Technology has proven to solve a lot of problems. Small technologies have, especially, repeatedly proven to solve big problems. From next generation robotics, smart wearables, to distributed manufacturing and undoing climate change, technology is making leaps. One industry where technology is making meaningful change is the hospitality industry.

During the pandemic, the hospitality industry was disproportionately affected with hotels and restaurants having to shut down or furlough employees. This need to mitigate the cash and working capital issues also showed the data inefficiency of the industry.

Dutch scaleup Omniboost helps the hospitality industry overcome this challenge with its data automation technology. The Terneuzen and New York based company seamlessly integrates POS, PMS, Accounting data and more to enable automatic synchronisation of financial data. Its journey shows how technology can solve known problems effortlessly.

A omnichannel solution

Omniboost was founded by Kees Zorge in 2017 as a technology-based innovation and automation company. Back then, the idea was simply to offer a solution that did 100 per cent of the work as opposed to the readily available tools that provided at maximum 90 per cent of the solution to the data automation challenge.

In fact, the solution initially designed was for the retail industry, says Mike Baecke, COO and CFO of Omniboost. He says there was little traction for Omniboost’s technology at the time and when an opportunity came to deploy this solution within the hospitality industry, they were able to solve the problem within a couple of days.

Technology solutions are supposed to be adaptable and this instance showed that Omniboost had a product originally designed for the retail industry that can also be deployed in the hospitality industry. “Currently, Omniboost is fully focused on the hospitality industry but it’s not to say that the technology cannot be applied to other industries,” says Baecke.

However, the data automation solution offered by the company is not just restricted to hotels. Baecke shares an example of an integration they have done for a hotel with a parking garage located close to it. Baecke says, “We can facilitate an integration between a technology the garage uses in order to connect to a property management system to combine with the car space.”

In a nutshell, Omniboost has branched out to offer its technologies that are not necessarily dedicated to the hospitality industry. It is an omnichannel solution that was originally designed for the retail industry but through its robustness was easily deployed in the hospitality industry, but adaptable for multiple different use cases.

US expansion back on track

Hospitality was one the worst-affected industries by the pandemic and as a company serving that industry, Omniboost also had its work cut out. Baecke says unlike other tech companies, they didn’t see any accelerated demand for their product during the pandemic.

He, however, is happy that Omniboost did not see an accelerated churn either which he says, “accentuates the value of their products.”

The pandemic did force Omniboost to make major changes to its business plan. Omniboost is incorporated in the US and had major plans for expansion in the same year. However, they had to halt those expansion plans due to the global pandemic and picked up on the expansion only last year.

As a scaleup, Omniboost has a total of 25 employees and they are looking to double that number by the end of 2023. Among these 25 employees, Baecke says most are based in the Netherlands while some operate remotely as well within Europe. They also have some employees in the US but the product development will continue to take place in the Netherlands.

“The sales and business development roles will be expanded internationally along with customer support functions,” adds Baecke.

A subscription-based business model

Like many other software and system integration tech companies, also operates with a subscription-based model. The customers get an option to cancel anytime during a month, like Netflix, but Baecke says they have a churn of less than 0.5 per cent and it was the same during COVID as well.

In order to get to this strong subscription business model, Omniboost relied on a three-phase approach. The first phase involved building on its network and creating a powerful network of partnerships within the hospitality industry.

They partnered with companies building property management systems (PMS), point of sale systems, accounting systems and more. Baecke adds that this approach meant that their growth was in conjunction with that of their partners. “A lot of the subscriptions have originated in our customers’ marketplaces,” he says.

As part of this phase, Omniboost also proved that its product is market-fit, has proven scalability, and created a brand name for itself. It has also created a tech stack that supports as many technologies as possible. This meant that Omniboost could switch attention to phase two of its model, creating an enterprise business by offering its tech stack to small and medium-sized chains and management companies for both restaurants and hotels. The last phase, according to Baecke, is still under wraps and is yet to be revealed.

The really interesting thing though is the fact that Omniboost has scaled its product with users in over 70 countries across the world, with millions of dollars of transactions being processed and reconciled through its integrations on a daily basis.

Rise is all about sharing ideas, knowledge and experience

Zorge and Baecke from Omniboost joined nine other Dutch fintech scaleups at batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme. Baecke called it “an honour to be selected as a participant” of the Rise programme and their motivation to join was driven by “access to peers and industry experts for sharing knowledge, experiences, and ideas.”

Baecke, who previously worked in the airline industry, says the Rise programme was particularly helpful for his first venture in the startup world. “It’s interesting to learn that there are more companies who’ve got similar problems that we’re facing,” he says.

After multiple sessions as part of the Rise programme, and on a few occasions being given tough love, Baecke says they have now started refreshing their pitch deck. He says their current pitch deck served the purpose and are now reviewing the mission and vision to better tell their story.

Both Zorge and Baecke believe that the sessions have been insightful and provided them with excellent knowledge from experts who have gone “through the scaleup process before.”

One of the learnings, Baecke says, was to go after bigger enterprise deals while continuing to cater to smaller, independent businesses in the hospitality sector. “We’re busy negotiation our first large enterprise deals as well,” he says with a smile.

Ending the data silos

If data is indeed the new oil, then Omniboost helps its hospitality clients to put that oil in the right tank. While data being stored in silos has been a challenge, Baecke says that challenge has only “gotten worse in the past couple of years.”

He cites this creation of data silos on availability of many technology and cloud-based systems in the hospitality sector. “So there’s more data silos between the system now and the problem that we solve is also twofold,” he says.

The first problem being solved by Omniboost is integration with its staple product called automation of accounting. Omniboost calls it the standard for accounting across the board and various regions. Since it is completely source agnostic, it is also able to create a powerful ETL that can work anywhere.

For hospitality chains with different brands operating with different systems, Baecke says Omniboost’s ETL can standardise the information extracted from these systems to create one common language across the company. He says this allows the “management to see the performance overall without having to do manual extraction of excel sheets and trying to stick them together.”

The second problem that Omniboost is solving is supporting legacy systems used in the hospitality industry. By providing the same services to its customers whether they use an on-premise solution or a cloud-based solution, Omniboost is able to maintain synergy and support transition for its customers.

The success of Omniboost essentially demonstrates the success of technology to solve a major data challenge in the hospitality industry. The path they took to reach there is one of resilience and belief in building a product that would actually solve a complete problem and not 40, 60 or even 90 per cent of it.

Baecke says entrepreneurs should have a clear business model of what they want to achieve in a specific number of years and a clear strategy to not only delight their customers but also achieve enterprise success.

