By: Rea Naidoo
Niroj Sri was one of the few students selected from his school to spend an afternoon with Sir Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer who made the first confirmed ascent of Mount Everest. Today he remembers almost none of it, except for one idea he still can’t shake.
Niroj, now CEO of Helppli and founder of the AI platform HelppliX, walked away from that afternoon believing he shouldn’t put a ceiling on what he could do. He built that belief into a tagline he’s carried across every business since: Welcome to Possible.
His path into entrepreneurship wasn’t a sudden leap. His grandfather, a self-made businessman who sold goods off a bicycle as a boy in the 1940s, taught him to build the foundation first. Niroj took the lesson seriously. He studied software engineering, finished an MBA, and spent years in global corporate roles, including a stretch at several leading global companies, where he led teams across markets.
When Goldman offered to move him to the US or London, he turned it down. His family, and his wife’s family, were in New Zealand, and he wanted Australia, rather than somewhere further away, to be home. Mobile apps were just starting to take off around then, and Niroj used the moment to found his first company, building some of the earliest mobile loyalty apps in Australia, work that came before he moved into education technology with KinderM8.
KinderM8 was the business he would run for a decade. It started small: an app that let parents track daily routines at daycare, nappies changed, meals eaten, hours slept, the kind of detail most parents want and most daycare software at the time didn’t bother tracking. It grew into a full CRM handling payments and workforce management, integrated directly with Australian government childcare funding, a system that had to work correctly for families every month. The software also had to keep pace with frequent changes to government funding rules, which made accuracy non-negotiable.
Niroj built KinderM8 from 2015 until its exit in 2025. Looking back, he’s candid about what he’d change.
“I went too deep into the product and ignored the marketing,” Niroj said. “You can build referrals and grow that way, but it’s hard to create momentum. I learned it’s just as important to build brand awareness as it is to build the product.”
That lesson shaped how he approached Helppli and HelppliX. This time, he wanted to build the product and its visibility side by side.
Helppli is built around taking a founder’s idea and engineering it into something real. Having a vision and having the ability to build it are two different skills, a distinction a lot of founders learn the hard way. HelppliX is where that same team turned their expertise into a product of its own. Businesses increasingly need to understand how they show up when someone asks an AI assistant about their industry, as well as what’s driving results in the campaigns they’re already running. HelppliX is built around three pieces:
- HelppliX Agent deploys an AI teammate that handles real customer conversations across phone, chat, and messaging apps like WhatsApp, giving businesses an always-on front line without adding headcount.
- HelppliX Reach tracks how a brand shows up across AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Google, and Gemini, and identifies areas that may need attention.
- HelppliX Grow reviews a client’s campaign history and recommends changes based on what the data shows, rather than guesswork.
Niroj sees AI the way an earlier generation saw the calculator.
“You’ve got to consider it as a tool and build around it, rather than think it’s going to replace you,” he said. “It can look at the data you already have, identify patterns and trends, and give you insights in seconds – work that might previously have taken weeks or months to analyse manually.”
He applies the same thinking to how he runs his teams, which are spread across multiple countries. He compares it to rowing.
“If you want to go from one place to another, you’ve got to make sure you have the right team to support you,” Niroj said. “People need to grow with you at the same pace. If someone’s pulling in the opposite direction, you’re not getting anywhere.”
His own team spans three countries, and he runs all three as one core team.
“The moment you don’t do that, it doesn’t work,” Niroj said. “People stop feeling like they’re part of the same goals, and they stop delivering the same output. I’ve seen a lot of companies fail because they don’t treat every team the same way.”
When he talks about what it takes to become a CEO, Niroj goes back to what his grandfather taught him: build the foundation first. Go to school. Do the work. Don’t take shortcuts.
It traces back to that afternoon in New Zealand, where a boy met a man who’d climbed higher than almost anyone alive. What stuck was one line: don’t limit yourself. Nearly three decades later, it’s still the thing running his companies.
To learn more about HelppliX, visit HelppliX.ai.
