Sergiu Negut, co-founder and Board Member of UK-based Fintech, FintechOS, has a background in computer science and international business administration. Today, The Recursive sat down with him to discuss in a video interview the latest solution the startup launched on the market, titled FintechOS 22, and his lessons learned about scaling and fundraising in the last three years.
This year has been one of fast growth for FintechOS. They raised a $60M Series B round in April, they are looking to expand globally, and they are also launching new solutions on the market.
Two of them are FintechOS 22, a new platform that will allow options like buy now/pay later, or split payments loans, to name a few, and FintechOS Academy, where both customers and consultants can create and edit financial products for a personalized financial journey without having to rely on software development teams.
“We have to put it forward for everybody to be able to contribute. We have to enable a community-based approach to build software banking and financial services. To create this community, you need an Academy and an easy-to-use product,” Negut explains.
In the interview, you will discover more about the gap the FintechOS team saw on the market and tackled it with innovative tools, like the no-code editor, to accelerate non-engineers productivity, as well as what was necessary to do to succeed.
“It was very clear for us that if we want to take this road, if we want to be convincing about this, we have to raise as much money as we can from the existing market to carry the word outside and make ourselves known,” Negut says about fundraising.
FintechOS was launched in 2017 by Teo Blidarus and Sergiu Negut. Before this, in 2014, the two partners collaborated at Softelligence, a company that aids Insurance and Banking players to grow through AI and Machine Learning.
He also jokes that if FintechOS will be a success, he will talk more about it. If not, he might write a book, which will still be inspiring because failure is a step forward, as these other startup founders shared with us. For now, he is busy scaling up.
“Don’t meet with your dream investor first. Because you will get feedback, you will get rejections due to not understanding the business model. So, do that learning without compromising the best money that you can get,” the FintechOS co-founder shares with us about growth.
Negut has over two decades of experience helping brands grow. He has been an adviser, board member, angel investor, and manager in different industries, like health, IT, and finance. He was also the first investor in FintechOS, about which he shares more in the video interview.
“I have been talking quite a lot about building businesses, about how you take a company and you grow it and at some point, you talk, talk, talk, but you have to do stuff as well. So, I wanted to join [FintechOS], especially because the access to finance has changed a lot. We have access to venture capital, which was not the case for businesses in Romania 10 years ago,” he shares about the beginning.
His goal is to build teams that can increase the value for both society and the shareholders. The co-founder has experience in the educational sector, as an Associate Dean of Entrepreneurial Growth and partner at Maastricht School of Management Romania, where he teaches “Entrepreneurial Growth” and “Mergers and Acquisitions”.
He has been an inspiring mentor for young founders like Ciprian Dudulea, co-founder of The Outfit, and George Moroianu, co-founder of Flip, as well as other students at The Entrepreneurship Academy in Romania.
