The City of Melbourne's Retrofit Melbourne plan requires more than 80 commercial buildings to be retrofitted every year to reach the 2040 net zero target. Currently, seven buildings are retrofitted annually. The gap exists not because building owners lack motivation — it exists because they lack a reliable, defensible basis for making capital decisions.

The tools available until now sit at two extremes. At the high end: traditional engineering consultancies charging $15,000 to $25,000 for months-long custom studies — pricing that excludes the mid-tier building owners who represent the majority of Melbourne's commercial stock. At the low end: simplified digital calculators that estimate performance based on postcode averages and building type databases — outputs that fail under financial scrutiny because they describe buildings like yours, not your building.

Kelvara was founded to close the middle gap. By combining automated numerical physics simulation with modern machine learning workflows, Kelvara delivers calibrated building modelling — the kind historically reserved for tier-one engineering consultancies — at a price point that makes full use of municipal grant co-funding.