• Ukrainian cash flow management platform Finmap has closed a €1M funding round, with SMOK Ventures as lead investor.
• Czech VC Presto Ventures, investment firm Capital Genetics and tbi bank CEO Petr Baron also join the funding round.
• Finmap’s main product is a cloud service and iOS app that helps business owners track their business’s money and personal finances.
Despite wartime challenges, Finmap, a cash management platform based in Ukraine, managed to secure €1 million in funding. What makes the story even more impressive is that one of Finmap’s co-founders, Ivan Kaunov, helped close the funding round while serving on the country’s battlefield.
The company’s other co-founder and CEO, Oleksandr Solovei, who founded the company with Kaunov in 2019, tells The Recursive about Kaunov’s determination on and off the battlefield when it comes to success of Finmap.
“A little story about Ivan: during our fundraising campaign, he was signing one of the documents while lying in the trench, just a few hundred meters from the front line. The document was to be signed exactly that day, and Ivan happened to be on a military mission. He connected to the Internet via Starlink, took out his cell phone and started signing the document lying on the ground near the battlefield in the freezing winter,” Solovei recalls.
The success of Finmap’s funding round is also a testament to the founders’ determination to build a successful fintech business, while fighting for the future of their country.
“He is almost always on the battlefield. Previously, while in the infantry, Ivan was injured by helicopter fire. Fortunately, he recovered and later joined a military unit of the Air Force, where he works in aerial surveillance,” Solovei adds about Kaunov.
Development and expansion into new markets
Now the company aims to continue growing and expanding into new countries such as Poland and Turkey.
The majority of funds are used to grow the business. “The reason why we are focusing on Poland is that we previously had many customers there, which is why we decided to continue expanding there. We see that there is enormous growth potential. When it comes to Turkey, we see a wide range of opportunities. The types of customers in this market are ideal for our product,” adds Oleksandr Solovei.
Finmap’s native mobile application was launched in 2022 and allows for quick and easy entry of financial data and management of entrepreneurs’ personal funds. So far, more than 2,500 companies use Finmap for their daily financial management. Over the past year, the number of foreign clients has tripled – from 11 to 36 percent, while Ukrainian entrepreneurs still make up the majority of clients – 64 percent.
“We have successfully combined powerful features with an easy-to-use interface, which is particularly valuable and important for time-conscious entrepreneurs. We are happy that additional resources and support will help us extend this “powerful simplicity” to new markets,” says Dmytro Dubilet, third co-founder of Finmap.
The fintech startup secured its first investments in 2020, in the form of a state grant from the Ukrainian Startup Fund (USF), which financed the project with $50,000.
“I first met the Finmap team in 2021, right after they raised their pre-seed funding and were looking to take on the world. Then came the Russian invasion, the loss of income, and they had to start from scratch. I was impressed by the resilience of Alex and the team as they quickly restructured the company and put themselves in a position to expand outside of the Ukrainian market,” said Borys Musielak, Founding Partner of SMOK Ventures.
Tbi Bank CEO Petr Baron started investing in the project in early 2022 and continued to provide support during this latest funding round.
“I am inspired by the dynamism and inspiration that the founders, Alex and Ivan, maintain at every stage of the company’s development and with which they take on new challenges. They evolve at the pace of the project and will continue to reach new milestones. Over the past year, Finmap has demonstrated incredible growth and product adaptability, once again confirming the importance of financial management and the relevance of this topic for European businesses” , noted Baron.
In addition to the planned expansion, Finmap has also identified new areas where it can expand, such as invoicing tools.
“We see that there is still a huge demand for such tools today in different European countries, including Poland. The next aspect concerns our freshly deployed applications. Previously we only had the web version of our platform, but we are currently actively designing the Finmap iOS app, which will also be followed by the Android version. Such measures also partially open the personal finance market to us, rather than only commercial finance,” concludes Solovei.