Clipboard Hospitality backer Mayfly Ventures merges with Brisbane's Oka Studio

Melbourne-headquartered Mayfly Ventures, a backer of early-stage AI startups including fast-growing disruptor Clipboard Hospitality and its Choosey platform, has announced a merger this week with no-code agency Oka Studio as part of a focus on larger projects.

Mayfly Ventures founder Joe Young tells Business News Australia the combined team will have 12 staff and the capabilities to work with larger corporate partners on innovation projects requiring greater depth in product, design, and technical execution.

Oka Studio founder Marco Santiago - a former managing director at Josephmark - will join the combined group as chief technology officer and partner, alongside founding partners Joe Young and Geo George.

Young says the Mayfly team met Santiago in mid-2024 when they were looking for a collaboration partner to develop the Choosey platform for Clipboard Hospitality, a cutting-edge, AI-driven professional networking platform designed specifically for the hospitality, tourism, and accommodation industries.

Choosey was developed as a gig-economy marketplace from Clipboard Hospitality, whose founders Tipu Sultan and Brendan Leeds were finalists in last year's Melbourne Young Entrepreneur Awards,

"Clipboard Hospitality boasts 100,000 users and 10,000 businesses already on the Clipboard platform so it was important to us to deliver an exceptional product to their existing user base from day one," explains Young, whose agency currently has eight companies in its portfolio with early-stage investment sizes of normally $50,000-100,000, often provided through services.

"So we put our faith in Marco and the Oka team to help bring this product to life. Marco delivered incredibly well and in collaboration with the Mayfly team, the Choosey platform successfully launched."

Since the Choosey project, Mayfly and Oka team have been collaborating on a project led by Santiago called Well United, a platform providing state-of-the-art virtual healthcare initially focusing on chronic muscular-skeletal issues. Young expects the platform will be rolled out in NSW next month.

"When Geo and I started Mayfly Ventures a little over two years ago, we would not have pictured where we are today," Young says.

"We now collaborate with some of the best organisations in the Australian startup ecosystem such as Airtree Ventures, Aussie Founders Club, Rampersand and Stone and Chalk and we get to work with people the calibre of Marco. I feel very lucky.

"What excites me about 2025 is that I feel like we are at the start of the equivalent of the dot com boom, but for vertical AI agents. And with this merger now in place, I believe that we are well positioned to drive Australia forward in this space."

He says the technical team at Mayfly led by Santiago is "going deep", mastering how to build exceptional AI agents, knowing which models are best suited to each use case, and understanding how different programming environments or programming tools interact with those models.

Santiago says joining Mayfly felt natural after such a strong year of collaboration.

"We share a belief that beautiful technology should solve real-world problems, and I’m excited to help scale that vision as both CTO and partner," he says.

"After leading successful agencies for years, the Oka team became convinced the conventional software development model is too slow, expensive and risky. It is outdated.

"I worked for four years at Josephmark and was always frustrated about the approach to the MVP (minimum viable product) problem. In theory, we were always focusing on getting quickly to market to prove a concept and de-risk ventures, but in practice, the projects were expensive and too complex."

After discovering no-code and other leaner approaches when developing and launching his own venture Inia Health, Santiago left Josephmark to start Oka with a focus on co-creating products and apps more quickly and at a lower cost.

"The same approach to the market of Mayfly and also a great synergy with the two co-founders led me to join forces two years later," he says.

"Together, the new Mayfly team will continue to co-build with founders and corporations, launching ventures that are fast, focused, and fit for the future."