Australian AI consultancy acquired by Bain & Co


Brandon How
Reporter

Multinational consulting firm Bain and Company has acquired the consulting and managed services divisions of Brisbane-based artificial intelligence consultancy Max Kelsen for an undisclosed amount.

Max Kelsen’s team of full stack machine learning engineers will join Bain’s Advanced Analytics Group to “help enterprises develop and operationalise high-impact AI and ML enabled use cases”, the company announced on Tuesday.

Only the consulting and managed services division of Max Kelsen, known as Max Kelsen Consulting, is being acquired by Bain. Max Kelsen’s products division SAVI Surgical and PROPeL Health AI, as well as its  research division, are not included in the deal and will operate independently following the acquisition.

Bain and Company sign in San Francisco, United States. Image: Tada Images / Shutterstock.com

Founded in 2015, Max Kelsen is an experienced service provider to the healthcare and life sciences sectors but has served companies in a broad range of sectors in Australia and globally. This includes cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud Platform, as well as other sectors including mining, financial services and retail.

The company currently has one active contract with the federal government. It is providing an ‘industry coding proof of concept’ to the Australian Bureau of Statistics between October 2022 and the end of March 2024, at a cost of $750,000.

Max Kelsen co-founder and chief executive Nicholas Therkelsen-Terry said the firm is excited to join Bain as the world begins to grapple with the disruption of generative AI.

“In a rapidly evolving business climate, companies that understand how to use these tools to their advantage will come out on top. By joining Bain, we are thrilled to be working with an even larger pool of global clients and supporting Bain to strengthen their global ML capabilities,” he said.

Bain’s Advanced Analytics Group global head Roy Singh said the company is excited to welcome the Max Kelsen Consulting team to Bain.

“We are delighted to welcome the Max Kelsen Consulting team to Bain, and to bring their industry-leading machine learning expertise to bear to deliver even more powerful solutions to our clients,” he said.

“We are seeing growing demand from clients for AI-related services and engineering capabilities that will enable them to be early movers in shaping how this generational shift in technology could transform their respective industries.”

Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.

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