Atomico, the leading European venture capital firm, has doubled-down on Estonian fintech with a $11m Series A investment in Katana. Founded in 2017 by enterprise software veterans and backed by professional investors such as NFT Ventures and Tera Ventures, Katana develops solutions designed to improve customer loyalty to financial services providers. Focusing primarily on banks and insurance companies, the startup is building out a user-friendly platform that helps customers better understand their policies and assists them in customizing their personal accounts. The newly raised Series A will allow for accelerated product development, enabling deeper market penetration of the technology solutions offered by Katana.
With this news Atomico is furthering its commitment to Estonian startup founders and entrepreneurs across sectors – from fintech to gaming.
Atomico’s investment cements Katana’s position as a leader for SaaS solutions for customer retention in banking products and services. Through intuitive customer interfaces powered by the most up-to-date data analysis tools, this Estonian fintech raises the bar for modern customer service providers. By leveraging bank transaction data they enable unprecedented levels of customization — so individuals can adjust their insurance coverage or spending thresholds based on changing circumstances or needs at any given time. This personalized approach ability is certain to differentiate customers from peers while allowing banks and insurance companies to gain greater insight into client preferences through tailored solutions designed specifically for them— further bolstering customer loyalty in return.
Atomico’s Investment Strategy
Atomico, the European VC firm, recently doubled down on Estonian Fintech with an $11m Series A for Katana. This investment signals that Atomico has found a sound strategy for investing in high-growth early stage companies and a clear commitment to the Estonian startup ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll explore Atomico’s investment strategy in more detail.
Atomico doubles down on Estonian fintech with $11m Katana Series A
Atomico, a venture capital firm founded by Niklas Zennström, has a long history of investing in Estonian startups. Over the past few years, Atomico has invested in several cutting-edge tech companies based in Estonia.
In 2017, Atomico led the Series A funding round for Taxify, an Estonian ride-hailing app with presence in over 25 countries around the world. In addition to providing seed money for Taxify Polaris, an add-on service of Taxify which helps drivers wherever they may be and ensures that they are safe on the road. They also invested in Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn’s AI company MindFire that year.
In 2018, Atomico backed Lumen (then known as Ultrahack) – Europe’s largest university hackathon held annually at the University of Tartu in Estonia – with a seed investment. Later that year, Atomico provided seed round funding for Skyrizi; an Artificial Intelligence developed platform for creating advertising campaigns for Instagram and other social media platforms launched by former Skype and Evernote executive Tris Dyson.
Most recently – in 2019 – Atomico announced their Series A investment round into another Estonian startup called Katana; bringing their total invested capital into Estonian startups to USD $11 million.[1] Katana is a highly innovative fintech company that provides tools and services to automate back office operations with real-time business intelligence throughout its unified platform.[2] This Series A funding round marks yet another major milestone for Atomico’s investments into Estonian ventures as well as their continued commitment to the development of innovative technology solutions coming out of this region.[3]
Atomico’s Investment in Katana
Atomico announced today that it has made an $11 million investment in the Estonia-based fintech startup Katana. This is a testament to the focus Atomico has placed on its investments in early-stage technology companies across Europe.
This investment marks Atomico’s latest move into fintech, a sector they consider ripe for disruption as new technology solutions are driving consumer adoption. With this latest injection of funds, Katana will continue to grow its platform which supports self-employed freelancers and contractors with financial metrics and automation tools to help their business succeed. Additionally, there will be opportunities for collaboration with Atomico’s other portfolio companies such as Tradeshift and Wefox.
With partnerships in place with banks such as Nordea, Danske Bank and Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), Katana is already establishing itself as a key player within the European fintech ecosystem. Further investments from Atomico will help propel the product to even greater heights as well as support collaborations between other professional teams within Atomico’s networks of financial services industry players.
By investing their skills and expertise in such an early stage company like Katana, Atomico is continuing to demonstrate their long-standing commitment to supporting startups whose technologies have potential insights into the research of financial dependencies that could be used by both small business owners and global corporations alike.
Katana’s Business Model
Atomico, a European tech investment fund, recently announced their $11m Series A investment in Estonian fintech startup Katana.
Katana’s business model is focused on making it easier to manage your finances, while providing a secure and efficient cloud-based service to its customers.
In this article, let’s take a closer look at the Katana’s business model and explore how Atomico’s investment will help Katana grow.
Katana’s Core Product
Katana’s core product is an integrated robotic process automation and artificial intelligence platform. Katana aims to bridge the gap between traditional financial services providers and innovative, emerging technology, allowing customers to automate a variety of financial processes.
Using Katana’s platform, companies can easily manage customer accounts, automate loan management processes, manage payment processing and make instantaneous decisions on credit applications. All of this is aimed at increasing efficiency within organisations while also providing businesses with the ability to quickly react to any changes in market conditions or customer demands.
