Welcoming Quaestor
Our mission at Riot Ventures is to be the premier provider of capital to entrepreneurs leveraging hard technologies for automation, advanced capabilities and human augmentation in large physical industries. While we’re constantly evaluating new sectors and technologies of interest, our core areas of expertise are robotics, digital manufacturing, biomanufacturing, defense tech, construction automation, communications/datacenter infrastructure, applied AI and logistics.
So, our investment in Quaestor Technologies… a fintech company…. may seem a bit off the reservation at first blush.
Quaestor is building a suite of automated financial tools to help entrepreneurs more easily understand the fundamentals of their business and eliminate many of the administrative burdens associated with investor relations. The platform automatically collects, standardizes, and synthesizes company financial data enabling operators and investors to make metrics-driven decisions in real time.
The past few months have made the opportunity for Quaestor quite clear.
Most entrepreneurs spent a significant amount of time in March 2020 scrambling to understand the ramifications of Covid-19 on their businesses and forecasting their cash positions and runway accordingly.
Most private market investors spent a significant amount of time in March 2020 scrambling to figure out which of their portfolio companies would need more cash.
By streamlining the process of analyzing a company’s financial health in real time, Quaestor is bridging the gap between investors and operators and bringing a new level of transparency to the startup ecosystem.
Aside from the atypical circumstances that 2020 has thrown at us, Quaestor solves a major problem that Riot Ventures and our portfolio companies feel intimately every quarter. The platform will replace the quarterly dance of investors bugging entrepreneurs for the basic financial status of the company. Instead, Quaestor will automatically produce reports for investors (at the operator’s discretion), including financial statements, burn/runway analysis and custom KPIs. All generated automatically by integrating with a company’s financial institutions and systems of record. This removes a major headache for reporting and board meetings.
Automating the leg work associated with FP&A empowers early stage founders with the tools and insights traditionally found in much more mature businesses. We believe Quaestor also a massive opportunity to leverage the platform’s data to simplify and modernize the way companies access the capital markets.
We’ve spent a lot of time at Riot Ventures trying to identify the best internal tools for our business. As we got to know more about the Quaestor product over the last few months, it was abundantly clear that we needed to use Quaestor to help us manage our growing portfolio.
As we spent more time with the Quaestor team over the last few months, it was also quite clear that we needed to find a way to be investors.
Quaestor was founded by John Melas-Kyriazi, Deny Khoung and Kevin Hsu.
John is one of the smartest people I know and someone I’ve admired since we met in 2014. I’ve long held the opinion that I would jump at the opportunity to work with John and as I spent more time with Deny and Kevin it was clear that the dream team was assembling.
The Quaestor team is an incredibly accomplished crew hailing from Carta, 8VC, Affinity and Spark Capital that pairs a deep expertise in product, design, and engineering with a profound knowledge of the customer needs.
We are incredibly excited to be supporting Quaestor on its mission to build a platform that empowers founders to make the most strategic decisions in scaling their companies. Riot Ventures is privileged to have invested in Quaestor’s seed round alongside our friends at 8VC, Spark Capital, Fathom Ventures, Global Founders Capital and Abstract Ventures.
If you’re an entrepreneur or investor interested in learning more about what the team at Quaestor is building, check out their new website: www.Quaestor.com.
