APRIL 5 2023

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Welcome to Edition V of Blast OIF, a monthly(ish) roundup of what’s been happening across the OIF portfolio.

It’s been a HUGE start to the year for all our portfolio companies and even in the midst of what has been a challenging year to date for the startup ecosystem, there are bright spots of innovation, creativity and grit shining through. 

In this edition of Blast OIF, we’re shining the spotlight on their achievements and recognising their recent successes. 

We continue to be extremely proud of the founders and teams we’ve partnered with, our portfolio companies and the impact they’re having. 

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Big news 💥 

We’re thrilled to have welcomed, Shan, Tim, Tony and the entire Nullify team to the OIF Portfolio, leading their Pre-Seed round. 

Nullify is a DevSecOps orchestration and correlation layer that helps developers to contextualise and prioritise vulnerability fixes throughout the software development lifecycle, from code to production to operation. With one click, developers and security engineers can run vulnerability scans across their company's entire codebase and be guided through fixing critical vulnerabilities, while triaging non-critical fixes. 

We’re excited for our future with Nullify and can’t wait to see what’s in store. Onwards and upwards! 

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Making headlines 🗞 

Our portfolio companies have been hard at work the past few months, and it's fantastic to see their dedication recognised. To highlight just a handful of their achievements; 

• 9 of our incredible founders were listed in Business Australia’s Top 100 Entrepreneur List for 2023! Namely; ‍

               Advanced Navigation co-founders Xavier Orr and Chris Shaw ‍

               Bare Cremation co-founders Sam McConkey and Cale Donovan ‍

              Go1 co-founders Andrew Barnes, Vu Tran and Chris Eigeland ‍

               Mastt co-founders Jamie Cerexhe and Doug Vincent

• Jodi Geddes, co-founder of Circle In was named a finalist in the Entrepreneur/Founder category for the 2023 Women Leading Tech Awards 
• Go1 was named a Y Combinator Top Company for 2023 and placed on the GSV 150 list, highlighting the most transformative private companies in digital learning and workforce skills 
• Advanced Navigation’s autonomous underwater drone Hydrus, was selected as a top innovator in the UpLink – World Economic Forum Ocean Data Challenge 
• Arcade won the 2023 Innovation in SaaS award at Dallas Innovates 
• Enboarder was honoured in Built In’s 2023 Best Places to Work lists, earning #87 on Austin Best Places to Work and #42 on Austin Best Midsize Places to Work 
• Go1 co-founders Andrew Barnes and Chris Eigeland were both named national finalists for EY Entrepreneur of the Year 
• Bridgit was named a finalist for the Innovator of the Year award at the 2023 Real Estate Business awards. Whilst CEO and co-founder Aaron Bassin was named a finalist in the individual category, for the Innovator of the Year award 
• Zitcha, was named one of the top 100 most promising retail tech companies in the world for 2023 by CB Insights 

New products and features alert 📢 

One of the best parts about partnering with exceptional founders building exceptional businesses is watching their growth and development! 2023 has brought new products, features and integrations, so to mention just a few; 

• D-ID recently launched their new Chat API with a streaming solution, allowing users to chat face-to-face with an AI digital human 
• Fortiro launched their new Redaction Software-as-a-Service product, whereby advanced algorithms automatically redact sensitive information such as tax file and credit card numbers from important documents 
• Vouch released their new integration with Canva, which allows users to access their entire Vouch video library within their Canva account, in addition to launching their new AI powered search tool, helping users to quickly sift through their questions, transcripts and contact details to find the video they need fast 
• Josef announced the launch of Josef Q, their industry-first tool that transforms your policies and regulations into simple digital Q&A tools in minutes with AI 

New customers and partnerships 🤝 

Since our previous edition, our portfolio companies have continued to soar to new heights and we’re ecstatic to see them reach new milestones; 

• D-ID partnered with Spring ACT to launch Sophia, a confidential and untraceable online chatbot to provide support for victims of domestic violence
• The Josef team recently collaborated with The Creative Co-Operative with the launch of Maya Cares, a chatbot designed to support First Nations, black and women of colour who have experienced racism 
• Neara partnered with Essential Energy to build a digital model of their energy distribution network, one of the largest in Australia. It has revealed Essential Energy’s capacity to transport twice as much electricity than previously thought, which is instrumental in the shift towards renewable energy 
• Go1 acquired award-winning content curation provider Anders Pink. Anders Pink’s targeted content feed, powered by their AI-algorithms in combination with Go1’s rich content library will help the learning platform reach their goal of a billion workers quicker 
• Inspace partnered with global leader in commercial real estate services and investments, CRBE to access Japan’s commercial real estate market - the 3rd largest in the world 

Our community 🤸

Over the past few months, the OIF Ventures team have participated in and organised some great events. 

• We started the year off with an epic OIF Founder Lunch and Learn, an opportunity to bring together the incredible group of founders that we are privileged to be partnered with, share challenges, learnings and build the community that is OIF. The session was led by Sam Crowther, founder and CEO of Kasada, who talked us through his journey founding and scaling a global b2b SaaS business at just 19 years old. 

• Our very own Oliver Darwin participated in the Rampersand Giant Warm Intro - SouthStart edition, aimed at levelling the playing field in tech investment. Along with some of Australia’s other leading VC investors, we were able to connect with some of the 60 early-stage Aussie founders who attended. 
• Last month we had an awesome time bringing together a small group of people from across the startup ecosystem – founders, venture partners and a few of the OIF team, catching up over some drinks at the Clock Hotel to celebrate the start of 2023. 

We’re growing 🌟 

Our portfolio companies are not the only ones growing 💪 

We’re so excited to welcome Kevin Wilson and Adam Goldschmidt to the team to help us continue to achieve our goal of partnering with incredible founders, adding material value to them and their businesses and doing our very best to help them succeed. 

Kevin joins as Partner having spent the past two decades working in leveraged finance, investment banking, private equity, venture capital and large SaaS. Before joining OIF, Kevin was Global Head of Corporate Development at Xero and was previously Head of Technology Investment Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Australia.  

Adam joins as an investment analyst after 2 years at UBS, advising some of Australia’s leading companies and investors on mergers and acquisitions and capital markets transactions spanning across the technology, media, telecommunications and infrastructure sectors. But he has now made the leap into venture capital, and we’re thrilled to have him here. 

We’re so excited to have them both on the team, so if you’re building something iconic make sure to reach out to Kevin and Adam - here! 

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Top Jobs 👩 💻 

If you’re thinking of a new career in 2023, check out our jobs board! Make sure to subscribe to be the first to know about opportunities in the OIF Ventures network, that match your search criteria.  

To name a few of these exceptional opportunities; 

• Neara is looking for a PreSales Consultant (Power Utilities) and a Customer Success Engineer in the UK 
• Assignar is hiring a Senior Software Engineer 
• Clear Dynamics is looking for a Technical Project Management Lead 
• Atomi is looking to hire an Audio Specialist 
  

There are over 150 incredible roles going across the OIF portfolio, so if you know someone exceptional who would be a good fit, encourage them to apply or reach out to our team to learn more. 

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We're seeing and investing in some exceptional founders of early-stage technology companies. So please reach out if you're creating something iconic, we love to partner with great people building something we can all be proud of! 

Thank you for reading the latest edition of Blast OIF.  

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter.

Until next time ...  

The OIF Ventures team