Raise the Mastt: Aconex founders back ‘spreadsheet killer’ start-up

“After completing my engineering degree at ANU in 2011, I went headfirst into the construction industry. I got a rude shock to find organisations like the government and major property owners managing complex capital works and infrastructure programs with spreadsheets,” Mr Vincent said.

“These were huge economically important projects, building large schools, hospitals and naval wharves, and there were sometimes thousands of spreadsheets on just one project. It was a total mess and I was pulling my hair out. No wonder we see regular reports in the news of projects going over cost and time.”

Having decided after seven years that he would try and build a company to tackle the problems he was facing in his job as a program manager at professional services firm RPS Group, he invested $150,000 of his own money and teamed up with tech entrepreneur Raman Nambiar and Mr Cerexhe to develop the minimum viable product.

RPS became Mastt’s first client while Mr Vincent was still working there and he said they were suitably patient as it ironed out the inevitable early bugs in its software.

Its association with Mr Phillpot and Mr Hennessy came about when Mastt last year won a start-up contest at the Oracle Construction Technology Summit, where they were both judges.

“We are excited to be involved with Mastt who are providing an extremely interesting and unique product for the project owner’s market, which has traditionally been lacking in technology,” Mr Phillpot said.

Mr Hennessy said he had been impressed by the company since it had unanimously won the top prize at the Oracle event, in particular noting the speed at which it was scaling up its product at such an early stage in its development.

“Mastt is one of the few companies I’ve seen that have recognised the great opportunity for the construction ecosystem to make huge leaps in efficiencies by vertically integrating processes, in the same vein as we have seen for years in industries like finance and manufacturing,” Mr Hennessy said.

Mr Phillpot and Mr Jasper have become prolific investors in local tech companies since they sold Aconex to US tech giant Oracle for $1.6 billion in 2017.

Mr Jasper last week revealed he was investing in procurement tech company VendorPanel, whereas Mr Phillpot recently joined the board of listed construction tech company Felix.

Mr Vincent said Mastt’s rapid growth was reflected in the company’s numbers.

It employs 30 people and claims to service more than $10 billion worth of capital and infrastructure projects. Its annual recurring revenue – a metric used by fast-growing software-as-a-service companies to show normalised annual revenue from existing subscriptions – had grown from zero to $1 million in 18 months.

He said the company had good long-term growth projects and nearly all the projects it was used on spanned up to a decade, which would provide regular, reliable and potentially increased revenue.

The fresh funding will go towards existing plans to invest in its technology and expand overseas later this year, despite the travel restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The team has been preparing for a scenario where overseas travel remains off the card until 2022. We’ve come up with a seamless way for international clients to self-serve and implement Mastt without the need for local staff,” Mr Vincent said.

“Our goal is to employ 50 staff, expand overseas and 10x the revenue we are currently achieving. It’s ambitious, but the growth of the product to date has been phenomenal and we’re really bullish on its future prospects.”

Artesian portfolio manager Alexandra Clunies-Ross said she had recognised that Mastt was addressing an under-served sector that was spending billions of dollars every year on projects that were not properly tracked by technology.

“The Mastt founders bring a winning blend of deep industry experience and tech team management, they are solving a complex problem that they have experienced first-hand and providing the tech grunt to scale up a global play in the sector,” she said.