ReefKNoT Investments’ Post

Transcript

Welcome to the 6th episode of our Reef Cloud portfolio Spotlights. I'm Mark, the Managing Director of Renard. Thanks for joining us again today. In this episode, I spoke with Paul Christensen, Co-founder, Previs. Revise is a transformative supply chain financing analytics tool and platform that harnesses deep data science capabilities such as machine learning and LMS to ingest, harmonize and organise bTB transaction data and uses this to power instant supplier payments as well as spend analytics. Join us today. Is Paul and I talked about previous genesis is evolution over the years. The technology that provides is using to process and makes sense of the transaction data that's handling and the insightful advice he has for first time founders do enjoy the session as much as I enjoy interviewing Paul. So what's the genesis of the idea when you first started to revise? What inspired you to start the journey? It sounds a bit trite, but I always love to quote the the British Mountaineer George Mallory when he was asked why did you climb Everest? And his answer was because it's there. It is that right? We're we're in BB payments and it is such a big market. It's the biggest market in the world. The way companies pay their suppliers is so bad. It's such a big problem and it's so inefficient. To me, it's like looking at Everest, like you can't leave. That alone, we gotta fix that. And so that's, yeah, that's it. It's there and it really needs to be fixed. And whereas better place as anyone to fix it must provide key value proposition, right. Why is there a reason for being for providers in the whole space? Yeah, it's about the data. Every large company in the world has a gold mine of data sitting in their ERP system. Every large company in the world. And no one's using it, no one's using it, no one's looking at it. And you know, our sort of clients, which are typically the the, the very large. Or breaks the the Fortune 2000 type companies they're all using on Prem ERP systems. So highly bespoke, highly customized. It's actually quite complicated to get the data and to be able to use it. When you think about B2B payments and corporates paying their suppliers. I guess when we started the company 8 years ago, we looked at this incredible space which was so backwards and so painful and so inefficient. And the hypothesis was what if we used the data? If we use the data, surely we could do this much, much, much better we built. Models and and we realized actually yeah this works and so we're really specialists in ingesting and harmonising that B to B transaction data from large corporates and then creating value off the back of it and now especially with the onset of the AI revolution right and AI a lot of times it's trained on data as well right so we we first met our attraction to you is number 1 you know you're targeting a space that made sense to to help address because. These were folks that needed help and #2 you had not only the data, but also very interesting and very deep models to actually make use of the data to facilitate those payments. Maybe can also give us a sense of. Where you started from versus where it is right now? How has that product and evolution sort of happened, right? Yeah, it's a great question. And, and, and you're right, I mean, there is this huge focus on AI and has been for the last two or three years. But clearly there wasn't eight years ago when we started and we were an AI company. That core value proposition hasn't changed. Ingesting huge amounts of data, B transaction data, harmonizing that data, getting into a form that it's usable and then applying AI and other forms of decisioning to that. That core USB has never changed. That's the core of the company. We've really tried to broaden out the products and services that we can bring to market and the the way I position this now and it's getting a lot of traction, particularly with the the world's largest 20 odd banks. We did the really, really, really hard bit 1st and and part of that is the ability to adjust and harmonize the data and and build that four platform that could do that really at enterprise grade, right because we started. Startup 101 will say, you know, start with SME and then work up to middle market and you know, maybe never go to enterprise, but but don't start there. Whereas we started with the biggest blue chip names, but cracking that hard bit of building that enterprise grade platform to do that. And then the first use case we had were these instant payments that you didn't have to wait for a supplier, a buyer to approve your invoice. That was our first use case. So let's say Motorola is an example. They're they're one of our clients. We rolled out this solution to pay all their suppliers instantly, which they logged. Now we have that data. Made in place. So everyday Motorola sends us a full copy of their Ledger. We have all that data. It's all kept incredibly securely and we can't do anything with it other than what Motorola allows us to do. But now we're able to experiment and provide all kinds of other services for Motorola or their banks because we've got that data. An example of one that's getting a lot of traction now is what's called matching. Motorola has 10,000 suppliers in its database. It might have one supply, you know, Joe Bloggs widget code. And in one system it's called Joe Bloggs. Another system it's called J dot blogs in another system blogs is spelled with 2G's and not 1G and so they end up with 20 different records of one company and that causes all kinds of pain for the matching processes let's actually work out is this one entity or 20 entities perfect use case for large language models can we use our edge harness the power of MLM's to solve that problem and the answer is yes we can and we're getting sort of 9899% hit rates success rates so your your question of what's changed the. Four, USP and the core value hasn't changed. We're just building and developing a whole set of new solutions off that core foundation that we put in place. What was the most challenging period for you, you know, during your previous journey, right? Is it the startup part of it or the middle or where you know, or now is there all of the above? Movie about listen, it's it's building a startup is the hottest thing on the planet. There's there's nothing harder than than doing that. I would say building a startup servicing enterprise is the hardest of the hardest of that because enterprises just don't buy stuff from startups. Yeah, it's all hard. It never gets easy, but that's the beauty of the journey. What kind of advice would you have for like, you know, first time founders as they're designing their board, either both directors or advisors. What kind of advice do you have for these? Founders, I guess my advice would be, you know, 1 you definitely want people to understand your space and this is where Richard has an instant proposition, right? You guys are very narrow in terms of your thematic focus, which is which is super valuable. And wherever you can, you know, you want that alignment and you wanna shared vision of where it's going to go. And maybe more importantly with that is an alignment on how you going to operate, how you have each others back. Brian Beers open and is transparent. As you can as early as possible because frankly, **** will hit the fan and you're fancy business plan is not going to plan out like you think. And you know, you're going to go through hard times together, you know, I guess try and get alignment on that as much as you can. I'm someone who will bang my head against a wall until that wall comes down and I will not stop. And that's resilience. But sometimes that's kind of stupid because sometimes the world won't come down and sometimes you need someone to tap you on the shoulder and say you might want to stop banging your head and try a different way. Or maybe there's a door over there. And I guess that's, that's, that's a key point of building any great company and, and, and of any founder or team is that you need to be very aware of your strengths and your weaknesses. And that's why I try and always have people around me that can actually say, umm, it might be time to try a different way. Or anyone who's early in their journey founding, you know, full credit, hats off to you. It's awesome. I just have huge respect. The world needs more entrepreneurs. The world needs more startups. The world needs more venture capital to back it because. That's, you know, that's where innovation comes from, that's where growth comes from, that's where jobs come from. The whole venture industry, the whole startup industry is so, so valuable. So anyone out there early in that journey, you know, awesome. Keep going, stay curious, keep questioning, and yeah, keep keep making a dent in the universe.