The payment industry has evolved a lot in the past decade, where paying a person has become as easy as sending a text message. This advancement in electronic payment and introduction of peer-to-peer payment has often come with the question of whether you are paying the right person.

While the European Union introduced Payment Services Directives 2007 (PSD1) to make payments safer and secure for consumers and followed up with PSD2 in 2015 to increase competition from non-banks, there is often confusion surrounding International Bank Account Number or IBAN.

To overcome this challenge, Marcel Rienties and David-Jan Janse started SurePay as an IBAN-Name Check platform that prevents misdirected payments and fraud. Their story shows how the rise of fintech is also massively driven by innovation.

Payments made easier and personal

The idea of Surepay struck Rienties and David-Jan Janse when they were working on a new Rabobank app with the goal of improving payments. “We believed that paying your friends or a company should be as easy as chatting, calling, sharing: you tap someone’s picture or logo and initiate a payment,” says David-Jan Janse.

However, their new app still relied on making payment to an account number, which meant dealing with IBAN’s and opening a possibility of error and fraud. Their solution to this problem became Confirmation of Payee or IBAN-Name Check while making a payment.

This feature made sure that the name is checked for the genuine account holder and prevented misdirected payments. In 2016, the co-founders of Surepay invented this Confirmation of Payee feature as a startup of Rabobank but became an independent company in 2020.

SurePay operates in four EU countries and provides check-services to banks, government, and corporates. The innovation has been so crucial that the European Commission has proposed making the IBAN-Name Check mandatory for all instant payments.

David-Jan Janse says, “Our service has a huge impact and results in an 81 per cent reduction in impersanation scam like invoice fraud and a 67 per cent reduction in errors in online banking. Companies use our solution in multiple business processes, such as customer or supplier onboarding, resulting in 80 per cent less fraudulent onboardings. Besides preventing or detecting fraud, the value is often much more in efficiency and getting it right the first time.”

With IBAN-Name Check success and using its network with the banks, integration at payment initiation as well as the KYC account holder data, Surepay has developed more services like Pay to Mobile contacts including Mobile number-Name Check, switching notification when users pay or draw from a new account number, an CompanyID check.

With a business model based on fee-per-check and monthly invoicing based on tiers and subscriptions, SurePay shows how critical innovations are necessary in a fast changing payment environment. The innovation has not gone without notice and Iris Capital and Connect Capital invested €12.2M to help the Dutch company scale its business.

Solving a complex problem

Rientes says when banks tried to solve the fraud problem by checking a name they cited data sharing, GDPR, and SEPA regulation to not go through with their innovation. As a result, SurePay had to not only innovate the process but also validate till their IBAN-Name Check service became easy to use.

“[The service] is based on a complex algorithm and handcrafted rules (not based on AI),” explains Rientes. While banks don’t share data with each other, Surepay also doesn’t disclose personal data.

Rientes, CPO of SurePay, says inventing the service and creating an ecosystem of banks was a challenge at first. Once they had a network of banks, it was all about creating the business model and co-creating the accompanying contracts, which he reckons is still the foundation of their business.

CEO David-Jan Janse says they were able to solve this complex problem by handpicking team members out of their network knowing their “capabilities, knowledge, and personality.”

He also acknowledges the key role played by trainees, graduates, and interns with senior roles and responsibilities. “These team members were really independent
and self-propelling,” he adds.

Rise helps focus on scaling

SurePay was one of the ten Dutch scaleups to join batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme. “The Rise programme is an excellent programme with sparring sessions with each other and experienced experts, stories, and Q&A with icons per topic,” says David-Jan Janse.

He says an entrepreneur and the management team is often focussed on scaling the company, customers, prospects, partners, and stakeholders. They need an opportunity to benchmark, share experiences, and get inspired, which the co-founders of Surepay found in the Rise programme.

While it is early in the programme for batch #9 participants, David-Jan Janse feels they have already built relationships that will last. “We already have a list of learnings on HR and Go International,” he says.

For him, the next sessions of the Rise programme will be about getting even more benefits in the form of connection and giving back. He says they see a real opportunity to not only learn but also extend their network with the Bold community.

Inventing a new business and making solutions more widely accessible

For Marcel Rienties and David-Jan Janse, the long-term vision is to turn SurePay into a specialist and market leader for Confirmation of Payee in the EU. By scaling in the European Union, they aim to connect the world for domestic and multinational banks and corporations.

With added services, Rientes says they will be able to strengthen their position to fight fraud and reduce operational costs in payments. They aim to do that without any additional funding in 2023.

David-Jan Janse says he will consider Surepay to be successful if it becomes “the specialist and market leader in every EU country and the EU hub for multinationals” but envisions one where it is also a specialist worldwide.

He says that will only be possible if they continuously focus on “Who’s the customer? What’s the problem?”. It is also great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. “Most successful startups have pivot to the successful service. The first idea is not always the best solution,” he says.

They say the next step is to make their solution more widely accessible, including those who want to perform checks online. With a portal already developed and accessible at this link, SurePay is not just about inventing a new business and making solutions more widely accessible.

Fintech companies have successfully made it easier to pay for and buy things. However, it is still not easier for an average person to invest their savings. Investing is often seen as complex, risky, and time consuming, where most people believe the barrier of entry is too high. But Dutch scaleup Peaks makes investing not only easy but paves the way for financial freedom.

Founded by Tom Arends, Rutger Beens, and Sijbrand Tieleman in 2015, and incorporated in 2017, the founders spent about a year researching the idea. Amsterdam-based Peaks serves a market that left young people and women out of the investment landscape. The story of Peaks is not only about making investment easy but also about financial inclusion.

A non-accessible investment landscape

The idea of Peaks stems from an investment landscape that primarily catered older, wealthier people and men. Tom Arends, with experience in the retail investment space, says he has given many presentations in his previous career to retail investors, but almost never young people or women. Tieleman and Beens leading a digital agency that helped financial organisations innovate.

The pivotal moment came from combining their experiences with creating financial savings and investments apps for banks. “Bringing our experiences together was the Eureka moment for Peaks as we saw the vast blue ocean of consumers who weren’t served by the market,” says Arends, CEO of Peaks. “It also led to our mission to make investing accessible for everyone, everyday.”

He adds that Tieleman had the idea of creating a simple investment app that enabled everyone to start investment. They were also inspired by the success of Acorns, the spare change investment app that launched in the US and gained a lot of traction attracting a number of users.

Peaks takes the Dutch habit of filling a tube with your remaining change to the investment world. “With Peaks we’ve built an app that makes saving and investing as simple as paying with your debit card,” adds Arends.

It started with a roundup feature that automatically rounds up the amount spent by you with your debit card to the next euro and invests the difference in a well-diversified and sustainable portfolio of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The feature allowed users to invest with small amounts regularly.

