When the Software Combined team visited Melbourne to meet the Acendre people, one team member found CEO, Liam Ackland afterwards.
One team member who has been with Acendre for fifteen years had watched the whole journey: the pioneering years in Australia, the expansion to the US, and the journey that brought them back. Standing in a room full of cautious optimism, she said: “It just feels like we’re coming home. Back to our roots. Our DNA.”
Liam says it encapsulated everything the team had been feeling.
This is what that journey looked like.
What Acendre built
Acendre was founded in Australia in 1997. They created the country’s first online resume database, before online recruitment existed as a concept. By 1999 they were working side by side with Commonwealth government agencies, sitting in the room with them, learning the merit-based frameworks and compliance requirements of the Australian public sector from the inside.
That collaboration produced a product built for complexity. Not one-size-fits-all: a platform so configurable that a customer with 27 different hiring processes, each with 16 or 50 or more steps, could have every one of them mapped, automated and audited. Liam describes it like this: “It’s like a Ferrari on a racetrack. We’ve got the Ferrari. But we can either teach customers to drive, or we can bring the pit crew in and take them on hot laps.”
By the early 2000s, Acendre was winning more than half the deals it competed for. Federal Government, yes, but also state and local government, and utilities and resources. Anywhere that recruitment ran on structure, compliance and auditability, Acendre was strong.
Then the centre of gravity shifted.
Hunting rabbits, landing an elephant
The business expanded to the US. Liam moved there in 2010. His first deal was the US Department of Agriculture: 120,000 staff, 29 component agencies. He describes it now as hunting rabbits and landing an elephant.
When HireRoad refocused on its North American market, divesting the ANZ business was the natural outcome, and the right moment for Acendre to find a permanent home.
Liam came back to Australia in 2016 and refocused the business on what it does best. Today the business holds customer relationships that average 14 years, with twice the revenue, in one of the most demanding and compliance-driven hiring environments in the country.
What Liam looked for in an acquirer
Over 2025, Liam and Ben King, Acendre’s COO, and in Liam’s words his best working relationship of his career, met with more than 40 organisations: competitors, PE firms, software aggregators. They were looking for something specific.
“Hand on heart,” Liam says, “the very first meeting we had with Software Combined, the cultural fit was better than everybody else by night and day.”
What was he looking for? Australian ownership. Control over decisions. The ability to keep the team together. A partner who would invest in the product and the people rather than extract from them. Long-term commitment: not just to the company, but to the customers who had stayed for up to 29 years.
That last commitment extends beyond the business itself. Customers who have built 14-year relationships with Acendre need the same certainty the business is now getting. As Liam puts it: “We also want the forever home for our customers. And that means we’ve got to innovate. We’ve got to move forward.”
Welcoming the 14th company
Acendre is Software Combined’s 14th acquisition. Liam Ackland, CEO, Acendre Group, and the existing team remain in place. They run the business.
We look for a defensible market position, customers who rely on the product deeply, a leadership team that wants to stay on, and a culture that tells you something about the quality of what has been built. Fourteen-year average customer tenure in the most compliance-sensitive sector in the country does not happen by accident. IRAP certification to ‘Protected level’, the highest tier of Australian government cybersecurity assessment, represents years of investment. And the knowledge required to serve the agencies Acendre serves lives in the people, not the software.
As AI reshapes recruitment, Commonwealth agencies need platforms that can deliver AI innovation without routing sensitive hiring data offshore or compromising the auditable hiring standards the public sector requires. Acendre is uniquely positioned to meet that bar.
Liam’s ask was direct: keep the team together, back the product, let them get on with it. “Just put us in coach.”
Welcome home, Acendre.