7 Questions to Ivan Maryasin, Monite
signals presents companies, people and partners from the signals innovation ecosystem. This week, we have seven questions for Monite.
1. What is Monite and what problem are you solving?
Today, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use multiple online and offline tools to take care of their admin and accounting tasks — banking, invoicing, expenses, accounting software to name only a few. Using many tools and having the data in many places leads to a lot of manual time spent on these tasks — dozens of hours a month wasted for the average SME.
Monite is an all-in-one financial management platform that bundles all the key functionality SMEs need in one place and automates up to 90% of accounting and admin tasks. It lets you do banking, invoice clients, receive & pay incoming bills, log expenses and pay reimbursements — all in one interface. Monite then auto-maps all documents to transactions and hands the information over to the tax advisor, so they can categorize and export to Datev. With all that, Monite saves SMEs 50% of the time and money they usually spend on admin and accounting.
According to our research, over 77% of SME owners in Europe prefer using a one-stop-shop solution for their finance needs instead of their current manual/half-manual process.
2. What makes your team special and what skills are you still looking for?
To build a next-gen platform solution, we gathered a team of experienced fintech people who sense from experience what the future of SME Tech looks like. To build a next level thing, we were looking for people who think past the current status quo in the market. We managed to build a team of seasoned specialists who have unique perspectives on SME fintech market.
- Ivan Maryasin, CEO, who scaled a key German neobank Penta from 0 to 20k customers
- Andrey Korchak, CTO, who built an SME super-app in the largest Russian neobank Tochka
- Almir Muminovich, COO, who scaled a leading UK SME neobank Tide from 80k to 500k clients
- Stephan Weber, Head of Product, who made Payfit a key SME payroll solution in Germany
3. What are you most proud of?
We are most proud of the fact that we managed to build a platform solution with a fraction of resources any vertical competitor has, while covering five verticals from the start and bringing value innovation to each subset of our service.
4. What is your biggest challenge and how do you tackle it?
Our biggest challenge is translating the product value proposition into a very simple and compelling message that can be easily understood by the business owners. As the platform concept is novel in the market, we have to experiment and find a way to get the message across.
5. What will you have achieved in one year?
We will have went from the thoughts of building a neobank to a totally new concept of the one-stop-shop platform that layers on top of banks and to deploying it live in March 2021.
6. Where do you see the benefits that your investors bring?
Our investors bring a unique combination of SME Tech and company building knowledge, networks of experts that give us deeper insight into the market, and a strong feedback loop that allows us to quickly reflect on learnings and move ahead more efficiently.
7. What one piece of advice would you give someone starting a company?
Starting a company is a lot about the vision — you need to have a clear understanding of what you’re after. The approach, the means, the product — all these can change many times along the way. But if you have a strong vision, you will find a way to make it happen.
signals is your trusted business partner, mentor, and investor in one. We support founders with more than money.
signals Pre-Seed supports early-stage founders on the road to finding a product-market fit. signals Pre-Seed provides up to €250K in pre-seed funding as well as individual mentoring. Our focus is on B2B startups in Enterprise and SME tech within the DACH region. Follow-up funding is available via signals Venture Capital, a €100M venture capital fund, investing in subsequent Seed and Series A stages.
Our portfolio companies benefit not only from classic venture capital support, but also from the signals innovation ecosystem, part of the SIGNAL IDUNA Group, a leading German insurance provider. As a scaling partner, signals supports startups with a broad offering, including pre-seed to Series A investment, facilitation of corporate partnerships, as well as access to a communal office and event space.
