About Us
About Vertical Matters®
Vertical Matters® is a specialised research and development company dedicated to advancing the technical capabilities of the construction industry
Some industries get transformed by technology from the outside. Construction gets transformed from within or it doesn’t get transformed at all.
Vertical Matters® has spent almost two decades inside the construction industry asking a single, complex question: why does technology that works everywhere else fail to expand on a building site?
The answers have produced a body of intellectual property, digital platform frameworks, human-machine integration methodologies and sustainable plant integration systems. These frameworks exist nowhere else, because no one else has been investigating these constraints from this position, at this depth, for this long.
Founded in 2012 by Marcus van Enk, VM develops proprietary IP across digital platform architecture, construction workforce safety analytics and sustainable plant technology. All core research programs are registered with AusIndustry and the resulting IP is commercially deployed exclusively through our licensed partnerships with Platformers®.
History
It started with digging a hole on a local sporting ground in Cranbourne, Victoria, Australia in 2004
About the Company & Our Plans For the Futures
Founded in 2012 following a decade of direct construction industry experience, including a 2010 CCF/OAMPS scholarship to the USA for advancements in civil construction technology, Vertical Matters® began as a targeted research program.
The program commenced with a documented technical gap: Australian construction SMEs lacked the infrastructure available to enterprise companies. Vertical Matters® set out to engineer that architecture, developing the mobile fist digital form templates, procedure frameworks and offline capable workflow systems that became the foundational Kontrol4® IP portfolio.
Between 2015 and 2018, the research program expanded in scope and scale, including a formal collaboration with Monash University. Field deployments of the Safe at Work platform scaled across active construction sites in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and nationwide, generating massive operational datasets at a genuine commercial scale.
Following significant organisational disruption in 2018, Vertical Matters® redeveloped research infrastructure, engineering a more resilient microservices architecture focused on portable digital identity for construction workers. The research program continues today.
- Industry domain experience
Meet our founder
Built on a legacy foundation which will carry into the future
Marcus van Enk
Founder
Lead Researcher and R&D Director
Original Vision (2012)
Founded Vertical Matters to resolve the architectural limits of mobile first technology
Developed the original MQMS methodology that became industry standard
Engineered enterprise platform architecture that remains in use today
Innovation Legacy
12+ years of continuous platform development and system architecture design
Directed over 100 architectural iterations and technical field experiments
Engineered foundational mobile quality management systems
Developed the original UpviseJS configuration for the construction industry
Current Mission
Advancing the original vision exclusively through licensed partnerships
Maintaining deep IP leadership and technical innovation
Supporting industry transformation through proven, field-tested methodologies
The Foundation
Vertical Matters® was not built in a vacuum.
The van Enk family arrived in Australia in the 1950s, Dutch immigrants who left everything familiar to build something new in a country they had chosen rather than inherited.
Going back to the origins, Marcus van Enk’s grandfather established one of the first local community shops in his region, built with his wife from nothing, serving a community that was itself still being formed.
That model is, identify a gap in what a community needs, build the infrastructure to meet it, make it serve people directly, is the oldest business principle Marcus knows. It predates every MBA, every startup playbook, every digital transformation framework.
Marcus van Enk’s father continued the line. As founder of Radio Systems Technologies (RST) and developer of a product known as SmartBridge® , he engineered technical infrastructure in Australia and supplied it to over 40 countries. He built something that crossed borders.
When Marcus discovered, mid-sentence, while drafting a product email in 2025, that he had unconsciously named one of his own frameworks with the same root word his father had used, he recognised what Carl Jung calls the gold of individuation: the inheritance that was always present, visible only once the surface work was done.
Three generations. Each one building infrastructure for communities that needed it. Each one working from the same instinct without needing to be told.
Vertical Matters is the third iteration of that instinct. We apply it to the construction industry, the most foundational industry in any community, at the moment when the industry most needs someone to build the technical infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist.
The name van Enk® now carries a continuous research program, a vast body of IP and a set of entities designed to outlast any single generation’s effort. That was always the point.
