Our Founding Team
Ashif is an exited serial entrepreneur, turned venture capitalist. ScaleupMap was founded because he identified the need for this tool in his work as Managing Director at ScaleGood Fund. He knows first-hand how messy and time-consuming due diligence and evaluation can be for early-stage ventures. As he explained on a podcast: many founders don't get proper mentorship early, and investors waste time sifting through unstructured deals. He believes deeply in mentorship, honest feedback (even when it's hard), and in entrepreneurship as a vehicle to create real impact — whether solving social problems or backing technology that moves humanity forward.
Vision:
With ScaleupMap, Ashif aims to codify his own investor-and-entrepreneur instincts into an accessible, scalable platform: a "co-founder in your pocket," enabling founders to understand how an investor scores their company and what risks, weaknesses, and potential mistakes founders need to mitigate.
Kinza is a software engineer with a passion for startups and venture capital. As a student of Finance and Computer Science at University of Alberta, he launched ScaleupMap while still studying. Through his unique vantage point as a young founder with both technical and financial expertise, Kinza saw a gap: existing startup and investor tools often prioritized investors' interests, leaving founders — especially first-timers — with limited visibility, guidance, and structure. He's building ScaleupMap to help the startup ecosystem while also learning about startups and technology through the process of building. His goal is to create a platform that acts less like a marketplace for investors, and more like a coach for founders, giving them clarity, imprimatur, and the resources they need to navigate fundraising and growth.
Mehrshad is a current MSc student at University of Alberta in the Computer Science faculty, researching AI/ML applications with AI agents. As co-founder and engineer, Mehrshad provides the technical muscle required to build and scale the platform. He's passionate about building software that helps the startup ecosystem while continuously learning about startups and technology through the process of building innovative solutions. His expertise in AI and machine learning has been instrumental in developing ScaleupMap's patent-pending AI agents that generate investor-ready documents and provide unbiased scoring and benchmarking.
Bashir Osman
Co-Founder (In Memoriam)
Bashir was the CTO of ScaleupMap before he tragically passed away in May of 2025. Bashir was an incredible person with a passion for startups and technology. Bashir was an amazing mentor to Kinza, Mehrshad, and everyone on the software engineering team. His involvement was instrumental in shaping ScaleupMap's early vision and launch, helping ensure the platform would carry forward the founding ideals of accessibility, fairness, and support for founders. His technical expertise and dedication to building tools that empower entrepreneurs left an indelible mark on the platform and the team.
ScaleupMap was originally built as a venture diligence tool for assessing venture intake at ScaleGood Fund. The idea originated with Ashif Mawji — co-founder, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and community builder — who needed a systematic way to evaluate early-stage companies efficiently and fairly. What started as an internal tool for due diligence has evolved into something much more powerful.
Today, ScaleupMap serves a dual purpose: it remains a critical tool for investors to conduct rigorous venture assessment, while also empowering founders to understand how a VC would score their company. By providing founders with the same insights and frameworks that investors use, ScaleupMap enables entrepreneurs to identify risks and problems early on, mitigate them proactively, and scale their ventures with greater confidence and clarity.
Our mission is to reduce the startup failure rate. We recognize that the only reason a startup fails is because the founders stop working on it — typically due to discouragement and running out of money. Our software is built to catch problems early on, before they become insurmountable. By giving founders investor-grade visibility into their company's strengths and weaknesses, we help them address challenges while they're still manageable, maintain momentum, and secure the resources they need to succeed.
Today, ScaleupMap boasts:
- •A Founder OS that scores founders against best-in-class in their industry and stage and built in AI Co-Founder to get your startup to the best-in-class.
- •Patent-pending AI agents that generate investor-ready documents (investment memos, company tearsheets) and provide unbiased scoring & benchmarking against best-in-class peers.
- •Digital Pitch competition software for Innovation Hubs, Accelerators, and Investors to create and manage virtual pitch competitions with custom rubrics, judges, and comprehensive scoring tools.
- •A comprehensive directory of startups, investors, competitions, and funding programs — acting as a nexus for the startup ecosystem and enabling efficient discoverability for all parties.