Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 1)

Mike has raised over $300M and built an over $250M ARR FinTech SaaS business. Now, AI offers FloQast an opportunity to further strengthen their product roadmap with deep domain knowledge.

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now, on this timeline, we are in 2022. This is also when AI is starting to hit the popular consciousness and the venture capital industry in a big way. What impact did that have on your product strategy, go-to-market strategy, et cetera? So, tell me more about what’s your AI strategy and

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Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in your first round? Cynthia Chen: First round was $2.5 million. Sramana Mitra: What milestone did that get you to? Cynthia Chen: It got me to tens of thousands of active users.

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of when you decided to quit Figure and kicked off Kikoff, what were the circumstances? How did you kick this off? How did you get this off the ground?

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, but that’s not the company we are talking about today, right? Cynthia Chen: It’s not. I was at Figure for almost two years. I was the founding Chief Risk Officer and then became Chief Revenue Officer. Then I saw this opportunity for building a private company, and I started Kikoff with my

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Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to about 2012 when you have spent seven years in Deloitte in credit and consumer credit. What did you do next?

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 1)

In the past year, 330 out of 1200 Unicorns have lost status. You read a lot about Unicorns that raise lots of VC money and then fail to scale. Cynthia Chen tells a very different story. She has raised about $43M and built a highly profitable $100M+ ARR company called Kikoff. Read on to learn

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Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now, just explain the core business model. Ryan Rosett: We have three channels: our renewal department, wholesale channel, and the direct sales channel. We have risk-based pricing with a lot of automation. We have prequalification models. A quick no is fine too. We’re very much about the customer experience. Obviously a customer doesn’t

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