Romanian startup FLOWX.AI, an enterprise platform helping banks and other financial institutions launch modern digital experiences unrestrained by the limitations of their legacy technology – just raised $8.5 million (~€7.3M) seed money, which is well above the average seed funding rounds in Central and Eastern Europe. The round was led by PortfoLion, a VC and private equity firm part of OTP Group, and joined by Budapest-based Day One Capital and Romanian crowdfunding platform SeedBlink.
Building unbounded from the limits of legacy tech in 10 weeks
FLOWX.AI was the product of an intrapreneurial journey started by Ioan Iacob (CEO), Serban Chiricescu (CTO), and Radu Cautis (a Silicon Valley VC, leading the company strategy), while working for QUALITANCE, an established software development company with clients from the Fortune 500 list. Founded in late 2020, FLOWX.AI was launched in 2021 with an ambitious target: global enterprises.
In a nutshell, FLOWX.AI aims to help banks, other financial institutions and large enterprises to transform customer and employee experiences into omnichannel digital apps faster, easier, more affordable, and, most importantly, with a smooth integration of existing legacy systems.
On the one hand, the AI-driven UI generator and ZeroRedeploy™ technology offered allow for instant changes of functionalities across all platforms. On the other hand, the solution helps modernize digital experiences on any legacy infrastructure, thus tackling the $500 billion challenge of enterprise legacy systems. Banks alone spend $200 billion on technology, out of which 85% goes to infrastructure maintenance and regulatory updates, the company said in the press release.
As Iacob shares with The Recursive in a podcast episode, the key behind building the startup was finding a precise niche of opportunity to bring value to people:
“This is the problem that we’ve been seeing, it’s the same pattern over and over again: companies being completely stuck and prevented from building amazing things. And it’s the core revival trend that we’re enabling: being able to provide digital, modern, beautiful experiences for users and employees, without having to change their legacy stack, giving it a new life instead,” Iacob explained.
Already, FLOWX.AI is used by large enterprises across different sectors, including financial institutions such as Banca Transilvania, the largest bank in SEE, or Vienna Insurance Group, and enterprises in energy and utility, such as OMV, to improve operational margins, accelerate innovation, and drive revenues through digital products.
With the new capital, FlOWX.AI plans to expand to Europe and US and grow the team with more than 20 people by the end of Q1 2022. On top of this, the engineering and data science team will continue improving the product, developing new functionalities and enhancing the AI components.
“FLOWX.AI has a huge market potential with a plausible promise of fast becoming a global player in digital transformation. Their solution stands out as it provides unmatched speed and security for modernizing the legacy systems of large enterprises. In an era of developer shortage, it’s fascinating to see such excitement and inbound interest from the developer community. We are excited to work together with the team in the coming years”, Gábor Pozsonyi, Partner at PortfoLion Capital Partners, announced.
