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 how.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Nicholas Fok, General Partner, Erez Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: For those of you who are listening, it’s actually not a bad business to do a wrapper. You can build a business by doing AI wrappers that are specific to a vertical or specific to a use case, and you would find customers. It’s better as a bootstrapped business. VCs are not going to invest in wrappers, because the VC funded company has to go from zero to a hundred million dollars in five to seven years. So, you need a defensible competitive advantage. You need an exit strategy and so forth, none of which are going to be viable with just a wrapper business.

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your go-to-market strategy? And what is your go-to-market strategy today? It sounded like you got access to customers through First Data. Or did I get that wrong?

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Could you double click down on the technical integrations that were required to make all this happen? You’ve talked about First Data on one hand, you obviously need to have an integration with the customers’ credit card system and bank account. So what is the integration landscape of this solution?

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At that point in the year of 2010, what was going on in the market? Why did you choose to do this business? There are several other companies that are doing this business. What was the landscape then? Why Credibly in 2010?

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So what happens after this beer thing closes?

Ryan Rosett: Then I went into real estate development. I was probably 25 or 26 at this time.

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 1)

Ryan has bootstrapped a FinTech small business lending business from Michigan, raised Private Equity funding to scale, and then bought the PE stake back through a Management Buy-out. Excellent case study!

Sramana Mitra: All right, Ryan, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the credit capital, you got four term sheets from the credit capital side. How many customers or SMBs were on your platform?

Felix Rodriguez: A little over 500.

Sramana Mitra: And what was the total amount of transactions that you were seeing on that?

Felix Rodriguez: Half a billion a year in transactions.