From the Surf Circuit to Scaling AI: How Jevon Le Roux Built Keeyu
Before he was solving operational headaches for ecommerce brands, Jevon Le Roux was solving a very different kind of problem: how to read a wave before it broke.
A former professional surfer on the World Surf League circuit, Jevon spent his early career competing at the highest level before stepping into retail leadership, where he'd spend the next two decades.
Over that time, Jevon held senior roles at some of the biggest names in action sports and fashion retail: Regional Sales Manager at Billabong, General Manager at Hurley, Managing Director at SurfStitch, Managing Director at P.E Nation, and CEO at Papinelle.
It was inside those businesses that he saw the same problem play out again and again: by the time a customer complains about a late delivery, a failed payment, or a lost return, the damage is already done.
Brands were spending huge amounts of time and money reacting to operational failures instead of catching them before they hit the customer.
That observation became the founding thesis behind Keeyu, the company Jevon co-founded with Tahir Rauf (CTO) and Tracy Godtschalk (CPO).
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Keeyu is an AI-powered platform built to sit across a brand's existing tools (Shopify, ERPs, warehouse systems and carriers) and catch operational issues before they become customer complaints.
Jevon describes the approach simply: "sell painkillers, not vitamins." Rather than another dashboard brands have to check, Keeyu is designed to proactively flag the payment failures, fulfilment delays, shipping problems and returns issues that quietly erode customer trust and revenue.
The results have been striking. Early customer EHP Labs used Keeyu to save $455,000, cut reactive helpdesk tickets by 55%, and shrink resolution times from 45 minutes down to just 5.
Keeyu's first 35 customers, including David Beckham's IM8, were closed through founder-led sales, and the company has since raised a $2.3M pre-seed round led by Rampersand and is now nearing $1M in annual recurring revenue.
With a 25-person team based in Sydney, Keeyu is now setting its sights on the US market, where the scale of the problem is even bigger: Keeyu estimates $250 billion a year in churned ecommerce revenue and $90 billion in reactive-fix costs stem from operational failures brands never saw coming.
For Jevon, the through-line from professional surfing to founding an AI company isn't as unusual as it sounds. "Learning to read what's coming before it breaks," he says, "isn't so different in the water than it is in ecommerce ops."
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