🎧 Funders & Founders: 3 New Episodes!
Central Banking as a Service, Non-dilutive Growth Financing, and RiskOps for Insurers
Hey friends -
Three new episodes of Funders & Founders! It’s an incredible array of founders building exciting startups.
🎧 #7. Carmelle Cadet, EMTECH - Central Banking as a Service
Carmelle Cadet, is Founder & CEO of EMTECH, an award-winning central bank technology platform. EMTECH is bringing modern technology including fully digital regulatory sandboxes powered by APIs to central banks around the world.
With initial clients in the Caribbean and Africa, and a major announcement with the Bank of Ghana, the company's delivering on a vision that's as thoughtful about expanding financial inclusion as it is about helping central banks innovate.
Carmelle’s story is remarkable - from Haitian immigrant to Founder & CEO of an award-winning startup. In her own words:
EMTECH is now an award-winning central bank tech provider. We won that for the regulatory sandbox when we launched a pilot, our beta, for the Bank of Ghana, because it was a groundbreaking innovation.
There's no other firm right now building what we're building. And we're pretty excited about that.
🎧 #8. Miguel Fernández, Capchase - Non-Dilutive Growth Financing
Miguel Fernández is Co-Founder & CEO of Capchase, non-dilutive financing to turn recurring revenue into flexible growth financing for SaaS startups. With almost $1B raised and over $2B made available in financing to 3,000+ companies in 10 countries, Capchase is a key partner for many of today’s leading startups.
We discuss Capchase's unfair data advantage and how that underpins their underwriting success, why the company has focused exclusively on financing technology startups, and how thinking strategically about the cost of capital is a secret weapon for successful startup founders.
It took me almost halfway through the conversation before what Miguel’s unlocked really hit me - it’s a perpetual growth machine for startups. In Miguel’s words:
If they come to Capchase, they can access between 20 to 60% of the ARR [annual recurring revenue] off their next 12 months’ revenues to reinvest into growth.
Let's say you have a million dollars in ARR and you decide to take 20%, $200,000. You reinvest that into growth over the next couple months. Your ARR goes from $1 million to $1.2 million. So then your availability grows again. So then you can do the same motion again.
🎧 #9. Will Ross, Federato - RiskOps for Insurers
Will Ross is Co-Founder & CEO at Federato, an insurance technology startup. The company’s RiskOps solution for property and casualty and specialty insurers uses artificial intelligence and dynamic optimization to help insurers better utilize their existing data investments to balance risk and growth, and incorporate organizational goals at the portfolio level.
Hot on the back of a $15M Series A, we discuss how Will rapidly developed deep domain expertise, what it means to be underwriter-centric, and how Federato helps insurers optimize risk exposures at both the case and portfolio levels.
While Federato operates in insurance, the insight is universal for everyone managing risk - individual risks and portfolio-level risks have to work in concert. Each individual manager in the portfolio “running their own business” is suboptimal at the portfolio level. In Will’s words:
We were looking at things like the increase in natural catastrophes because of climate change. We were looking at securing cyber risk. We were looking at things like social inflation in the context of the opioid epidemic.
As you look at these big social problems and you wonder, why are insurance companies struggling with them, the answer we found inevitably is that this risk selection process and this portfolio management process were entirely separate from each other.
The whole idea of RiskOps is to align this portfolio strategy piece with actually underwriting accounts, which doesn't sound like a wild idea, but it represents a huge change in how property and casualty insurance is done.
👀 Sneak peek
Here’s what to expect over the coming weeks:
Ocrolus’s Sam Bobley talks about fintech’s dirty secret (lots of paper!) and the unfair advantage of getting the first look at data.
Realworld’s Genevieve Bellaire talks about being a non-technical female founder as she scales a startup for adulting made easy.
Valur’s Mani Mahadevan is democratizing the tax strategies of the uber-rich with a self-service tech platform.
📣 Listen anywhere, listen everywhere
Fintech & Finance - complete with video, transcripts, and research notes
Cheers,
Jared