Our investment in Mastt: automating and simplifying the most painful aspects of project management
We’ve started 2022 with a bang, welcoming some new companies to the OIF Ventures’ portfolio. We’re excited to announce, that we led the $9.5 million Series A round of Mastt. Mastt provides capital and infrastructure portfolio offices with a cloud Saas platform that provides a simple and transparent means to manage and report on their complex construction programs. In less than two years, the company has served federal government organisations and Fortune 500 companies, including Australian Army, Jacobs Engineering, RPS Group and Aurecon.
In 2021, Mastt serviced $25 billion worth of projects and are now embarking on scaling internationally.
There are three key reasons why our team are confident that now is the time to back the Mastt team
- Co-founder Doug is a highly experienced program manager and project engineer, having an excellent understanding and network in the space. Co-founder Raman has previous founder experience with a technical sales background
- A pricing model that facilitates product-led growth, where users become advocates for the sticky product.
- Natural growth opportunities in international expansions, introduction of new modules and existing customers adding multiple projects.
89% of construction projects need Mastt
2020 global construction survey highlights a lack of integrated controls exist at a project and portfolio level across the sector. This has resulted in 89% of projects being delivered over time and over budget. Today, PMs, owners, and contractors rely on spreadsheets and Excel, which generate a lot of admin work and overheads, but fail to provide real-time or historical data analysis. It becomes even more complicated when the staff changes and some of the data simply disappears.
Mastt on the other hand, providing multi-level view of projects and visual reporting on their financial, risk and progress status, all within the structured and automated platform. The company already services top-tier clients such as RPS Group, Jacobs, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The International Policy Division and more. They boast 0% logo churn to date and are starting to capture revenue from the middle east region, US and UK.
Founding team with the perfect mix of skills, experience and dynamics
Mastt founders are strong, enthusiastic and have executed outstandingly to date.
Co-founder and managing director Doug Vincent has spent years as a certified project manager experiencing the problem first-hand. He was a program manager at RPS Australia Asia Pacific for over six years and a project manager before that for nearly three years.
Co-founder and head of strategic partnerships Raman Nambiar is an experienced entrepreneur and CEO with a combined 18 years of co-founder experience. He also has background in software education and SaaS sales, and is a strategic advisor at Switch Maven, GERUDIO and previously at Coder Academy and JPR Security services.
Co-founder and head of engineering Jamie Cerexhe brings development team management and enterprise software experience. He was previously a technology subject matter expert at United Nations, head of operations at Contentserv, industry partnerships at Switch Maven and product manager at Coder Academy.
We know that embarking on a VC partnership is a relationship that can last a decade or more. And, while we enjoy getting to know founders over time, we felt an instant connection with the team. We clicked with Mastt immediately and have been blown away by what Doug, Raman, Jamie, and the Mastt team have built.
Market worth trillions (and growing)
By 2025, the global construction market is forecast to grow from about US$11.5 trillion to over $16.6 trillion, making it one of the biggest industries in the world. The construction industry is heavily sought-after by not only private, but also the public sector. The US Government has recently announced $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Locally, the Australian government has committed $290 billion in infrastructure investments over the next decade, which sees a doubling of investments in the next three years.
What excites us the most, is that this is just the beginning for Mastt. With a demonstrated opportunity already, their growth opportunity increases vastly as they expand into global markets. Global population growth coupled with ongoing urbanisation is driving the demand for even more construction.
With almost every construction project going over budget and over time, the need for a product like Mastt is clear. The titanic volume in Mastt’s sales pipelines as well as the existence of other well-funded competitors gives us validation in their market.
Introducing Mastt: Saving time, money and mitigating risk
On top of project management and administration functions, Mastt also provides system development, tailoring, onboarding, training and implementation services. The platform is also able to give customers the ability to generate deep insights across data aggregated from all projects in a portfolio. Customers can track trends and conduct analysis using pre-built reports which can be further tailored to specific environments.
Mastt has three main capabilities so far:
- Cost Module enables the user to manage accurate project budgets and final forecast costs with reliable, real-time, data. The solution provides a real-time view of how the project, program or portfolio is tracking across commitments, cash flow and more. In addition, automating the roll-up of financial data across projects into programs, portfolios, regions and more with quick and easy drill-down functionality.
- Risk Module allows users to manage and learn from risk so they can thrive and grow during change, disruptions and unforeseen events. This solution helps to learn how to prevent issues, increase organisational preparedness and recovery and enhance compliance.
- Reporting Module provides real-time dashboards that consolidate project, program or portfolio information. The reports can be exported to a PDF or Excel file to be shared with executives, owners, or project teams.
Mastt also helps their users with stakeholder engagement. For project consultants, Mastt provides access to seamless system that minimises their administration time and provide centralised data that can be beautifully visualised and automatically reported. For project owners, they can use Mastt to take better control of their projects through monitoring analytic dashboards, risk scores and team efficiency.
Why Mastt?
To the OIF team, Mastt represents an opportunity to invest in a talented mix of co-founders tackling one of the biggest industries in the world. We love the team’s attitude towards business building, and believe they have what it takes to succeed. From the demo and our conversations with Mastt’s customers, the product is seamless, practical and makes the traditionally painful budgeting, risk-profiling and reporting jobs automated and simple.
Mastt’s transparent and clever pricing system allows unlimited users. This means customers are incentivised to maximise users on Mastt, which resulted in faster industry awareness and adoption of the product. These users quickly become advocates of the product. The dynamic of the stakeholders also means Mastt benefits from both top-down and bottom-up virality. The company can also upsell existing customers on many different levels, with additional modules and multiple projects under a single customer.
We have been extremely impressed with Mastt’s growth metrics since their inception, especially as they are already monetising internationally.
But for Mastt, we know this is just the beginning. Although the market is competitive, we are more than confident that Mastt can continue to expand and main their unique advantages with this funding.
Onwards and upwards!
Mastt is hiring now! Check open roles here.
OIF Ventures is a leading Australian venture capital firm that champions exceptional founders, driven by purpose, who add material value to their customers, markets, and communities. OIF Ventures invests in early-stage companies with innovative, high-growth and disruptive technologies with demonstrated market demand.
Founded in 2016 by a team of founders, entrepreneurs, and business-builders, OIF Ventures has raised two funds to date, managing over $300 million and closing its upsized Fund II in mid-2021 for over $115 million. OIF Ventures is exclusively backed by founders, business-builders, ASX executives, HNW and family offices. While focused on backing Australian founders, OIF Ventures seeks to partner with ambitious founders who have the opportunity to expand into global markets, in particular the US, where we can support this expansion through our extensive network of potential customers and investors.
The OIF Ventures team have backed some of Australia’s leading emerging technology companies including Go1, Instaclustr, Assignar, Enboarder, Kasada, Circle In, Adventus.io, Clear Dynamics and more.
