The founding team with Philippe Sahli (second from left) and Melanie Gabriel (center): On a growth path in Germany.
(Photo: Oliver Hochstrasser / yokoy)
Zurich For a long time, founder Philippe Sahli blocked Friday afternoon for a particularly annoying task: As a consultant at EY, he spent hours submitting expenses and credit card statements. “Frustration with the existing solutions was a reason to found Yokoy,” says Sahli.
The goal of Shali and his co-founders Melanie Gabriel, Devis Lussi, Lars Mangelsdorf and Thomas Inhelder: to radically simplify the reimbursement of expenses, business trips, credit card payments and bills with the help of artificial intelligence: “We are working on 90 percent of the process automate, ”says Sahli. “A standard billing should no longer have to be handled by anyone.”
The Swiss fintech has recently taken a significant step closer to this goal. Yokoy has raised $ 26 million in fresh capital – and reportedly secured a three-digit million valuation. Yokoy intends to use the money to advance its expansion in Germany and Europe – and to challenge the software giant SAP with its Concur accounting software in its home market.
Yokoy is the latest example of a series of fintechs that are celebrating their first successes in Switzerland and are reaching for the European market from there. The most prominent example is the German-Swiss digital insurer Wefox, which was founded as Financefox in Zurich before moving to Berlin and raised $ 650 million in June.
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But the entire Swiss start-up scene is booming. In the third quarter alone, venture capitalists invested almost 700 million francs (around 660 million euros) in start-ups, as data from Swiss Venture Insights show. After CHF 400 million in the first quarter and CHF 1.4 billion in the second quarter, 2021 could be a record year.
Founder Sahli thinks Switzerland is a good market to start with. In a protected environment, it is easier for start-ups to develop, and there is enough venture capital, says the Yokoy founder. “That helps a lot at the beginning.” At the same time, the expansion in neighboring countries promises great growth: “As an entrepreneur, I like the EU very much,” says Sahli. “If you put your product on the market, you can roll it out across the EU.”
Tillmann Lang has had similar experiences. He is the boss and co-founder of Inyova, an app that enables fractional investments in individual stocks of sustainable companies and also wants to revolutionize the fund industry.
He observes: “The mood in the fintech scene is good. During the financing rounds, I only heard success stories. ”There are many investors in the financial center of Zurich who are specifically looking for fintechs. “You understand the subject well and have good access to industry.”
New solutions to old problems
Inyova also benefited from this: The fintech had collected eleven million francs in May – since the Bafin approval nothing has stood in the way of growth in Germany and Austria. Other European markets are to follow. Lang is convinced: “It is often time-consuming for investors to find out which companies a fund or ETF invests in.” But that is not compatible with sustainable investments. “Sustainable investments should actually be totally transparent,” says Lang. After all, savers wanted to know where their money was going.
At Inyova, for example, investors can view the ecological footprint of the companies in the portfolio and independently weight the positions from a pre-selection of around 40 companies. “At the same time, an algorithm checks that the portfolio is just as broadly diversified as the overall market,” explains Lang.
The Zurich start-up PXL Vision is also developing a technical solution to an old problem in the traditional financial industry. The team around founder Michael Born has developed software that can use computer vision and machine learning to digitally verify identities, for example for customers when opening a bank account. The software “reliably detects whether a real person is sitting in front of the camera and compares the face with the image on the identity card,” promises Born.
Scandals at the digital bank N26, which had numerous accounts opened by fraudsters, should be a thing of the past. Born sees a billion dollar market “as soon as the automated customer verification is equated with the personal interview for regulatory purposes”.
PXL Vision has grown similarly to Yokoy or Inyova: Fintech collected the first million in Switzerland, rose to become one of the market leaders in digital identity solutions – and is now pushing its way onto the German market with references from the Swiss telecommunications and financial sector.
The start-ups are also united by the difficult search for developers and other talents: “The greatest challenge at the moment is to hire new employees,” says Inyova boss Lang. “We are in direct competition with Google.” To stand up to the big tech companies remains a challenge, even with fresh capital.
More: After Wefox’s mega financing round: Who will be the next unicorn in the insurance market?