Derek Troy-West

Kylie Troy-West, COO, and Derek Troy-West, CEO, are the husband-and-wife founding team driving Factor House, the enterprise tech startup building world-class tools for engineers using real-time streaming technologies. Derek is the technical visionary and architect behind Factor House's core solutions, Kpow, Flex and Factor Platform. He combines over 20 years of engineering expertise with a passion for building next-generation streaming platforms. Having worked globally in the enterprise fintech and finance sector, holding high-profile platform delivery roles at UBS, e2x, Fortis, and Fidelity. When he moved to Melbourne in 2012, he discovered an exciting new technology called Apache Kafka. Spending the next six years building enterprise-ready data streaming solutions across Australia and New Zealand through his consultancy. What he learned from being in the trenches with Kafka fuelled his vision for Kpow. After many months of late-night conversations, and few glasses of red wine, Kylie took a leap of faith and jumped into the co-founder and COO role, taking on 'everything that wasn't technical' in the early years. After five years of bootstrapping and selling Kpow globally without a sales or marketing team, Kylie decided it was time to up the game. She led the company's recent $5M seed round, gaining the backing of Blackbird, OIF, Flying Fox, and the Alice Anderson Fund. Kylie is known for her people-first approach to building high-performing teams and a supportive culture. Drawing on her arts and community engagement backgrounds, she strongly advocates diversity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Ensuring Factor House remains a forward-thinking, values-driven organisation. Through Factor House, Kylie and Derek intend to revolutionise the developer experience by building user-centric tools that empower engineers and make real-time data infrastructure seamless and accessible.