Arends says, “It worked as we grew our customer base quickly and were reaching our initial target group of (relatively) young people and women.”

While ease and simplicity remain the key USP of Peaks, the company has now grown into an international wealth building platform. With a subscription business model and an asset-under-management fee, Peaks has a revenue stream that grows as customers grow their wealth on the platform.

Leap of faith to attain financial freedom

Arends, Beens, and Tieleman began working on Peaks in 2015 while continuing with their primary jobs. Once they knew their idea of a simplified investment app would work, they left their jobs to spend all of their energy on their startup.

“I switched my career and salary at a major bank to become a fintech founder. I moved closer to Amsterdam, leaving Rotterdam behind where I lived for almost 16 years,” he says.

On the business front, Arends acknowledges the challenge they faced with the delay of the PSD2 legislation. The PSD2 legislation required banks to offer an API access to customer’s payment transaction data after approval of the customer. “We needed these APIs to make our roundup feature work and offer our key feature to customers of all banks,” Arends says.

He adds, “The legislation was delayed and it took a lot of time for the banks to get the quality of the APIs to the right level. As a consequence we had to wait almost 2 years before being able to offer our key feature to all consumers.”

This leap of faith is not just restricted to the founders of Peaks but also the customers. Arends says a lot of people postpone their decision to start investing because they find investing “complex, boring, and costs a lot of time” but they also know that “investing is the best way to attain financial freedom.”

He further adds that by making it easier to start and automating the savings discipline for customers, Peaks allows users to focus on things that are urgent or interesting to them.

Democratising the world of investing

In a nutshell, Peaks is trying to democratise the world of investing where opening an account takes only about five minutes and one can invest with any amount. To further simplify, Peaks offers its users the option to choose from four different portfolios that are well-diversified, sustainable, and invest in the ETFs of world class asset managers such as iShares, UBS, and DWS.

“Basically you cannot make a mistake, as what we offer is based on the most important investment lessons: diversify your investments globally, deposit regularly, and stay disciplined,” Arends.

He calls this the best way to build up wealth over time and take advantage of the compounding return effect whether you invest €100 or €1,000,000. At the core of this investment philosophy is an application that is rooted in fundamentals such as design, development, and product.

With most important hires being in those areas, Arends calls them the core of their product and platform. “We found our most important first hires in our own network via former colleagues, friends, and family,” he says.

Rise is about learning and sharing

Peaks joined nine other Dutch fintech scaleups to form batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme. Arends says they joined the programme since it offered them the opportunity to learn from the best tech entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and its peers.

“Building a fintech company is all about learning, iterating your way forward,” he says. “[Rise programme] helps us in our process of scaling Peaks further and building a sustainable business.”

He also adds that the experience and insights from other scaleups in the programme has been valuable. “Running a scaleup as a CEO is challenging and sometimes lonely,” Arends says before adding that sharing experiences at the Rise programme helps navigate the future better for entrepreneurs.

With access to the broader BOLD community of Techleap.nl connecting all Dutch tech scaleups, Arends says all the sessions of the Rise programme has been a great networking opportunity that will help all the participating companies build their scaleups.

A pan-European wealth building platform

Arends envisions Peaks becoming one of the leading wealth building and pension platforms in Europe. The pain point solved by Peaks is not only for Dutch people but also one that is true for Europe.

Arends says, “We tested our solution in multiple countries and we know customers all face similar obstacles when it comes to investing. At the same time, there is no truly simple and easy European platform that is focussed on wealth building.”

In Europe, there are neo-brokers focussed on short term trading and active investors, offering too much choice for the average consumer. Arends says these brokers can offer over 2,000 savings plans and more than 10,000 ETF options. These brokers are into trading as opposed to Peaks, which uses investing as a means to building wealth and which tries to keep it as simple and easy as possible for the user.

Peaks is active in the Netherlands and Germany, and has executed pilots in Spain and France. Arends says the platform is ready to scale internationally and the company aims to raise funds in the course of this year to fund the European expansion.

The mission, according to Arends, is to improve the financial lives of at least one million people. He sees Peaks becoming a company that “is able to sustain itself so the mission can continue indefinitely.”

Arends says they have been able to get to this point by testing their product rigorously and thinking early on how to sell their product and viability of their business model. “It is not easy to build a regulated fintech, but it is worth the effort,” he says.

If you use Google Photos then you would have seen the notifications it sends each day in the morning called memories. These memories bring up old pictures or events from a Wednesday five years ago. While it is meant to jog up your memories, it can often bring up memories of a deceased person or an ex.

Whether you want to see that photo or not, the internet will never forget, similar to how Facebook will never forget to remind you to send birthday wishes to a dead person. While our digital world is more connected than before, it has a lot of cracks including lack of sensitivity.

For the immediate family of a deceased person, the challenge often is to close all of their social accounts, subscriptions, bank accounts, insurance, et cetera. It often supersedes the process of grieving and can be tedious. Rotterdam-based Dutch scaleup Closure wants to not only simplify this process for heirs, but also unburden organisations that need to be informed by heirs when finalising the digital legacy of a deceased person.

Automation to eliminate burden of digital legacy

We live in a subscription economy where an average person in Europe has at least four subscriptions and that number jumps to between 8 and 12 subscriptions in the Nordics. All these subscriptions are left behind along with traditional contracts, bank accounts, insurances, utilities, telecom, charity, sport clubs, and magazines when a person passes away.

When Chantal van der Velde, former co-founder of Closure, got a notification from Facebook to congratulate her deceased grandmother on birthday, this got her and co-founder Graciëlla van Vliet thinking about all the services “a person leaves behind after passing away.”

Van Vliet says it is a time consuming process to inform each service provider and organisation about the loss of their loved one and thus terminate or adjust connected contracts, accounts and subscriptions. The process also forces the next of kin to continuously confront the loss, which Van Vliet says results in “digital legacy becoming a burden for heirs.”

She adds, “The urge to do something about this growing pain amongst heirs, was deepened by our interest in data and efficiency.”

“Automating something as awkward as the cancellation process of all the accounts of a deceased person, saving heirs a lot of pain, appeared to be a very interesting challenge,” explains Van Vliet. With a clear and enormous challenge, both the co-founders quit their jobs and committed to building Closure.

A support desk for heirs

Founded in 2018, Closure acts as a one-stop-shop for finalising all contracts and accounts of a deceased person at once. Available free of charge to heirs, the company operates as a centralised, external “heir support desk” that aims to eliminate long waiting times and offers a bridge to report death to respective organisations.

