Why we invested in FLOWX.AI
Putting builders in charge
There are new structural paradigms in enterprise software every 5–10 years, starting with the shift from on-premise solutions to cloud based products, then from sales driven top down approach to product-led growth. Now we see a shift from off the shelf products with limited customization to composable platforms. Much of these are commonly characterized as low-code/no-code but I like David Peterson’s (Angular Ventures) definition better, as “low barrier / high ceiling” (let’s call them LBHC).
Low barrier is quite a relative notion in enterprise software (as it’s still, you know, enterprise software) but can generally be interpreted into fast implementation, clear initial use case and intuitive design. High ceiling is the ability to act as a scalable platform within the enterprise addressing a diverse set of use cases with user generated solutions.
As the core of these products (such as Notion, Airtable or Zapier) are building blocks, users within organizations have the freedom and power to fit them to their needs, which results not only a better customized soution, but higher activation and engagment too. This duality can act as a flywheel to create better value alignment between software vendors and builders, as well as between enterprises and end users. Such tools empowering citizen developers are becoming the backbone of the creator economy in B2B.
So far LBHC products mostly addressed the automation of backend processes, where the main idea is to get the job done, in other words eliminating mindless manual work. As product sophistication develops, I believe soon all software development needs can and will be addressed with bottom-up platforms (and Gartner believes it too, estimating visual coding will account for 65% of all enterprise application development by 2024.)
The digitization trap in banking
Over the past decades financial institutions brought much of their operations to the digital world. The transition has been long completed on the database and infrastructure level as account balances, transactions and contract details are all to be found on a server somewhere, rather than a paper trail. But more often than not, the digital information was fragmented in many pieces rather than stored as a single source of truth, creating overly complex data structures which trickled down to overly complex operations.
On the customer facing front banks were more hesitant to boldly move away from their traditional ways of doing business and towards digitization, mostly just following the demand of younger internet native generation, rather than leading the change. This, coupled with the described complexity on the infrastructure front resulted in slow implementation cycles (400 days on average, according to McKinsey) and often inconsistent digitization roadmap spanning over many years; and a remarkably low NPS of the end products (32/100 in banking according to Qualtrics). Implementing foundamental changes gradually rather than at once primed institutions to end up with high failure rate of projects and an incoherent digital offering.
In the fintech wave of the 2010s multiple tech companies became successful deivering core banking systems. While they often were compact and state of the art, they were also generally cumbersome to integrate as well as to build upon. In the meanwhile neobanks came along starting with a clean slate and showed customers that digital banking can actually be a pleasant experience, putting pressure on their legacy counterparts to up their game. Holding onto their legacy systems on the shore while trying to step into the shifting boat of digital future banks are at risk of falling into the water. What they need is a bridge.
FLOWX.AI enters the chat
Ioan and Serban have been serving global enterprises with digital solutions for over a decade. After recognizing patterns of use cases they started developing a reusable visual coding framework and started FLOWX.AI to bring the LBHC paradigm to customer facing applications.
The platform acts as a shell around legacy backend systems — it does not need to alter them, only picks and refeeds information as needed. As a middleware it allows for quickly deployable omnichannel applications without the need to integrate more than once. As a frictionless substitute of a full stack solution it empowers citizen developers within the bank to focus on business opportunities rather than technology risks.
We are excited to back them in their 8.5m USD seed round to enable builders within financial institutions and enterprises to build unbounded and deliver solutions that customers deserve.
