What if the future of finance isn't in spreadsheets or
banks, but in software that actually understands your business?
Today's guest helped build one of Europe's fastest growing
fintech platforms, empowering thousands of SMEs
to automate, spend, master real time budgeting
and finally ditch the chaos of manual finance
workflows. From corporate cards to E money licenses, from
P2 till backing debuffing compliance, this founder's story is
real redefining what finance ops can be. Stay tuned.
This once a master class for modern CFO,
SaaS, builders and startup fans alike.
Welcome to Startup Rad IO,
your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German
startup scene with news, interviews and
live events.
Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate IO bringing you
another exclusive deep dive into the minds shaping the future of startup
finance and technology across Europe. Today I'm
joined by Ante Splitter, the CEO and co founder of
moss, a Berlin based fintech scale up that's
become a category leader in Spanish event management and finance
automation for SMEs German Kaimus. If you're
a founder, CFO or operator tired of juggling
receipts, budget approvals and end of
month chaos like everybody is, you want to
listen closely. Musk is building the most intelligent finance
stack for European businesses, unifying everything from
copper cards and accounts payable to real time insights,
pre counting automation and embedded payments
all wrapped in a user first experience. They've
issued over 300,000 credit cards, raised
180 million in venture capital from the likes of Vala
Ventures and Cherry Ventures and now processes more than
5 billion euro in annualized payment volume,
all while maintaining Baffin's licensing and enterprise
grade compliance. Ante brings a unique lens to this space
with roots in investment banking and venture capital, plus the
scars and lessons of building a high profile growth
fintech from ground up. Today we unpack his
founder story, most products, evolution and the high stakes future
of AI powered finance for SMBs. Ante, great
to have you on startup radio. Welcome to the show. Hello Jern.
Likewise. Very glad to be here. This was quite an
introduction. I really like that one. And of course
we'll dig a little bit deeper but let me
start out with asking. You were once deep in fines like
investment banking, VC consulting. What was the specific
pain or moment that make you say ah, forget spreadsheets,
let's rebuild finance ops from scratch for European small
and medium businesses at the typical frustration of
an analyst or investor with Excel doesn't
count. Everybody experiences that.
Yeah, it's a honestly things came
Together while I was building my prior business together
with Anton, who is also co founder in this company.
And it was a marketplace startup. We
grew very quickly to decent size. So within the first two
years we had more than 25 million revenue. And
everything was centered around expansion.
As you can imagine, what was really behind
was our finance setup. So after
18 months, 18, 24 months,
we realized if we don't get a grip on
finance now, it's going to kill us, like literally.
Um, and then, so what followed was a significant
cleanup with temporary resources, you know, our
internal team trying to find invoices, receipts.
It was a total chaos and it took, I would
say at least six months to clean up and another six months to, you know,
properly close the books and run to the audit.
And, and I think this was the moment that that kind of sparked
my hate and passion, if I may say,
hate for the situation we had, but also the passion for
there needs to be a better way. And then it took a while longer
until it really became the vision for Moss.
So it was not that right after I got
extremely excited to continue with
the finance suite. Instead
I spent a year in venture capital and, and they realized
it's a ton of other companies that have very similar pains.
And this is what together has led to
actually launching the company. Thinking about the vision, thinking
about the first product. And yeah, now six years later,
we're still here. Actually, when you talked about
the love hate relationship with the finance
department, in my mind there was somebody looking very much like
Sigmund Freud wearing glasses and ask, could you,
could you elaborate at your love hate relationship there? But
let's forget about that. You
guys must launch with bold ambitions, corporate cards,
automation and now full spend orchestration. What was
the first moment with friction make you doubt whether
European SMEs were ready for this shift?
Look, honestly, the market is still
fairly early if you think about the customer adoption
curve. Yeah, so the famous S curve, we're still pretty far on
the left. And the main competitor has
been and still is manual
workflows, it's literally Excel, it's email
signature folders, especially with SMBs. So basically
everything that finance teams has found as a workaround to get
the job done. And
after we started, we managed to launch this
first incredible product. Yeah, and we were super lucky that we actually also
started with that product. And it was a cards issuing platform, a
cards management platform, as you said. And then on top, the expense,
expense tooling. So how can I process the receipts, how can I connect with
finance and. All of those Things we may add
most people, 80, 80% here from
listeners at least on the audio podcast, are from Germany, Austria and
Switzerland. But we do have a lot of viewers, especially on long
form YouTube, who are not familiar with the system. So basically you
first make your card expenses and then you have to
get also for the tax authorities, a receipt, an
invoice that matches this expense. And you have to do this depending
on your size and every month, every quarter, every year.
And it's a big headache. It's one of the reasons I have fewer hairs.
Yeah, like one really interesting point. And
honestly, I only got to learn this a bit later. Yeah, I realize. Yeah, it's
so obvious. But then somehow it's also so crazy. In business,
every single transaction, no matter if you spend five bucks on
a coffee or if you buy a lunch for a client or if you
invest hundreds of thousands or millions in machinery,
everything has to be administered. Like every euro, there is no black,
there is no hole in the, in the cash. You know, like it's, everything
needs to be done. So having said that, the administration
is very significant burden. And now to get
back kind of to your question, the biggest,
the biggest point of friction, the biggest question for us was
will we be able to pass beyond
that cards platform and being a cards and spend
management company to becoming a much bigger finance suite?