“Our corporate customers work with Closure, because they want to offer the heirs of their customers the best possible support, while at the same time increasing internal operational efficiency,” Van Vliet tells Silicon Canals.

With organisations working with 10 to 30 full-time employees on settlement of subscriptions and contracts of their deceased customers, Closure plays the important role of customer contact in the event of death. Interestingly, it operates largely on AI and Machine Learning and Van Vliet says, “the customer contact that remains only exists to provide extra guidance to heirs, and not to keep operational processes running.”

With a lean operational team and use of transversal technologies like AI, Closure is able to run customer care operations for its partners at lower expense. This way, Closure not only increases customer satisfaction, but also effectively reduces operational and customer care costs. “Due to the shortage of high quality personnel, our solution is currently being embraced all the more with one in four deaths in the Netherlands now reported via Closure,” she adds.

Finding the early adopters

Before starting Closure, Graciëlla van Vliet worked as a part-time management trainee in China while pursuing her master’s degree in Econometrics and Machine Learning. She says “quitting the job was the easy part” but finding a structured approach as a first-time founder was more challenging.

She also acknowledges the challenge of finding their first corporate customer. “We overcame this simply by perseverance and finding the early adopters,” she says.

Within a couple months of its start, Closure hired Bart Berhaegh as a developer and he currently fulfils the role of CTO. To reach scale, the company has also added former AON executive Joep Vercauteren to its leadership team as CCO. With a strong leadership team at the helm, Closure is now growing its team with diverse and experienced talent.

“We are heavily investing in making the company scalable,” says Van Vliet adding that they are “finding ways to reduce average sales cycle, structuring customer acquisition, and finding strategic partnerships.”

SAP of customer mutations

Closure currently operates in the space of DeathTech, which Van Vliet feels applies to its current proposition well. However, the long-term ambition of Closure is to become the SAP of customer mutations, which would make it more of a CustomerCareTech company than just a DeathTech company.

She says operating as a data and technology-driven, specialised heir support desk is only the start. For Van Vliet, the goal is to turn Closure into an enterprise software solution for customer mutations around key moments in life, such as debt restructuring, marriage or divorce, where the cause of the mutation is not limited to death.

She says, “Customer care operations are still very labour intensive, and we see a future where increasing a customer care department’s operational efficiency and exceptional customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand.”

This data and technology driven approach spearheaded by Van Vliet as an econometrician is bearing fruits. After a pre-seed capital from experienced angels, Closure recently raised €1.5M in seed round from Borski Fund, a Dutch VC that invests in female-led companies, as well as Rabobank.

With the funding in place, Van Vliet says success is not one simple metric or achievement but instead it’s about “having an energetic and purpose-driven team that feels they are doing something meaningful and growing every day, and adding real value for both our enterprise clients and users (consumers).”

She also says they want to keep on building the best product available in the market and growing the organisation in a financially healthy and sustainable way that impacts the lives of a significant amount of people globally.

Rise is valuable for every entrepreneur

Closure joined nine other Dutch scaleups in batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme, which Van Vliet calls as a programme highly valuable for any entrepreneur. She says the programme is “even more valuable for a first time founder or founders operating in an industry where there exist limited similar organisations or competitors to learn from.”

She also adds that the other founders and experts leading the sessions went beyond expectations. “There are few occasions where you get such high-quality tough love and different points of views that challenge us to make bold decisions.”

For Closure, the programme has helped by offering specific helpful suggestions to being challenged on general strategic topics. From the ability to position a feature in a low-key way to extending its service to smaller prospects suggested by Sjoerd Rietberg, a board member at Flow Traders Foundation, Van Vliet says the Rise programme has contributed in a big way to its scaling ambitions.

She also appreciates the feedback from other participants of the programme on Closure’s internationalisation strategy based on their experience in countries they were targeting.

Technology to prepare for death

Technology is widely seen as a solution for every challenge and in the DeathTech space, the startups and scaleups see technology as a “preventive” approach to preparing for death. Van Vliet says this is opposed to the reactive approach predominantly followed right now.

With people now turning to AI technologies to preserve memories of their loved ones, Van Vliet says they looked into pre-death services in the early days but they are no experts in this field. With its focus squarely on being a B2B or customer care related company, Closure stands out even in the DeathTech space.

With its AI and ML-driven automation, Closure shows how technology can be used to solve a problem faced by next of kins. It may not be using technology to help prepare for death but it is definitely helping people process death, and an NPS score of 9.6 from surviving relatives is proof.

Rewards and loyalty programmes have long played a key role in the modern payments and finance industry. However, every reward or loyalty programme is always seen as a value add rather than as a wealth generation engine. Amsterdam-based Bits of Stock wants to change that with its innovative fintech platform.

Started by Arash Asady and Ryan Gary in 2016, this Dutch scaleup helps businesses to reward their customers in fractional shares. With the option to differentiate loyalty programmes with stock, crypto, and more, the company is making “rewards-as-a-service” the new frontier of embedded finance.

Is this a once in a century business opportunity? CEO and co-founder Asady not only thinks so but is already on a mission to scale it further.

Fractional ownership as wealth generation engine

The idea of turning fractional ownership into a wealth generation engine comes from Asady’s previous work as an algorithmic trader for leading banks on Wall Street. He says these banks leveraged “cutting-edge technology to exchange billions of dollars of financial instruments in fractions of seconds with minimal execution risk.”

These transactions made him realise how fractional ownership can democratise investing for the underserved and underinvested instead of the wealthy. “I wanted to help regular people tap into the massive engine of wealth generation that is stock ownership,” he says.

After a few iterations, Asady and team landed on the idea of harnessing billions of dollars spent by businesses on rewards and incentive programmes. They saw how the points or cashback offered as rewards to customers sit unclaimed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of users worried about losing the miles accumulated on their cards or air carrier of choice.

Bits of Stock helps these corporations offer fractional shares of stock instead. In order to test its idea, they built an app and partnered with a team of NYU researchers to analyse the data. The research revealed that stock rewards were 51 times more effective than cash rewards in building brand loyalty.

Rewards-as-a-service to create ownership economy

If you shop with your credit card then there is a good chance that you have accrued some points on it. However, not everyone really takes advantage of these reward points and Bits of Stock wants to plug this visible gap in the rewards industry.

US Marine Corp veteran Asady, who now serves as CEO, and Computer Science graduate Gary first met during graduate school at New York University. “Ryan and I hit it off instantly in grad school while working on a class project together,” says Asady. “We shared the vision of leveraging fractional ownership to help create a more equitable economy.”

As a platform, Bits of Stock enables banks, fintechs, and brands to reward their customers in fractional shares of stock, crypto, and more. Asady says they have now built a “best-in-class product” with a strong product and engineering team in Amsterdam.

