisation mandates.
A two-week assessment with a fixed deliverable: technical debt inventory, risk-scored modernisation roadmap, and a board-ready business case quantifying exit multiple impact. Priced to be approved without a board meeting.