The simple answer is that you can implement Kelp’s tools exactly as you wish – end-to-end or as modules and even as individual tools in some cases. Kelp was originally conceived and designed as an end-to-end platform, automating volume tasks, creating meaningful insights and providing decision-making support throughout the investment lifecycle. However, recognizing the investments many businesses have already made in building or buying technologies to deliver support in certain areas, we have made Kelp’s tools available as modular solutions, addressing key parts of the investment lifecycle and enabling clients to pick and choose where and how they integrate, while retaining the option to scale at an appropriate time.

No. Kelp can work with existing tools and stacks, or replace them, depending on your need and the integration you choose.

Yes. This is a key feature of Kelp’s design – to collect, aggregate, clean and harmonise data from multiple sources and format, paid, proprietary or public, to provide a single, source of insights. Kelp’s tools are completely agnostic with regards to data sources and have been proven to work smoothly with any and all major paid sources, as well as reaching into and analysing unstructured public data to provide the most comprehensive view of any given company, sector or geography.

Kelp’s clients usually have a three-horizon view of the ROI

1. Immediate, short term – Increased efficiency and ease of collaboration within the team with significant workflow optimisation. As workflows ease and manual intervention reduces, clients can allocate resources to higher value workstreams. Typically, clients see efficiency and workstream improvements within three months of deployment witnessing up to 90% bandwidth liberation in certain tasks.

2. Medium term – Firms see impact across and within teams over a 12-18 month period. Depending on modular/ E2E deployment, clients typically observe improved response time – within their portfolio or in evaluating a deal, with a more cohesive, firm wide and transparent view around decision making. This is where Kelp starts transitioning from being a decision enabler to a decision engine, going beyond efficiencies and augmenting the teams’ approach to investment. One of our clients for example, was able to minimise the time spent on misfit opportunities, instead allocate more time on identifying and closing the right fit deals aligned to a “firm view”. Another anchor client, focused on proprietary sourcing, was able to progress conversations and invest in assets identified 18 months prior via Kelp DI, engaging advisors when transactions came to market, and were better prepared with sell-side’s price and valuation expectations. The speed to market and pre diligence were instrumental in closure.

3. Long term ROI over an 18–24 month period. Clients are able to observe a digital transformation in the organisation over this period. Kelp changes the way teams work with each other - creating well structured data lakes, on-tap ‘intel’ about companies, deals, sectors, portcos and market movements. Powered by all types of data specific to individual teams and the whole firm overlayed with custom rules, configured workflows and the right-fit AI enabler, Kelp enables the firm’s management to empower their teams to deliver at peak performance.

No. Kelp’s tools are designed to maximize the value of your secret sauce, digitizing and automating volume tasks to free up resources and bandwidth, accelerating certain parts of the deal lifecycle, and providing decision makers with better, more robust, more nuanced data on which to apply that secret sauce. Kelp is not about changing what you do but enabling you to do it faster, more consistently and, ultimately, better.

No. All client specific information is hosted on the client’s cloud infrastructure or on a secure dedicated Kelp server. Fund managers or deal advisors have highly specific investment approaches, driven by strategy, legacy, relationships and the partners’ styles, and Kelp’s robust architecture ensures this secret sauce is not transferable.

We define deployment as scoping to delivering logins to our clients. In a data-free environment, with clear client asks, this can be as little as (two weeks). In the most complex of deployments, we can take up to three months to go-live. Kelp supports a variety of customizations and data sources, although these do impact the speed of deployment in addition to the following factors:

· Specificity of the use case (the more well defined the ask, lower time to go live)

· Quality and cohesion of underlying proprietary data

· Number of stakeholders involved in the deployment

· Number and quality of data sources required for integration

· Type of customizations in workflows, features or formats

Kelp’s underlying architecture is unique in that while rooted in years of incubation within a PE firm – and therefore, built to reflect typical PE workflows, it is configurable to individual firms. Kelp’s architecture, combined with the latest digital advancements, paves the way for what ‘mass customization’ - a departure from the traditional view of trade-off between standard technology and bespoke solutions. where best in class architecture, UI/UX and the power of AI support personalisation (parameter selection, metrics, dashboards and visualisations and even branding on downloads).

Kelp prioritizes security by adhering to industry best practices, including the OWASP Top 10—a globally recognized standard for web application security. Kelp’s tools are designed to mitigate critical risks such as broken access control, cryptographic failures, injection attacks, and insecure configurations.

Kelp implements robust authentication, encryption, and continuous monitoring to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access. Regular security audits, software updates, and integrity checks ensure that Kelp remain resilient against evolving threats.

Kelp is also ISO 27001 certified, ensuring that data security remains a core focus for the platform now and in the future.

Kelp’s client success managers are embedded with client teams to identify core needs and the best solution within Kelp. These managers run customized walkthroughs based on each team’s requirements from Kelp, and are available for any questions and enhancement requests.

For customizations, Primary stakeholders get to preview the solution, both in design (before development), and post development (in the User Acceptance Testing) stages.

Once rolled out, teams get a walkthrough of the new feature as above, to ensure that the flow and data are as expected.

Efficiencies depend on the feature in use. For example:

· Finding entities of interest are faster from the get go, since all data sources and points have been set up in Kelp.

· Performance data is available from day one, so insights, whether monthly pipeline performance, or yearly firm performance, are always available to consume, dependent only on the time frame since Kelp’s use.

· Long-term insights like goodness of decision making are available once performance data for accepted and rejected deals are available – typically 3-5 years after the initial decision on Kelp. Migrating pre-Kelp data into Kelp will accelerate this process.

Kelp’s total cost of ownership is dependent on:

· Quality and availability of source data, usually dependent on geography

· Modules / sub-modules being considered

· List of geographies of interest and user base for Kelp DI, user base for Kelp DM and number of portfolio companies for Kelp VC (or its sub-moules)

· License tenure Kelp’s modules are licensed on an enterprise and not on a user basis.