Case Study: Everproof Credentials Management
Short form
Hugh and Nathan discovered that one of their teachers had bought their degree from a counterfeiting shop in Thailand. That discovery became a platform. Redgum built the MVP, helped them raise from Blackbird Ventures, and stayed as the technical backbone through successive funding rounds as the business grew internationally. A good success story — and a cautionary tale about what happens when founder vision and investor timeline fall out of alignment.
The challenge
Some people work hard for their qualifications. Others buy the piece of paper in Bangkok.
Hugh and Nathan encountered both kinds, and realised the problem was systemic. Checking credentials by hand is slow, inconsistent, and depends on trusting documents that can be forged. The consequences of getting it wrong fall on the institutions that hire — schools, hospitals, construction sites, childcare centres — and on the people who work alongside someone whose qualifications they assumed were real.
Their idea, originally called BlueQ, was to make verification authoritative rather than assumed. Instead of an employer asking a candidate to produce a document and taking it on faith, the platform would go back to the source — the university, the government register, the professional body — and validate each credential directly. A police check is either current or it is not. A working-with-children card either exists or it does not. The platform would know.
The concept was clear. Building it — across multiple credential types, multiple authoritative sources, and a user base that ranged from tradespeople to teachers — was the challenge.
What we built
Redgum built the minimum viable product. The first version gave individuals a personal credential portfolio: upload your qualifications, and the system validates each one against its authoritative source. A forklift licence confirmed with the issuing authority. A first aid certificate checked against the provider. A university degree verified with the institution. Each credential either earns a validation mark or it does not — and the mark means something, because it came from the source.
As the product was tested in the market, a more nuanced problem emerged. People in high-volume hiring environments — trades, healthcare, education — were applying for multiple roles at once. They did not want to expose their entire credential portfolio every time. The platform evolved to let people build packets: a curated subset of credentials, shared selectively for a specific role or employer. Share what is needed; withhold what is not.
What made Redgum’s contribution valuable at this stage was breadth. Getting a platform like this to MVP requires capability across user interface design, database architecture, API integrations with credentialing authorities, and service-oriented infrastructure — usually the work of several specialist developers hired separately over months. Redgum brought that range under one roof. Hugh and Nathan could get to market fast, with patterns that would hold as the product grew, rather than inheriting a patchwork of early decisions they would have to unpick later.
The outcome
The MVP earned BlueQ its first round of funding from Blackbird Ventures, one of Australia’s leading early-stage investors. That round validated the concept in the market and gave the founders the runway to build an internal team.
As Everproof — the name the company rebranded to as it grew — expanded internationally, Redgum’s role shifted. The internal development team took on the primary build; Redgum moved into an architectural and senior support role, helping the growing team stay on the foundations that had been established and navigate the decisions that came with scale.
The founders raised successive rounds in the United States and grew the business to significant size. It is a good success story. It also carries an honest lesson.
Taking on venture capital at scale introduces a tension that Eric Ries describes plainly: the investor’s timeline for a return and the founder’s vision for where the company should go do not always align. When the gap between them becomes large enough, and when the investors hold enough votes, the company’s direction can change. That is what happened to Everproof. The original value proposition — giving individuals authoritative, portable control of their own credentials — gave way to a focus the investors preferred. The founders came out of it with a good exit. The vision they started with did not.
Hugh and Nathan have since moved on to their own things in different industries, both successfully.
For Redgum, it was a genuine success — a company taken from a concept to a funded, internationally operating business, on foundations we helped design and build. And a reminder worth passing on: the structure of the capital you take shapes the decisions you will eventually be allowed to make.