“Combining Dutch engineering with American sales and marketing is a powerful combination proven to create billion dollar businesses,” he says. “Our partners purchase our technology and brokerage services to drive customer engagement,” adds Asady.

It raised a $4.4M seed round earlier this year led by the London and Amsterdam-based VC firm Keen Venture Partners and Yellow by Snap. To get to this stage, Asady had to make his parents understand his entrepreneurial impulse. “My parents immigrated to the US from Iran and expected me to become a doctor or a lawyer in the typical immigrant fashion,” he elaborates.

Asady, who now calls Amsterdam his home, says his parents have come around to be supportive of his entrepreneurial journey. He also says entrepreneurship has been a humbling experience, one requiring “the ability to hear no and be able to move on quickly.”

He adds, “We pivoted several times before finding product-market fit. Those previous product iterations and initial sales and fundraising meetings were critical learning moments that led us to where we are today.”

With its rewards-as-a-service platform, Bits of Stock is essentially creating an ownership economy. Asady explains this as a pathway for everyday consumers to build long-term wealth. With a vision to fractionalise all asset classes and offer them as rewards, Bits of Stock is changing the very definition of rewards and plans to close Series A round in mid-2023 to further its vision.

Rise programme is about community

Bits of Stock is one of the ten Dutch scaleups to join Techleap.nl’s batch #9 of Rise programme this year. While learning is second nature for entrepreneurs and the Rise programme offers that in plenty, Asady says they see the programme as “exceptionally beneficial” as it is a great community of Dutch startups “who understand what we’re going through and whom we can exchange ideas with.”

He says Rise has already helped him build great relationships with other Dutch scaleups that were part of this programme. He also sees Rise as a programme that combines the best practices from top accelerator programmes such as YC with a hands-on approach to peer-to-peer advice and coaching.

“They create a safe place where founders can be vulnerable with one another and therefore give and get practical and actionable advice,” Asady tells us.

Consumers as shareholders

When you think of Bits of Stock, you cannot stop from thinking about employee stock ownership plans or ESOP. ESOP has played a key role in convincing people to join a startup as opposed to an established tech firm with hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap.

If ESOP paved the way for employees at tech firms to become investors in those companies, Bits of Stock could be the gateway for an average consumer to become a shareholder in the brands they consume. “When we reverse the accelerating trend of growing wealth inequality and disparity,” Asady says about the barometer of success.

To make this a reality, Bits of Stock joined ScaleNL’s accelerator programme to expand to the US. Asady says the US market offers massive opportunity and they have made critical hires on the ground in sales and marketing to build their business, and understanding the local landscape.

Imagine getting fractional shares of Apple Inc when you purchase an iPhone next time. It could become a reality if more brands get onboard Asady’s vision of fractional ownership as a wealth generation engine.

The success of Asady and Bits of Stock teaches an important lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs that technology is only an enabler. He says “researching your market, talking to as many customers, and surrounding yourself with the best-in-class team” as the starting point for building a high growth, high performance business.

“It is ultimately humans that will buy your product or service,” he adds.

Talent acquisition has emerged as the biggest challenge companies are facing around the world right now. Even when companies manage to find and retain talent, they struggle with offering them the right benefits. For decades, the benefits offered by companies have remained the same while the workplaces have become flexible.

With work and life becoming interconnected in the post-pandemic world, there is a need for flexible workplace benefits as well. Amsterdam HR tech firm YourCampus sees flexible employee compensation as the future and has a solution.

End to one-size-fits-all employee benefits

The idea of YourCampus stems from deep frustration for its founder and CEO Florian Gendrault, who did not see the benefits offered to him by his employer fit his needs. While working at various startups and scaleups, he noticed that everyone received the same benefits from their employers.

“My colleagues were of all sorts of ages, with different interests and different needs. Why were employee benefits then still one-size-fits-all? That just did not make sense to me,” he says.

Two years later, Gendrault decided to take a leap and turn his idea of flexible compensation or benefits into a tangible business. Some ideas take years to reach fruition and YourCampus is one such example. The employee benefits platform was “born out of the vision to build a virtual campus with location agnostic, personalised well-being, lifestyle, mobility and financial services connected to it.”

Gendrault adds that YourCampus is now being used by employees on a daily basis to access their benefits. “Recently we added flexible compensation programmes and we’re
developing more features based on demand from our clients,” he notes.

To support its ambition to make flexible compensation and benefits normal in the industry, YourCampus has raised €3.2M in pre-seed and seed rounds so far. The Dutch scaleup relies on a SaaS-subscription model where employers pay a small fee per employee, per month to use its platform. It also offers different packages tailored to different types of companies. For companies looking to budget only for well-being or learning and development, YourCampus has an offering as well.

Adventure over financial security

The story of Gendrault and how he made YourCampus a reality will serve as an inspiration for a number of entrepreneurs. He traded a well paying job to take the risk of starting a company that aimed to fix a flaw that most employers did not even bother to change.

He literally traded financial security for an adventure. “I had bought a new apartment in Amsterdam the year before, and made two angel investments, so I didn’t have much savings to lean on,” he says.

To make his dream of YourCampus a reality, he decided to save money quickly by staying with his parents for six months. “My savings, a bit of salary from the pre-seed round we raised and an adjusted lifestyle, gave me comfort to start the company,” he adds.

Apart from risking his financial security, Gendrault says he found the fundraising process to be a major learning for him. “The process of defining your ideal investor(s) profile, adjusting your pitch deck on a daily basis, pitching to VCs, overcoming objections and negotiating,” he says of the intricacies involved with fundraising.

In an entrepreneur’s life, all these challenges are intertwined with the need to also keep building and growing the business. Gendrault says, “It’s probably the biggest challenge I’ve experienced in my career.”

Rise to map the growth path

YourCampus joined nine other Dutch scaleups for batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme this year. With only 30 percent of the programme completed (at the time of this interview), Gendrault says they have “walked away with concrete knowledge of the type of people we need for the phase we’re going in, as well as what to think about when expanding to a new market.”

He says they joined the Rise programme because of all the other participating startups and scaleups, and adds that the coaches and the community overall add value. “It’s not only inspiring but also super helpful,” he explains.

YourCampus is in the stage of growth where it faces challenges that others have faced. With the Rise programme, the founders have already had two successful sessions around the topics of talent and expanding internationally. The founders now believe “they are well positioned to map their own path.”

From flexible work to flexible compensation

For far too long, the compensation and rewards programmes have been designed with the employer in mind. They have never been aligned with the needs of the employees, YourCampus is on a mission to change that. With a team of 24 employees operating via a hybrid and remote work scheme, YourCampus aims to compensate one million people “based on age, stage of life, and interests” by 2025.

