CertMate: A digital chain of custody for vehicle hygiene.

FOUNDERS2FOLLOW  ·  A FARMERS2FOUNDERS PORTFOLIO SPOTLIGHT

Carina Steinbakk on handwriting vehicle hygiene certificates in a Queensland gas field, the gap between ‘said it was clean’ and ‘proved it was clean’, and building CertMate to close it.

https://youtu.be/z4IDjb16qcg

A ute pulls up to a gate. Somebody hands over a certificate saying the vehicle was washed down. The gate opens.

That piece of paper is doing an enormous amount of work. It's standing between a clean property and a weed outbreak, between an operator and a landholder's trust, between an industry and its social licence. And it is, in the end, a piece of paper- one that can be lost, backdated, or filled in afterwards in the ute on the way over.

Carina Steinbakk used to be the person writing them. Now she's building the thing meant to replace them.

The 30-second version

"CertMate is a proof layer for biosecurity. When a vehicle rolls onto a farm, a mine or a gas site, somebody has to be able to prove that it was cleaned properly-  by whom, when, to what standard, and that it didn't carry any weeds or fire ants or disease onto the property.”

That proof, she says, used to live on paper: the weed and seed form, and a handshake at the gate. CertMate turns it into a tamper-proof digital record- one that holds up if something goes wrong.

"I'm Norwegian, and I came up through oil and gas operations in Queensland. I built this because I used to be the person who had to handwrite these certificates myself.”

Norway, then a paddock in Queensland

Carina trained as an energy and environmental engineer in Norway and was hired straight out of university into onshore gas in regional Queensland. Biosecurity was not the plan.

“My engineering brain is what made me notice the problem while I was working as a frac engineer. I looked at the process and asked, why is it done this way? Could it be done in a better way- in a way that actually proves what it claims to do?”

Biosecurity, as she puts it, wasn't on her radar until she was standing in a paddock being responsible for it. The environmental engineering training and the operational reality of the gas fields collided, and CertMate is what fell out of the collision. She's precise about what actually connects her career:

“The through line isn't the industry. It's that I care whether a system actually works, or looks like it does. A piece of paper might on the surface look like it works.”

Forty machines and a clipboard

The specific moment is easy to picture. She was 26, working for Schlumberger and later in onshore gas for Origin, and one of the things she owned was land access compliance.

Every mobilisation to a new site meant every vehicle and machine had to be cleaned down and certified before it could go onto a property, and she was responsible for every piece of paper being where it was meant to be, signed off and tracked.

“Forty-plus machines. Me handwriting a vehicle hygiene certificate for every single one, three copies each, all by hand, on a clipboard. That was the job.”

It's the kind of task that gives you a lot of time to think about what you're actually holding.

“I remember thinking, this piece of paper is the only thing standing between a clean property and a weed outbreak, and the trust between the company I was working for and the company we were working for. That was a lot of responsibility for a piece of paper.”

Why dirt is never just dirt

Ask her why this is worth building a company around and she starts with mud.

“A clump of mud on a tyre or in a wheel arch can carry weed seed, soil pathogens, or fire ants. A vehicle drives from an infested site onto a clean property, that mud drops off, and weeks later you've got an outbreak that wasn't there before.”

The vehicle, in other words, is the vector and it moves between properties all day, every day. Her point is that a farm's entire biosecurity system can be undone by a single machine that wasn't cleaned properly, or that said it was clean and wasn't. Which leads to the line that is essentially CertMate's thesis:

“The gap between 'said it was clean' and 'proved it was clean' is exactly where the damage gets in.”

The numbers underneath this are not small. ABARES puts the cost of established pest animals and weeds to Australian agricultural producers at at least $5.3 billion in an average year, with weeds accounting for 82% of that. Individual species do specific damage: giant rat's tail grass, one of the weeds CertMate's own material flags as a hitchhiker under wheel arches, can cut pasture productivity by up to 80%.

The spreadsheet that the regulator accepted

Annoyance, she says, was there from day one, nobody enjoys handwriting certificates. The turning point was different, and it's the detail most founders don't get this early.

“The turning point was when I built a spreadsheet out of it, to make it go faster and to track it. And the regulator and the client accepted it as a valid alternative to the paper form. Everyone around me was saying no, no, you have to do this piece of paper — but when you dug into it, that wasn't a rule.”

That distinction matters to her, and it should to any founder listening: the signal didn't come from a customer being polite, it came from the compliance system itself accepting a digital record. Most founders, she notes, don't get that kind of validation before they've built anything.

“Annoying turned into 'someone should build this properly'. And then it got to: fine, that one is going to be me.”

Aevi Tech was founded in 2021, and CertMate went to market in March 2024. It's now on both app stores.

Why it crosses industries

CertMate works across ag, mining and energy. Carina is candid that this wasn't strategy, it was the market pulling.

She started in oil and gas- home turf, where she had the credibility and the network. What she kept hearing back, with a shrug, was that a clean vehicle is a clean vehicle.

