Bucharest-based FintechOS raises USD 14 million to continue its rapid growth across Europe and to expand to South East Asia and the US markets. FintechOS will also invest in the continued development of more pre-built apps, services and solutions to break down the barriers to multi-channel customer service. The company focuses on hyper-personalised and true end-to-end automated financial technology, non-expensive and easily integrated with existing systems, allowing financial products and services delivery at unprecedented speed – weeks rather than months or years.

The financing was been led by the Digital East Fund of Earlybird Venture Capital and OTB Ventures, with follow-on participation from existing investors Gapminder Ventures and Launchub. In 2018, the company registered 1.1 million Euros in revenue. This year’s target is expected to exceed this figure by over 450%, with similar growth predicted in 2020.

According to Teodor Blidăruş, CEO and co-founder of FintechOS, demand for technology that allows banks, insurers and other financial services companies to transform the digital customer experience has never been higher, looking at the success of disrupting and innovating brands like Monzo or Revolut.

“Our disruptive approach is customer, not technology driven. We’ve created FintechOS to transform the financial industry, empowering banks and insurance companies to act and react faster than fintechs, to create a smarter, slicker customer experience. As a result, hyper-personalised services and elevated customer experiences are now available almost plug and play.”, states Teodor Blidăruș, CEO and Co-Founder of FintechOS.

FintechOS technology empowers traditional banks and insurance companies to adapt to rapidly changing customer expectations, and match the speed and flexibility of Fintechs, their new and technology driven competitors. Their platform provides end-to-end digital automation for all insurance and banking products, in an inexpensive way and working seamlessly alongside the existing technology infrastructure. The platform can be deployed both as part of multi-cloud SaaS, helping clients transition to the cloud, and on premises deployments.

„FintechOS is changing paradigms. It is transformative for the financial services industry, and possible other industries in the future. Its vision and state of the art technology help today banks and insurance companies to dramatically speed up the implementation of new and fully automated ways to deliver their own services to their customers or to interact with their own employees and ecosystems. And all these in a non-expensive way and easily interacting with existing systems. For the Series A investment round we are confident to follow-on and see their international hyper-growth going further”, declared Dan Mihaescu, Founding Partner of GapMinder. In 2018, GapMinder led the seed round of investment for the same company, and made a follow-on investment at the current round.

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In a first of a kind partnership in Romania, GapMinder Venture Partners announced it will double the money angels from Techangels Romania will invest in startups, for any investment between 40,000 and 200,000 euro. The main goal of the partnership is to increase the amount of angel-investments, with an estimated 5 up to 10 investments to be made in the following 12 months.

The companies selected for this program will have access to a cumulated round of investments of up to 400,000 euro, also benefiting from the support of the institutional investor GapMinder by accessing its partners’ know-how and other potential rounds of investments. Since January 2018, when it was created, until now, GapMinder invested in 31 companies and reached a threshold of 40 million Euro as fund size.

“Angel investor investments are the basis of any healthy startups ecosystem, which is the reason why investors can have a substantial contribution for the companies’ development. The angel investors are mainly successful entrepreneurs. Thus, a startup can benefit from their experience regarding multiple business aspects, from employment policy to products strategy and operational aspects. The partnership with TechAngels is the first step we make in this direction and we are open to similar partnerships with other angel investors groups, in the future”, said Cosmin Ochișor, GapMinder Partner.

GapMinder-TechAngels partnership aspires to becoming a model of good practice regarding the way in which such investments are made, with the aim to equally protect the companies which benefit from the investments and the investors.

“The venture capital investments’ philosophy is that the founders of the company should maintain control over these ones as much as possible and after two or three rounds of investments they should still own over 50% of the company”, explained Cosmin Ochișor.

On his turn, Malin Iulian Ștefănescu, TechAngels President added: “Technological innovation can be Romania’s main competitive advantage. TechAngels brings together angel investors who, individually or together, in syndicated rounds, provide financial resources and business experience to facilitate the growth and internationalization of Romanian technology start-ups. TechAngels investors are entrepreneurs and executives from corporations, with significant experience in their area of activity and well connected, not only with the leaders from different industries, but also with national and abroad investment funds. The partnership with GapMinder comes after an excellent collaboration over time and I believe that it will increase both the funds’ volume to which startups will have access, as well as the value of their results”.

About GapMinder Venture Partners BV

GapMinder Venture Partners BV is an investment fund set to provide capital for early stage companies with traction and for developing technology SMEs in expansion phase both on local or international level. The focus is on technology and services, sectorial diversification, product-centric and team-centric targets. GapMinder invests in Series A, Seed, and pre-Seed rounds.

Fund’s partners have a hands-on approach as investors, enhancing companies’ organic growth via direct involvement in operational streamlining, corporate governance, financial discipline, and coaching management. 

The fund is co-financed through the Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020.

About TechAngels

TechAngels was founded in 2013 with the aim of becoming a common meeting point between tech startups and investors. The group has two main objectives: educate and support young entrepreneurs throughout investments, access to the accelerations programs and many other resources necessary for developing their own business and to encourage the potential angel investors to take the first steps in this field. 

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