How Rapido started: from a Haydn Brush PDF to a real-time integration platform
The origin story — Accredo released its Web Service API, founder Adam Holt started building, and a single Haydn Brush PO2Order workflow turned into a platform.
2026 update. This was Rapido’s original launch post in May 2023. The product has grown well beyond the numbers cited at the bottom — current scale is on /customers. The story is unchanged.
Accredo is the ERP that quietly runs a lot of New Zealand. Wholesale, distribution, manufacturing, trades — the kind of mid-market businesses where the company file is the operational source of truth. For most of its life, that company file lived behind a Windows desktop app and a closed file format. Useful, deep, opaque.
That changed when Accredo released its Web Service API in version 5 (2018). For the first time, Accredo was addressable from outside the desktop. Modern programming languages, real-time integrations, the kind of architecture every other ERP had assumed for a decade.
Founder Adam Holt had been working with Accredo customers since 2015. When the API shipped, he started building.
The first workflow
Rapido’s first product wasn’t a portal or a connector. It was a tracking app for Haydn Brush, a Christchurch manufacturer drowning in PO PDFs. The AP team was keying every line of every PO into Accredo OE manually — about 4 to 8 minutes per PO, dozens of POs a day.
Adam wired up an inbox watcher, a PDF parser, an Accredo IC matcher, and a draft-order writer. Forty POs a day became fifteen minutes of approvals. The team got their afternoons back.
That single workflow is now PO2Order, one of Rapido’s headline products.
What it grew into
From PO2Order, Rapido added a real-time customer portal so trade customers could self-serve their account information. Then a Shopify connector. Then HubSpot. Then Snowflake. Then a hosted MCP server so Claude or ChatGPT could talk to Accredo directly.
Today Rapido sits between Accredo and every modern surface a business needs: storefronts, CRM, data warehouse, AI clients. The Auckland team works alongside Accredo Partners and QSPs — never around them — and the platform is in production with NZ’s biggest brands.
Why this matters
For two decades, the only path to a B2B portal on Accredo was a custom build at $25,000 to $500,000 in services. That’s a barrier that priced most NZ SMEs out of giving their customers a modern experience. Rapido’s pitch was — and is — that this should be SaaS-priced and shipped in weeks. We’ve held to that.
If you’re running Accredo and reading this in 2026, the world looks different from 2023. AI is in production, not in pilot. Real-time integrations are the default, not the upgrade path. And the gap between “what your customers expect” and “what your back office can do” is closing — quickly, in the right hands.
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