“We are currently in execution mode, and will decide later this year if we will fund our own growth or use capital from existing or new investors,” Gendrault tells us.

While he acknowledges that assembling the core team has been “easier than having to recruit someone in the market,” they did need some time and introductions to find Ruben van den Boogaard, who comes from the world of benefits and compensation. “We basically saved one year by bringing his learnings to the company,” he adds.

However, the first real hire for YourCampus was a UX designer with experience in branding and media design. A designer, according to the founder of YourCampus, has a positive impact on overall branding and product design, which also helps define how the market perceives you.

With a strong team and a capable leadership at the centre, YourCampus wants to improve the well-being of employees with the right compensation. Apart from being profitable, Gendrault wants to see YourCampus have an engaged and loyal team and one whose customers and users recommend it to new customers. For him, that’s the real sign of success.

Payments have played a key role in enabling the digital economy and there are now more payments solutions for consumers and merchants than ever before. With cash payments declining fast and merchants also stepping away from cash, the way we make and receive payments has changed for good.

A report by Payments Europe shows that physical cards continue to be the preferred method of payment but options like mobile cards, mobile instant, and BNPL are on the rise. This change in payment methods and multiple Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in the market means merchants must be able to support them all. Amsterdam-based Payaut makes that possible.

An all-in-one payment solution for marketplaces

Payaut is the only payment solution for a marketplace that can process with any payment service provider. It became a marketplace solution for payments based on the expertise of its founder Ernst van Niekerk, who started his career as a client of a payment service provider.

During this stint, he learnt that “if you are a merchant processing online payments, different providers can provide different benefits. There is not one single PSP that is perfect.”

Following this experience, Van Niekerk then became a consultant in payments and worked at Adyen, a popular payment service provider. At this PSP, Van Niekerk developed their marketplace solution, and during this process, he realised how the existing marketplace solutions of PSPs are designed to create a lock-in.

“The lock-in means that you can’t use multiple payment service providers at the same time, and lack the opportunity to optimise for conversion and price,” he says.

All these events set him up to start Payaut as a PSP-agnostic platform that offers the flexibility to process via any payment service provider. The founder says that paying online now has become increasingly easy for consumers, but the backend system supporting all those payments has become increasingly complex.

Ernst gives examples of people using different methods to pay in the Netherlands compared to those in Germany or the US. As a result, there is now different behaviour from payers, buyers, and consumers. “Therefore, it is not easy to find one payment provider that is a perfect fit,” he adds.

The overarching theme of the payment industry is that there are a lot of payment providers out there offering different advantages. However, there is no one payment provider that is a perfect fit for all the use cases. With Payaut, merchants are able to choose the payment provider they need based on their size, cost, and coverage of payment methods per country.

Shift towards platform economy

As a seasoned executive in the payments industry, Van Niekerk says that the payments industry was seen as “the winner takes it all” market. “They expected maybe three, four or five players like an Adyen or Stripe to be the only ones left and that all the small players would have no right to exist,” he explains.

However, the reality is that there are many payment providers out there with some being strong in one market and others in another market. Van Niekerk remarks that there are some PSPs who are promising, innovative, while many others are traditional.

The changing consumer behaviour and the need for merchants to support different payment service providers has led to what the Payaut founder describes as a shift towards platform economy for payments industry as well. For him, Payaut is essentially the payment platform for online marketplaces.

To power this shift towards platform economy for payments, Payaut has raised a total of €12M. It has also grown from just 3 to 30 employees with two in sales, five across the leadership team, and 20 on product and tech. “We’ve been building the product for three years and we are now ready to scale it,” says Van Niekerk.

Rise is about learning, networking, and marketing

Ernst Van Niekerk joined nine other Dutch scaleups as batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme this year. For him, joining this programme was a no-brainer and one where he had very clear expectations.

“I expect three things from [Rise programme],” he says with clarity. Since it is his first time building a company – and currently taking it from a startup to scaleup – Van Niekerk recognises that Rise is an opportunity to learn from those in a similar situation: “the cool thing about the programme is that everyone is a startup who wants to scaleup”.

For Ernst, the second thing is network. He sees Rise as an opportunity to increase the network, speak to other companies and maybe get “some new clients, get some new talent, get some new ideas, and expand the network.”

The third expectation is marketing, an opportunity for more people, specifically potential clients, to discover Payaut. All this also culminates in further boosting one of the key areas, and a core company value, of the business: People.

After the Rise programme, Van Niekerk says Payaut’s focus for 2023 and beyond is to continue to cultivate the best engineering team and sales team in order to scale the business from here. “We have a great team,” he says, “And for now, we just want to make sure that we grow the business – as in growing customers and growing the revenue.”

Building the service and product

Ernst Van Niekerk is a purist, one with deep commitment and focus on building the service and product. He says Payaut has sufficient runway and therefore are not planning to fundraise any time soon. The company has a clear Sales strategy, specifically with the focus to roll-out the service in the rest of Europe. Van Niekerk adds there are also imminent plans to increase their product feature portfolio with “a multi-currency functionality which allows us to payout globally and not only in euro-countries”.

For Payaut, the long term vision is building a platform that allows merchants to accept payments not only from different PSPs but also from different markets. The success of Payaut is also an example in how market scalability is important for anyone to succeed in the fintech space.

On a final note, the Payaut founder recommends that young entrepreneurs should be both smart and curious: “you will encounter a lot of challenges and you best face them with an open mindset”.

Traditional documentation practices are still used by many organisations around the world. Even though businesses are embracing digital transformation, the amount of paperwork and documentation followed by these companies becomes a challenge. One solution that has taken precedence is document automation.

With the implementation of document automation, companies can experience improved speed, fewer errors, decentralised processing, support for collaboration, and even security. One scaleup trying to make the process of digitising and administrative automation simpler is Klippa.

A desk full of receipts

The idea of Klippa originates from the personal experience of its co-founders, who often found themselves in front of a desk full of receipts and invoices. They observed that these documents lie around for administration, and it is often the least favourite job of many entrepreneurs.

This led them to think about a better way to do administrative work like document processing and they relied on automation. The Dutch scaleup based in Groningen was started by six IT specialists who became friends during university. Since its inception, the company has raised €1.7M in funding.

“The goal of Klippa is to use modern technologies like machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) to enhance the effectiveness of organisations,” says Yeelen Knegtering, CEO of Klippa.

The scaleup offers specialised solutions and software to improve administrative processes, scanning receipts and invoices, processing expense claims, identity validation, and data extraction.

