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Co-founder and CTO of Keeyu, an engineer who has spent decades building systems at scale, from enterprises processing billions of transactions to startups shipping daily, and now builds the AI that keeps e-commerce orders on track.
AI Engineering, Agentic AI, Ecommerce Operations, SaaS
Tahir Rauf is the co-founder and CTO of Keeyu. He has spent his career building systems at scale, from enterprises processing billions of transactions to startups shipping daily, and Keeyu is where those two worlds meet.
He came up on the infrastructure side of retail and finance. Before Keeyu, Tahir worked on retail systems at Woolworths and engineering at Mastercard, the kind of platforms where one failed transaction is a real cost to a real person. He and his co-founders spent decades in e-commerce operations and customer service for some of Australia's best-known brands, and they kept seeing the same thing: between the moment a customer clicks buy and the moment the order arrives, dozens of systems have to talk to each other, and that is where the chaos lives. Keeyu started there. The team mapped 86 distinct problems in the fulfillment journey and set out to fix them at the source.
Tahir's approach is the opposite of bolting AI onto a dashboard. “We don't automate chaos,” he says. “We design the fix first, then we connect the tech.” Under the hood that means around 100 connectors into the systems a store already runs, data streams that process millions of orders a second, a real-time rules engine, and 30-plus AI agents that detect a problem forming and act on it. When proactive tracking and fixes go live, he has watched “where is my order” inquiries fall 50 to 90 percent within weeks, on live systems for brands like Rebel Sport, Camilla, and Helly Hansen.
He is opinionated about how that AI should be built. Tahir writes and speaks widely on agentic engineering to an audience of 11,000-plus on LinkedIn, arguing that vertical agentic AI will win the next decade and that the real system is “the loop between” humans and agents, not one replacing the other. At Keeyu he holds a hard line on accountability: agents reason and execute, humans protect the edges, and every action is transparent and reversible down to the step. “Accountability is the path to trust,” he says, “and trust is the path to adoption for AI agents.”
That is the standard he brings to Keeyu's founding promise. Every order is a promise, and Tahir is the one making sure the technology can actually keep it, at the scale of millions of orders, on the days it matters most.
