I’m excited to share a new and improved Keese.
As a CEO of a startup, all I wanted to do was focus on building, selling, and growing our product and team. As a startup of 6 people in 3 countries, with 2 banks per subsidiary (not including individual currency accounts within a bank), and no CFO or VP finance, I realized that I was spending too much time dealing with managing our financial situation.
And then this happened:
When we raised our initial funding from Techstars, we budgeted our Israeli cash flow at 1UDS=3.3ILS but by November 2021, it was 1 USD to 3 ILS (if you can even get that market rate from your bank)…
~10% of my Shekel budget was cut over a month, and I couldn't do anything about it.
The difference between an Israeli startups that raised $10m in Nov 2020 vs Nov 2021 is 4 million shekel.
And to be honest, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Given the unprecidented inflation rate in the US right now and risks of hyperinflation all over the world (without even getting into the Bitcoin of it all), currency managment is a trillion dollar issue for startups and global companies.
Combining this global currency uncertainty with the exponential growth of companies hiring abroad (shout out to Deel) and with startups raising more money than ever before (another shout out to Deel :)), more companies than ever are overly exposed to currency risks.
In other words: Any company that has international exposure and is not holding/hedging that currency, is acting irresponsibly. And it’s surprisingly A LOT of companies.
We started working with our amazing community we had built with our international consumer app, and we launched our Beta business platform.
Our Beta users have raised anywhere from 5 to 35 million dollars (or are bringing in millions in revenue), have payroll, expenses, or incomes in the US+Israel, yet their finance teams are usually 1–2 employees with outsourced/external accounting departments who are not optimizing currency holdings.
Arbitrarily sending last-minute international transfers ad-hoc is a recipe for disaster.
It’s akin to driving without insurance. It’s all OK until it’s not OK.
So how can we help?
We upgraded our bank integration technology that we built for Keese app, and are trying to solve this problem for the millions of companies that now need to worry about their global exposure.
Moving forward, Keese.io will help CFOs and founders understand how much of each currency they need to hold, based on their global cashflow.
We do this in 3 ways:
- Identify the risk: A real-time cash flow dashboard that analyses all incomes, expenses, and transactions across the world to allow the CFO/founder to visualize the company’s currency needs.
This saves hours of a CFOs week reviewing multiple bank account statements and transactions. - Eliminate the risk: We offer the ability for companies to ‘lock-in’ an exchange rate up to 1 year in the future.
- Continuously manage the risk: We facilitate and process any internal movement of funds within a company between banks and currencies (Ex. transferring from SVB USD account to Poalim Shekel account).
With Keese, any CFO immediately visualizes both their past and upcoming exposure and can secure and transfer funds accordingly without ever having to work with a bank.
We want to let you run your company without worrying about fluctuating exchange rates. Be prepared. It’s responsible.
We’re still just getting started on this path, and would love to hear how we can help your company be better prepared for the future.
Check out our new site: Keese.io
Use the link there to demo our dashboard for yourself.
Thank you,
