SeedBlink Blog

In late 2020, Ioan Iacob founded FLOWX.AI, a platform that helps financial institutions (and large enterprises in general) to develop robust, scalable mission-critical digital experiences at 10x faster and less expensive than any of the existing alternatives.

The company raised $8.5 million in seed round late last year, with PortfoLion leading the round and backing from Budapest-based Day One Capital and SeedBlink, through a private deal. 

We sat down with Ioan Iacob to talk about what the experience was like and what we can expect from the startup in the future.

What does "success" mean for FLOWX.AI?

To us, success means that our civilization is able to develop good software at the pace we need. "Good software" means both reliability and usability. People - both customers and employees of large enterprises - want digital interactions and digital experiences that are intuitive, easy to use - and efficient - and add value with little effort.

Software development is one of the most wasteful areas of our civilization today - if we built buildings with the efficiency with which we develop software, we would have to tear down 9 out of 10 skyscrapers we build. At the same time, the capacity to create software is a huge bottleneck - the demand for software and digital technology has grown exponentially. Banks are spending insane amounts of resources, with disappointing results - U.S. banks alone spent nearly $80 billion on technology in 2021, and are expected to spend nearly $120 billion per year by 2025.

For us, it's just crazy that building digital processes - which are inherently about high leverage - is still measured by the number of employees ( FTEs). Software has changed the world, but building software is still what agriculture was before mechanization: measured in human FTEs.

We talk about the need for software engineers - in the U.S., for example, there are nearly 2 million unfilled software jobs, and universities supply 60,000 graduates each year. It's irrational to think that we are going to catch up and solve this problem by brute force - by throwing people at it.

We do not just need software engineers. We need to find smarter ways to develop better software, or we will fall by the wayside - as a civilization.

Why did you choose a mix of VCs and individual investors for your $8.5 million seed round? 

We have had a lot of traction because FLOWX.AI is a major accelerator for the digitization of financial services in particular, and enterprise digitalization in general. The platform is tackling the most critical challenges in the digital enterprise space - legacy systems and speed of digital development - and we have a unique approach to solving this problem. In fact, when we closed our funding round, we had to turn away significant capital.

That being said, for most companies, investors are just checks. For us, investors are people who understand what we do and stand up for it.

What were some of the highlights of your SeedBlink deal?

We really loved the SeedBlink journey. We reached our fundraising goal within hours of launching. About 100 investors joined our vision and invested almost $2 million in FLOWX.AI through the Private Deal Room.

It was exciting to see this happen, as we once again saw validation from many people about how profound and painful the problem we are solving is.

At the same time, working with SeedBlink to prepare for the funding round was an excellent exercise for our entire team, and we received and felt the support from the SeedBlink team members who took on an advisory role.

Would you recommend SeedBlink to other founders?

Most definitely. We loved the enthusiastic and professional team at SeedBlink. We really felt that they understood our business and became advisors to us.

The structuring and business advice that SeedBlink provided was valuable and facilitated networking with potential business partners - so it felt like a "smart money" investment, not a "crowdfunding" investment. We were very impressed with the work SeedBlink did in terms of communication as well. Even after the effective fundraising, everything went smoothly.

Which departments will benefit most from this seed round to scale? 

One of the first things we did was to accelerate sales by expanding our international team, because right now we have so much incoming demand that we can hardly keep up with it - at the same time, large corporate deals are resource-intensive at group level.

We also have some product developments in the works that are incredibly exciting and use cutting-edge technologies to realize our vision.

There are a number of innovations that are making waves in different sectors, and we want to bring these to the enterprise software world in a way that has never been done before.  

Where do you see FLOWX and your team in 3-5 years? Are you thinking about an exit scenario? 

We believe we have an opportunity to change fundamental aspects of the enterprise software landscape - which we view as a trillion-dollar market. Our mission, our definition of success, is to dramatically change one of the pillars of civilization today. That's what we think about - everything else is just collateral.

Thank you for your kind words Ioan.  

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