However, the primary product of Klippa is DocHorizon, which assists businesses worldwide with document process automation. It combines technologies like Mobile scanning, OCR, data extraction, classification, document conversion, anonymization, and verification.

With its AI-powered OCR tech, Klippa’s software is able to identify text in pictures and convert them into searchable text in any format. The scaleup also offers these solutions as a SDK or API that companies can directly integrate into their own application.

SaaS and understanding the market

The power of SaaS is often not very well documented despite the fact that the market for SaaS products is expanding at 18.4 per cent annually. According to Europe’s Capital Mind, the transactions in the SaaS industry are growing in volume by 25 per cent year-on-year.

However, what makes SaaS really interesting is the fact that there are a large number of small players in this dynamic market. With SaaS becoming one of the three main pillars of cloud computing, scaleups like Klippa are uniquely positioned to deliver software services that are critical.

This is most apparent in the business model of Klippa. The business sells software licences for automatically processing documents in high volume. It counts the likes of Vanmoof, Banijay, Nivea, Mercado Libre, DZ Bank, CarOffer, and others among its customers.

While SaaS offers opportunity, Klippa has also reinvented itself to stay ahead of the curve. “When a company grows really fast, you have to reinvent your company every year,” says Knegtering.

He adds that the founding team of Klippa were very much hands on with product, design, marketing, and sales, but had to “slowly develop into managers.” Klippa is now an international team of over 70 people with offices in Groningen, Amsterdam, and Brasov.

It owes its success to the very early vision of hiring international team members, which helped them understand the international markets fast. Chief Customer Officer Robert-Jan Verheggen says the understanding of the international market helped them address the broader market.

“With hindsight, those first internationals were very important hires or strategic decisions,” says Robert-Jan Verheggen. “Klippa is now mostly looking for experienced, specialised people that can help us bring our company forward,” he adds.

Rise helps challenge yourself

Klippa joined nine other Dutch scaleups to form batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme this year. Knegtering says they joined the Rise programme to be “challenged, improve ourselves, and stay on our toes.”

With a strong product and capital efficient business model, Klippa has gained a lot of praise from the tech community as well as investors. However, the founders feel the need to be challenged and stay focussed on their mission. Techleap.nl did just that with its Rise programme.

The founders of Klippa say the opportunity to talk with experts and companies in a similar stage will help them forward. For them, the sessions at Rise programme have transformed into an opportunity to push themselves to “think bigger and without limits.”

“Have peers around you that face similar challenges and learn from each other,” says Knegtering when asked for a singular takeaway.

Best automated document processor

Klippa is a good example of how the Dutch ecosystem has become a hotbed for SaaS scaleups. With a strong product and effective founder team at the helm, Klippa wants to be seen as the best automated document processor.

With recent expansion to the US and a suite of products that can be used in industries like accounting software, banking and financial services, marketing, logistics and transportation, legal, and public sector, the scaleup is focussed on its MVP: product.

“We believe that a great product is the primary driver of growth,” says Robert-Jan Verheggen. “Capital can be fuel for that growth engine, so when we see that capital becomes a limiting factor, fundraising could be a solution, but it is not a goal on its own.”

For Knegtering, the success of Klippa comes on the back of a great team and a technically strong product. However, he is not getting carried away by the growth to set any lofty goals instead believes in enjoying the journey.

“We think it’s important to enjoy the journey, not just pinpoint an end goal,” he says. “We are successful when we enjoy building our company, when our team enjoys working for the company, when our clients enjoy using our products, and we keep improving and growing.”

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Knegtering has a very simple piece of advice. He suggests finding the strong founding team early and listening carefully to the first real clients. He also believes in persevering during the tough times, an advice that can be followed at all times.

“Human-induced climate change is the largest, most pervasive threat to the natural environment and societies the world has ever experienced,” a UN report observed last month.

The report particularly said that the poorest countries are paying the heaviest price. It also focussed on the topics of “mitigation action, loss and damage, access and inclusion, and the protection of climate rights defenders.”

The biggest challenge associated with climate change is that transitioning towards a low carbon economy is a capital intensive task. “Capital can be an immensely powerful tool to effect change,” says Jacqueline van den Ende, co-founder of Carbon Equity. “Capital is basically the control room of the world. So I am curious how I can leverage capital as a weapon to drive change,” she quips.

She co-founded Carbon Equity in 2021 as a Dutch climate investing platform for alternative investments with Lara Koole, Jeff Gomez, and Liza Rubinstein.

Moving the needle on climate change

The idea of Carbon Equity comes from the quest of Van den Ende and her co-founders to move the needle on climate change. They repeatedly questioned how capital can be a prudent tool to bring about change. “We saw that trillions of dollars were being funnelled into so-called sustainable funds or stocks, but there was little to no change in real world outcomes,” she says. “This led us to ask “so how do we move the needle?””

According to the co-founders, most of the sustainable funds are ESG funds that invest with companies like Apple, JP Morgan, and Meta that have good environment, social, and governance practices. While these are sound investments, they believe it does little to actually solve sustainability challenges like climate change.

They observed that to really move the needle with your money, one needs to invest in private markets. “97 per cent of all companies are private, i.e., the vast majority of climate solutions are privately funded. Furthermore, when investing in private markets, especially in venture capital and growth equity, every euro invested directly powers innovation, product development and growth of these climate solutions,” Van den Ende explains.

However, private markets are still inaccessible to most investors and private investors mostly have access to risky time intensive options like crowd-equity or angel investments. Professional investors invest in venture capital or private equity funds, where they benefit from professional management and diversification. Van den Ende says a person, however, needs at least €5M to participate in such funds. Carbon Equity lowers that threshold to €100,000 and through the Climate Investment Club enables access below €100,000.

Powering world’s most impactful climate solutions

The mission of Carbon Equity, according to Van den Ende, is to unlock “billions in global private wealth to power the world’s most impactful climate solutions.”

Carbon Equity enables unique access to top climate venture capital and private equity funds at a low minimum. First, Carbon Equity’s investment team conducts climate impact and financial diligence on over 800 global climate venture capital, growth equity, and buy-out funds. Second, their fintech platform enables scalable access for all.

“Through our app and online and offline platform investors can track all of the companies they are invested in, meet fellow climate investors and learn more about climate investing,” she adds.

Since starting their first fund last year, Carbon Equity has seen €80M invested on the platform and has raised €3M in venture funding to scale its platform.

Powering the world’s most impactful climate solutions is a team that is very much driven by its mission. Jacqueline van den Ende says the core founding team came together very naturally. She and her friend Lara Koole envisioned starting a company together when they first met 15 years ago.

