Real Voices of Scale-up

Welcome to Techspace’s 10th episode of the Real Voices of Scale-up, where we hear from scale-up Founders on the front line. The Real Voices team speak to real scale-up founders getting it done in the Techspace community. This week, we’re in Techspace Shoreditch hearing from one of the most talked about Scandinavian startups, the European FinTech team at Pleo! In this episode, our General Manager sits down with CoFounder and CEO, Jeppe Rindom. Recorded weeks before their huge record breaking Series B funding round of $56 million. We join the interview with Jeppe talking about the FinTech industry, giving context to the rise of FinTech’s success, of which Pleo has been a great example.

We sat down with Managing Director, Friedrich Hubel to hear about pivoting from a B2C to a B2B company, preparing the team for acquisition and building a sustainable business. Lendico was founded in 2013 by the incubator and venture capitalist, Rocket Internet. The team are rethinking finance in Germany by offering companies an easy, fast and good value product. Together with ING, they aim to enable small and medium-sized companies to realise their full potential by not having to focus on the hassle of raising funds in the traditional way.

We sat down with Elina Räsänen of Holvi to hear her views on building a sustainable business, establishing an international user base and empowering micro-entrepreneurs to do more. In 2011 Tuomas Toivonen and Kristoffer Lawson were tired of the time and effort that money management and business bureaucracy took up when running their small business. They launched Holvi, a fintech company that provides digital banking services for European entrepreneurs and freelancers.

We sat down with Harry Franks, Co-Founder and CCO at Zego to hear his views on disrupting the traditional insurance industry, building a world class team and empowering gig economy workers to do more. In 2016 Harry Franks, Sten Staar and Stuart Kelly set out to reinvent commercial insurance for self-employed people. They launched Zego and started with an hourly policy for scooter drivers which meant that drivers no longer had to pay for insurance they didn’t need. Instead they could get flexible cover for the hours they worked. Zego has since launched plenty more products, all designed to enable gig economy workers make insurance work for them.

Co-Founder, Jeff Lynn shares his views on European expansion, how he prepared the company for sustainable growth and the motivations behind his move from CEO to Executive Chairman. Since launching in 2009 Seedrs has funded more than 640 deals and was named the most active UK investor of private companies in 2017 (Beauhurst). Companies who have raised on the platform include Revolut, Perkbox and Wrisk.

Since launching in 2005 Voxbone has become fully licensed in 63 countries, powering 92% of the world economy. We sat down with CCO, Shachar Radin-Shomrat to hear about Voxbone’s rebrand, the challenges she’s faced scaling global tech businesses and the motivations behind her move from software engineering to corporate management.

We sat down with Co-Founder, Cem Savas, to find out how he’s effectively scaled Europe’s first fully transactional home services marketplace. Since launching in 2013 Plentific has: secured over £7m in funding, grown from a team of 2 to 45+ and forged partnerships with the likes of B&Q.

Since launching in 2013 Silverfin has: secured Series-A funding, opened offices across Europe and forged partnerships with the likes of Deloitte. We sat down with Co-Founder and CEO, Joris Van Der Gucht, to find out how he's building the 'Salesforce for financial data' (TechCrunch).

We sat down with Co–Founder and CEO, Niall Barton, to find out how Wrisk is bringing insurance into the digital age. Niall shared his views on the growth of InsurTech, his experience of crowdfunding with Seedrs and the benefits of working with larger...

We sat down with Founder and CEO, Raph Crouan, to get his views on the IoT sector, and how he 'jumped' from corporate to startup. Following a successful career at Apple®, Raph joined Startupbootcamp which has since grown from 4 to 24 programmes worldw...