Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 5)

Martin Manniche: During the process of starting an energy management system, we built proof points on smart cities and smart country. We built proof points in consumer to consumer with connected lighting technology. We build integration with connected cars. We then said, “We need to control the home network.” We make them and get it out to millions and millions of homes. Then we needed to control the software that sits in the home for the voice.

Now we control voice, broadband, the ability to have devices commissioned on a managed network, the ability to build and manage services for these operators so it’s not Google or Apple that own the services store and build a different relationship to limit churn for their customers. >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your core business model is the origination fee business model?

Sergio Furio: We call ourselves an originator of secure loans. That’s where our value add is. If you think about it, a collateralized loan is very complex to originate. If you can create a business that excels in processing the loans for home equity and auto equity, then you have found a good spot.

Everyone loves those types of credit. The volatility of that credit is very low because you have the collateral. Then the investors definitely want to invest in that type of loans. The complexity is building a platform that originates these types of loans with high quality in an efficient way. >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you raise that money from and based on what investment thesis?

Martin Manniche: We raised the money from a combination of strategic partners. These are partners who have invested in previous companies. Then of course, myself and my brother invested to show that we were serious about this. That first round was only insider investment. The B round was where we took external investment.

Sramana Mitra: In the $6 million, were there any outside investors?

Martin Manniche: There were manufacturing companies and other private investors who had invested in companies with me before. I normally call it >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come to where you are now. Help me understand your business better. What’s happening on the platform? Who’s doing what? How are you getting paid? What do you need in terms of infrastructure to make your model work?

Sergio Furio: Today, BankFacil is a secure lending platform. We are a digital lender. From that perspective, we find customers who are looking for a variety of things. From providing loans for home improvement materials from oscillatingguide.com to purchasing cars, we provide financial help for everything. They could look for refinancing their debt. They could look for getting a loan for doing some home improvement. We find them and present them with our product – a loan with a collateral with much cheaper rates than the market. The market is working at interest rates of 200%. We work at a 25% interest rate.

We present the product. The customer fills out an application with us and we either qualify that customer or reject that customer. If a customer is prequalified >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Martin Manniche: 2005. Then the first new thing for me was that I was no more working for myself. I was joining a big company. I worked for Cisco Consumers Group where I eventually became the CTO. That was an interesting journey – coming in as a Senior Director and working your way up through the organization to become the CTO. I had no knowledge of networking.

Normally Cisco likes to see their CTOs have an MBA or a doctorate degree. I was an aberration, but as I said to the executive team, I have a lot of MBA experience of building companies for many years. I felt I’ve done my MBA many times. I was with Cisco for four and a half years. Cisco had a tremendous >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 4)

Sergio Furio: We actually ended up doing exactly what we were seeing at that point, but there were too many question marks. We raised money from a couple of seed funds – one from Brazil and another from the Czech Republic. That was 25% of the round. Another 50% was from a set of 8 to 10 financial services executives. These were actually people who I had met during those 18 months.

I have been sitting with them and telling them our dream and where we were heading. They invested in the team that they were seeing. They liked the idea. They liked the market, but they thought that our ability to execute was reasonable. Another 25% was from my friends. They wanted to get into a company and support me. >>>

Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 2)

Martin Manniche: In a very short period of time, I figured out that I really liked understanding the technology and the software. I picked it off fairly quickly. When I was out delivering these products, every time I would sell them something. I started, together with my brother, a component distribution company for distributing memory, hard drives, and monitors.

My brother ran his distribution company, but when his customers needed printers or other equipments, my organization could supply that. We grew fairly well. From that company, we transitioned. Multimedia was just starting. There was a company called Creative Labs that owns that market. As we know the PC market, I thought of building a multimedia kit where we give the retailers their own brand. We thought that the >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: While you were experimenting with lead generation and doing it on a shoestring experimentation mode, what kind of revenue level did you reach with that? Was that something that you used to bootstrap the new idea?

Sergio Furio: The reason why we were doing lead generation at that point was that it was cheaper. When it comes to the unit economics, the fact that the leads were not converting enough for the financial institutions meant that the revenues you were getting were very low. We were in a cost-per-acquisiton model.

The cost of acquiring that lead was pretty much the same. The revenue model didn’t make sense. You were spending the same in marketing. There was no >>>