The financial ecosystem is a tricky one. Many different entities have to interact with tedious workflows that make transparent and data-driven decision-making difficult. Sikoia aims to solve this by acting as the unified data platform for financial services to reduce regulatory risk and enable faster decision making. Sikoia’s modular enterprise platform supports various enterprises such as tech companies, lenders, advisers, and fintechs through purpose-built workflows, offering 100+ APIs to pick and choose from, as well as millions of data points to support enterprises’ decision-making.
We’re beyond excited to back the Sikoia team along with Earlybird and industry angels including Raffael Johnen (CEO of Auxmoney), Fabian Weseman (CFO of Wefox), and Charlie Delingpole (CEO of ComplyAdvantage).
“Thousands of APIs are opening siloed data sources globally at a rapid pace, but the explosion in the number of touchpoints has created significant complexity and it’s increasingly difficult to integrate this dynamic ecosystem in existing back-end systems and processes,” Alexis Rog, CEO and co-founder of Sikoia, said. “We couldn’t find a comprehensive solution that didn’t require complex manual configuration and lengthy integration. So we decided to build it.”
With over fifty years of experience in financial technology between Alexis, Stephen, Alastair and Harry, we are convinced that this is the best team to help cut through the noise of an increasingly fragmented Fintech service provider landscape. The four founders’ professional careers are a combination of experience from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, JP Morgan Equities’ business, Experian, and open banking consulting. “Sikoia’s plug and play approach is a real game changer, allowing Fintechs to access an entire data ecosystem and automate the most critical layer of their technology stack,” Reshma Sohoni, our Co-Founder and Managing Partner said. “We’re delighted to share this journey with such a dynamic and skilled team and are excited about their vision”
This round will advance product development and functionality expansion, before Sikoia’s public launch in late 2021. “With such a strong network of investors on board, we not only have their endorsement and confidence, but their insight and experience to support us as we head to public launch,” Alexis commented. We’re thrilled to back Alexis, Stephen, Alastair, Harry and the rest of the Sikoia team on this exciting journey in disrupting the future of the fintech landscape. Check out Sikoia here, and if you’re looking to join one of Europe’s most exciting early stage fintechs, Sikoia is also hiring.
Building a company isn’t straightforward. One of the many issues for companies is financial reporting, a notoriously manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task. The co-founders of LiveFlow, combining their backgrounds from Revolut and Web Summit, have teamed up to help businesses connect real-time data from Excel, Google Sheets, banks, accounting, and revenue platforms in a matter of seconds. This is all presented in a live dashboard shareable across an organisation. We’re really excited to join Y Combinator in backing the team to make financial management and transparency available for everyone. “Budgeting and understanding real-time financial data is a challenge for any business,” remarks Seedcamp Partner Tom Wilson. “We’re excited about the potential for Liveflow’s connected spreadsheet to address this pain point. Experience gained at startups such as Revolut gives the founding team the perfect basis to attack this massive market”.
One of the things that struck us about LiveFlow is the team’s philosophy around maintaining a strong company culture from day one (you can find more on their culture here!).
“We focus on natural strengths because we strongly believe that the best way to achieve high performance is to enjoy work every day,” Co-Founder Anita Koimur comments.
LiveFlow is currently expanding the team starting with Product Design talent. We decided to team up with them to share their recruitment process and their unusual approach.
1. Intro call
2. Design Review
3. FirstMind Talent Test
4. Career history interview
5. Final Interview
Interestingly, LiveFlow adopted a data-driven approach, using FirstMind to understand each candidate’s top talents. The results allow LiveFlow to put their employees in a position to maximize their strengths and have an open forum on how to collaborate with each other. LiveFlow tailors people’s talents to the job they will be doing so that person thrives and performs their best.
There are 34 talents in total attributed to a person. These natural talents are consistent patterns of thoughts and behaviours that define where a person sources their energy from and what brings them joy. By taking a deep dive into what makes them tick, LiveFlow is able to match their talents with a position that suits both parties best. For example, a person with talents such as Empathetic, Innovative and Problem-Solving would probably love a challenging role that involves talking to customers and coming up with solutions.
But how do the test results help with day-to-day work for two different people? There are two different members of the team:
Person A: Problem Solver, Targeted, Competitive
Person B: Analytical, Thinking, Contextual
This translates into a series of traits that help with finding the perfect fit for the candidate:
1. Person A is driven by having a clear goal (Targeted)
2. Person A is driven by solving new problems at all times and most likely at high speed (Problem-Solver)
3. Person A is driven by winning (Competitive)
4. Person B is driven by crunching numbers, understanding data and making thought-through decisions (Analytical & Thinking)
5. Person B is driven by the context of a situation and seeing the full picture before things are done (Contextual)
This information helps LiveFlow place both candidates in roles that work to their strengths and keep them engaged with each other. Person A might enjoy executing, solving new tasks, and get things done at lightning speed. Person B, on the flip side, will play better as the solid analytical, numbers-driven deep thinker to make an informed decision.
LiveFlow uses the test as a guiding framework but performs it during the hiring process to comprehend how the team dynamics will potentially play out.
Want to join the team? Check out their current openings here! Interact with them on their hiring process by sending an email to anita@liveflow.io or tweet @liveflow_io.
Portfolio and Pricing strategy solutions have typically been delivered via consultancy engagements and spreadsheets. Buynomics is changing that with a state-of-the-art, fully scalable, live SaaS platform. This ensures that all data inputs are current allowing for realistic market simulations in a fraction of the time that legacy solutions provide. The application of buynomics across a wide range of industry verticals really appealed to us, and the early adoption by global enterprise clients like Avira, Danone, and Fonterra is testament to the relevance of the buynomics platform. Founded in 2018 out of Germany, the company now has a team of 20+ people across the UK, Spain, and Belarus.
Buynomics’ ethos stems in the belief that portfolio optimization is about understanding the customer. Buynomics’ proprietary Virtual Customer technology behaves just like a real consumer, giving a >95% accurate view of customer reactions. The technology helps clients make smarter decisions and supports in optimizing their market share, revenue and profit. “Pricing has not evolved sufficiently in the past decades, and multi-million-dollar decisions are still based on gut feeling and overly simplistic legacy concepts, such as price elasticity, that come from a paper-and-pencil era,” says Ingo Reinhardt, co-founder of buynomics.
“We were hugely impressed by the founders Sebastian and Ingo who are both PhDs and have significant experience as management consultants with a leading global consultancy in the field of pricing and sales. They have all the right ingredients of industry knowledge, experience and ambition and we are thrilled to be able to support the company,” Dan King, our Venture Partner comments. “We look forward to seeing buynomics grow into a global powerhouse.”
With this new round of funding, Buynomics plans to build more features, automate customer onboarding, and scale sales and marketing. We’re delighted to have backed Sebastian, Ingo and the rest of the team from buynomics’ seed round on this exciting journey. You can check out buynomics here.
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