“The same machine that's on a gas lease on Monday is on a mine site on Wednesday and a cattle property on Friday. The problem doesn't respect industry boundaries - the vehicles cross them constantly.”

That's the product logic in a sentence: it follows the vehicle, not the sector. But she's disciplined about the difference between a long game and a launch plan.

“I'm staying focused on Queensland resources until we've proven it there. The breadth is the long game, it's not currently the launch plan.”

What paper can never do

Her framing of the competitive landscape is refreshingly unglamorous: the biggest competitor is a piece of paper.

“With paper, every certificate is a leap of faith. You trust the signature, you trust the date, you trust that it wasn't filled in or edited afterwards. With CertMate, the record is captured at the moment, tied to the vehicle, the inspector, the location and the time and it can't be quietly edited later. So when the dispute comes..not if...when, you don't go looking for a folder, or hope it's somewhere in the back of a container. You pull up a record that holds.”

Or, more bluntly: paper can be lost, backdated or fudged. A proper digital chain of custody can't.

The honest bit

The hardest part of getting agtech adopted, in her experience, isn't the technology.

“Changing a habit really feels like work. Paper works right up until the day it doesn't, and that day is invisible until it arrives. If you're asking busy people to change a routine to protect against a risk they haven't felt yet, that's a really hard sell.”

She's also clear-eyed , and unusually respectful about the industries she's selling into.

“These are conservative, relationship-driven industries, and they really should be. Trust is everything. You don't win a gas operator or a grazier with a slick demo. You win them by knowing their world, showing up, and proving that you won't make their day harder. There are no shortcuts.”

Asked what she got wrong early, she doesn't hedge:

“I confused 'people agree this is a problem' with 'people will buy this today.' Everyone nodded along- yep, paper's a nightmare, yes, this is risky. Nodding isn't a purchase order.”

The fix wasn't a better pitch deck. It was changing what she was pitching.

“I spent too long pitching the problem, and not enough making the buyer feel the consequence of doing nothing. Find your painkiller framing fast. If your product is a ‘should’, it gets deferred forever.”

She calls that reframe the single most useful thing she's done as a founder.

Three years out

“CertMate is the default way vehicle hygiene gets proven across Queensland resources and ag, and it's spreading out from there. Not one customer here and there- one system. Operators, the contractors who work for them, and the landowners whose gates they drive through, all on the same record. Not a tool one company uses, but the shared layer of trust that sits between everyone at the gate. Three years out, it's infrastructure people stop noticing, because it just works.”

Pushed on what a clean-gate Australia actually looks like:

“One where nobody has to take biosecurity on faith. Where a landowner can let a vehicle in knowing, not hoping, that it's clean, and there's a record to prove it. If there is an outbreak, it gets traced in minutes, instead of becoming a he-said-she-said that closes the property and the social licence goes out the window. Every gate, every property, every vehicle: proven, not promised. That's the country I'm trying to help build, one wash-down at a time.”

Quick-fire

One stat that should worry every land manager.

“Fire ants are already on Bowen Basin mine sites, moving on vehicles. That's a potential $2 billion a year hit.”

She's right, and the detail is worth knowing. Fire ants were confirmed at BHP Mitsubishi Alliance's Broadmeadow mine near Moranbah- the first detection in Central Queensland, roughly 800km from the southeast Queensland infestation. Within about six weeks, surveillance had identified infestations at five mine sites across the Isaac and Central Highlands regions. The eradication program traced the Broadmeadow incursion to pallets of bricks that had been stored on soil and trucked north — materials, not machines, but exactly the mechanism Carina is describing: contaminated things moving between sites without a record.

The $2 billion figure is the estimated annual cost to the economy if fire ants become established nationally, alongside a projected cut to farm output of up to 40%. An independent review of the national eradication program is due to report by the end of 2026, against a target of eradication by 2032.

Best advice you've been given.

“Sell the painkiller, not the vitamin.”

You've written a fantasy novel. What does that side of your brain give the founder side?

“A founder needs the spreadsheet and the story. The novel is what taught me that story.”

Carina's ask

She was reluctant to make this sound like a pitch, so it isn't one. It's an offer.

“Let us look at your gate. If you move vehicles or run land access anywhere in Queensland across resources or ag, I'll do a biosecurity risk assessment on how you're proving washdowns today, for free.”

The assessment looks at the current process, paper clipboards and all, and shows where the gaps are: where a record goes missing, and whether you could actually prove clean if a dispute landed on your doorstep tomorrow.

“This is not a sales pitch. Most operators have never actually stress-tested their biosecurity proof. They assume it holds — until it doesn't.”

And if CertMate turns out to be the fix, so much the better.

Get in touch: aevi.tech · certmate.com.au · CertMate is on the App Store and Google Play

Founders2Follow is a Farmers2Founders series putting founders from our portfolio in front of producers, agrifood operators, partners, industry and investors. Watch the full interview with Carina above, and follow Aevi Tech for what they build next.