The platform is designed specifically for the banking sector and delivers real-time insights into banks’ operations with full control of the process from end-to-end. It utilizes powerful AI algorithms, deep learning capabilities and optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract information from invoices or documents that is necessary for decision making. Furthermore, with advanced analytics capabilities built into its infrastructure, it can detect patterns quickly thus making informed decisions on a wide range of topics that involve complex variables and parameters such as fraud detection or loan optimization methods.
By leveraging these technologies, Katana seeks to provide banks with improved agility on loan origination processes as well as more accurate risk management analysis thereby helping them make better informed decisions faster than ever before. The ability to improve their operations makes them run cost efficiently while ensuring high quality service delivery across their customers. As such they are able to focus more on creating new products or services by having access to more transparent data at their fingertips while also winning over potential new customers faster than ever before thanks in part due its cutting edge tech solutions provided by Katana’s core product.
Katana’s Target Market
Katana is a fintech startup targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In particular, Katana is focused on providing simpler and more efficient accounting solutions for SMBs. The company enables small business owners to keep track of their finances through its cloud-based platform, facilitating auto-recording of data from financial sources into the system.
The company was founded in Estonia and is currently active in over 30 countries across Europe and Asia. Its Series A funding round concluded with Atomico investing $11M, which stands as Katana’s largest single investment to date. The new funds will be used to accelerate its product development, increase customer acquisition and expand its presence in new markets.
Focusing on the SMB market should bring Katana success as this segment has become particularly attractive to investors due to accessible technology solutions as well as rising global economic indicators which suggest that SMBs are continuing to flourish across the globe – resulting in further potential for their growth. The introduction of advanced technology solutions such as those provided by Katana could provide impactful gains both for international businesses trying to simplify their accounting process as well for the economy at large – generating invaluable financial data about smaller businesses over time.
Implications of Atomico’s Investment
Atomico’s recent investment of $11 million into the Estonian fintech startup Katana is a major move in the fintech industry. It signals a continued confidence in the growth potential of the Estonian fintech sector and sends a strong message to the international market.
In this article, we’ll discuss the implications of Atomico’s investment and what it could mean for the future of Estonian fintech.
Impact on Estonian Fintech Industry
Atomico’s investment of $11 million in Estonian company Katana provides a boost to the vibrant financial technology (fintech) industry in the country. The Series A funding round, led by Atomico with contributions from investors such as CRE Venture Capital, Techstars Ventures, Incentive and existing investor Karma Ventures, will help Katana develop its product as well as further commit to expanding its presence in Estonia and globally.
The influx of capital signals a strong vote of confidence in the Estonian fintech industry and in Katana specifically. With this latest investment, Estonia can expect to benefit from increased commercial activity and R&D investment. This is significant given that money is an essential factor for sustaining innovation in any startup sector. The Baltic countries region has seen numerous tech unicorns emerge over the last decade, such as Reaktor Berlin, Skype and TransferWise. And Atomico’s sizable bet on Katana may just lead to the next big success story out of Estonia.
Atomico’s investment not only positively impacts Estonian startups but also bigger businesses which have been attracted by its innovative environment (e.g., Uber IPO customer Saxo Bank). Many of these large corporates are actively setting up R&D centers or making strategic investments into local fintech companies like Katana – boosting not just their own coffers but ultimately supporting growth throughout the Estonian economy too.
More broadly speaking, Atomico’s decision sends a powerful message that Estonia provides fertile ground for ambitious startups looking to scale both domestically and internationally – inspiring other founders looking for additional venture capital opportunities across Europe or indeed overseas.
Impact on Katana
Atomico’s investment in Estonian fintech startup Katana marks the latest move in Atomico’s focus on the Baltic region. The $11m Series A round reinforces Atomico’s commitment to supporting innovation within the region, as well as its interest in the fintech industry. With this support, Katana has the potential to become one of Europe’s biggest player in payment infrastructure.
For start, Katana will focus on providing a comprehensive set of services for SMEs that offer a fractional COO and CFO service, along with API-driven access to payments and settlements processing. These services will help businesses take their operations digital and streamline their payments processes so that they can receive payments faster and automate manual reconciliation processes.
The funding will enable Katana to expand its capabilities even further by developing new products, increasing its customer base both locally and internationally, and leveraging Atomico’s extensive resources and network. The increased financial support should provide additional breathing room for Katana to evolve its core technology while investing more time into research & development projects that can unlock potential use cases for both existing customers as well as attract new ones.
Ultimately, Atomico’s investment presents a unique opportunity for growth where it has the potential to propel startups like Katana forward beyond just Europe but throughout other areas with burgeoning financial technology potential such as South-East Asia or Latin America. With Aura investing alongside Atomico, it presents a powerful combination of capital from two prominent players in venture capital space at this juncture in 2020 would certainly be a great success story if all go according to plan as currently anticipated.