She met Liza, a former consultant at McKinsey, during a customer interview, while Jeff joined them at a time when he was looking to start his own company. “We are a super multi-faceted and experienced team which has allowed us to move relatively fast,” says Van den Ende.

Go-to climate investment platform

Every founding team has a vision for its startup and the co-founders of Carbon Equity have one centred on impact. “Our ambition is to invest at least 1 billion dollars in climate solutions through our platform over the next 5 years together with thousands of investors,” says Van den Ende.

In order to make this a reality, she envisions building a platform able to service a global investor base and become the global go-to climate private equity investing platform. The Dutch scaleup is also planning to raise a substantial Series A round in 2023 to support its technology platform, marketing, and sales initiatives.

She also sees climate investing as a one way street. With most markets for climate solutions projected to become multi-million dollar markets and fossil fuels no longer being used in the foreseeable future, she says climate investing is a superior investment choice.

Rise helps with coaching and scaling

Carbon Equity joined 9 other Dutch scaleups to form batch #9 of Techleap.nl’s Rise programme this year. Jacqueline van den Ende says this programme comes at a perfect time as they start to focus on scaling.

“It’s a truly unique programme where, through themed sessions, we get to benefit from world-class coaching, mentorship from top entrepreneurs, peer learning and the strong network that Rise has built internationally,” she says.

In its first 18 months, Carbon Equity has made big headways, including proving its ability to deliver a great product, acquire enthusiastic customers, build a strong brand, and hire super talented people. With its current trajectory, the Rise programme will act as a guiding light in unlocking next growth potential.

Van den Ende says the programme just got started but has already proven beneficial to them. She says the sessions held by Techleap.nl have triggered new things including the need to think about your hiring plan for the next 12 months as opposed to ad-hoc hiring.

She adds, “It is super useful to share our experiences with other founders and to learn from them too.”

Actual dent in climate change

With a long-term vision of $1B invested in climate solutions, Jacqueline van den Ende says Carbon Equity will be a success if “it can put an actual dent in climate change.” She sees this possible either by mobilising additional capital to find breakthrough climate solutions or by mobilising people.

“Carbon Equity gives people skin in the game and allows people to benefit from transitioning towards a net zero economy,” she says.

For Van den Ende, it is more than just climate investment but also about creating a “Yes, we can” mindset.

As more entrepreneurs are embarking on their startup journey with sustainability at the centre, Van den Ende suggests looking at unique skill sets or experience and problems they are passionate to solve. “Once you answer these questions, you will be pointed in the right direction,” she says.

Consumers have long felt that traditional financing options don’t serve them well. This has led to the rise of alternative financing options with buy now, pay later (BNPL) emerging as the most popular.

BNPL has surged in popularity in the retail and consumer goods market and is slowly making inroads in the business credit space as well. However, not all BNPL solutions are equal and in3, a Dutch fintech company based in Eindhoven, wants to make a difference with its socially responsible solution.

From afterpay to BNPL solution

in3 was co-founded by Patrick van de Graaf and Jeroen Janssen en Jos Verkleij in 2016 with the key tenet of social responsibility in place. It initially offered only an afterpay solution but felt there was a need for instalment payments covering higher amounts.

With customers asking questions around the maximum order amount of the afterpay solution, in3 felt a real need to change its business without taking more risk or putting end consumers in difficulty of over credit. Hans Langenhuizen, CEO of in3, says they began offering an instalment payment solution for higher amounts.

The scaleup is now the fastest growing company in the fintech space in the Netherlands and registered triple digit growth during the first quarter of 2022. The company had a humble beginning with initial funding coming from three people including the founders.

However, the company grew rapidly during the pandemic and raised its first external funding from Finch Capital. With the funding, in3 has turned itself into a “click and go experience” that has no hassle for either the consumer or the merchant.

Social responsibility at the centre

The business model of in3 is not only simple but also deeply rooted in social responsibility. At the time of purchase online or in store, the consumer can choose in3 as payment option.

This allows the consumer to pay one third of the total amount directly while the second instalment can be done in the next 30 days and the final in 60 days. All this happens without any additional cost to the consumer.

Once the consumer completes the payment, in3 pays the merchant within 14 days and the merchant pays the scaleup for using it as payment option. Langenhuizen says they only get a small percentage of the flow from the merchant, which is used to accommodate for the risk of non-payment as well as operational costs.

Since in3 does not charge any interest from its users, it also makes sure to only accept those who can pay and uses a state-of-the-art credit risk machine that completes the credit check of a person within 0.2 seconds.

“If a consumer does not pay after 120 days we sell this Non Performing Loan (NPL) to two different external companies. So for us, it is therefore very important to get as few people who do not pay,” says Langenhuizen. “Otherwise we have a loss making business as we do not get any kickback or late payments fees from consumers. So the social responsibility to have less non paying consumers is embedded in our business model and not a marketing call.”

Debt funding becomes a challenge

Langenhuizen says their biggest obstacle was to get debt funding for the growth. He says their excellent product and increased spending during COVID-19 lockdown meant they grew faster than expected. This hyper growth made it challenging for them to explain their proposition to debt funders.

The fact that in3 was only present in the consumer space further complicated their debt funding process. “The outcome was that we took some more time than expected but we got over 4 times more debt funding than we initially asked for which helped us grow fast from that date on,”

Peer learning through the Rise programme

Every year, Techleap.nl brings the most innovative Dutch scaleups together as it helps them reach the next level. in3 was one of the ten scaleups to join the batch #9 of this programme and Langenhuizen says the Rise programme turned into a peer learning exercise for the company.

He says the programme served as an opportunity to “talk and get advice from peers” who have already gone through different stages of getting companies to the next level. With the Rise programme, he says they now have insights which were previously not available due to the experience of former or current entrepreneurs.

Eliminating hustle of payment

Hans Langenhuizen took over as CEO of in3 on 1 June, 2020 and since then, he has steered the company towards building a payment platform that eliminates hustle. In order to get there, Langenhuizen has filled key roles in his management team, including that of CCO, CFO, and COO.

He says these positions looked a “bit over the top at first” but helped set the company to meet big growth ambitions without complications. “The hiring went very well as we hired people we already worked with before,” he says.

With the management team in place, Langenhuizen is now focussing on expanding the proposition of in3 to new countries and pushing harder on B2B solutions. The growth will [continue to] be faster than expected.”

The goal, however, does not change for Langenhuizen or the in3 team. They really want to “put the needle of social responsible payments to the right side.”

Langenhuizen says social responsible payment that puts less stress on the consumer will become common. With in3, he envisions “a payment system where you can pay how you want, when you want to, with your own preferred method in every country, without feeling the pain of standing in line or even the hustle to get a payment done.”