Because of course, the vision was to go into this bigger finance suite
and the vision was to be able to tailor to accountants
and controllers for a much bigger, much bigger domain.
And, and this was a tough ride. Yeah. So once you have
the first product, when it works, getting to the next one is
almost like starting a new company. Yeah. It was a pretty significant
kind of learning experience and point of friction for us. And also doubt.
Yeah. On how the European SMEs will react.
You moved from an investor to
operator, from finance theory to
infrastructure execution. How did
becoming a founder and especially a regulated fintech
CEO r reshape how you saw yourself and your work?
Yeah, look, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very hard. Yeah.
The job is very hard and it's very demanding. I guess it's true for
many jobs, but I need to say it's particularly hard and demanding
based on my experience. And the crazy thing is
the role changes constantly all the time.
Yeah. So with every new wave of hires, the,
with every new executive that joins the team, with every new
priority for the quarterly OKR cycle, for the strategy for
the next year, a new market entry, every new kind
of fire in a Team is always changing
your priorities as a CEO. It will always impact on
which decisions you take, what you focus on, et cetera, et cetera.
So what it really taught me is to become
multivariate. Yeah. It sounds now very technical, but basically
be able to switch context very quickly. So now we're
recording this podcast. After that, it's going to be something
entirely different. Yeah. I'm not going to have a coffee with a different
reporter. But also to take decisions
fast. Yeah. Especially the small ones. But then take a lot more
time for the tougher decisions to shape culture.
Like things that never were on my agenda. Right. As a consultant or
in any other profession, you're basically kind of getting
shaped by the culture and not you're responsible for shaping that
culture. So what I want to say is it's a
ton of setbacks. You have to live with those. You have to develop a
positive mindset. Yeah. Otherwise you go crazy. And
you need a fighter attitude. Yeah. It needs to be this
willingness to win, the willingness to fight,
because there is a market, there are players, and
you are the new kid on the block. Yeah. You want to achieve something great,
but you're nothing. You have maybe some cash from a
fundraiser, you have a couple of people on your team, and now you want to
become something big. And this kind of
is, I think, one of the main ways
how it shaped me personally. Yeah. And also professionally.
Yeah. Just trying to think this through. When you
talked about a new executive coming into the team, it's like when you have
a new team member, some of your jobs get
absorbed by this person. You get to do more, but also
you have to think more, because it's not that you need to write
email, abc, but you need to tell this person what
to achieve in a month, in a year, and so on and so forth. So
you need much more time to think ahead.
Yeah, 100%. And it changes dynamics because
maybe first you were also execution responsible. Yeah.
So maybe first you were the person that worked together with the team on
getting the job done, and now suddenly it's exactly what you said. Suddenly
you're the context giver. Yeah. You're direction giver. You kind
of. You're the control tower. To make sure we stay on course. You work
together, you help. Yeah. And this is. And this is
constantly changing as the company
evolves. Yeah. From. From good to bad. I actually like
the picture of the control tower. Because you're avoiding the crash. Yeah,
of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's. Especially with
tech companies where one of the key strengths Is to be
agile. Yeah. So one of the key strengths is to learn fast, to break
things, to iterate from there. Which also means
realize where things maybe are not going not on the right path.
Yeah. And I can give you, if you like, and give you like a very
clear example. We once
decided to focus on a customer segment that was a bit outside
of our ideal customer profile. And, and that
customer segment faced a little bit lower complexity in
finance, but actually, you know,
had some of the pains. And we went
after that segment and tested how is it
reacting now? Once we had enough learnings to know what works, what
doesn't work. It's so mission critical to make sure that this information
tickles across all of the teams. Because the marketing team is going to
continue driving, driving traffic, they're going to train your
driving, investing and same on an outbound sales motion. They need to
know whether they should continue focusing or not. So
it's really hard to keep this communication
best in class to make sure that everybody has the context
and knows what they have to do in this very quickly changing
dynamics. And I was wondering,
because I've seen quite frequently when I was still a
consultant in large companies that you did this with regular calls,
weekly or monthly, where people participated and
they worked through items, but actually they
tended to get bloated and bloated and you could hear the
people not paying attention and tapping in the background and all that stuff.
Have you found a better way to do that? You mean
with my team or for myself? Both.
Yeah. So look, I'm really, really, really
bad at multitasking. Anybody
will confirm. So the only way is don't
even try. And this is going to avoid the
typing, it's going to avoid the confusion and if it happens, people
will realize immediately and it's not going to be supportive.
So for me personally, it's 100% presence. If you're
doing it, just be present, take your notes, be,
you know, pay a ton of attention, etc, etc. On
the other side, I guess there is, I don't
know, it's difficult. Right. Ideally you don't want to have so big calls. Right. You
don't want to have calls where there are eight to 10 people on it
and especially not if people have the time to do other
stuff on the sides. Yeah. Then it sounds almost like the audience is too
big. So maybe, maybe what we try to do is we try to
steer kind of ex ante on what is the audience, how
can we keep it to the ones that are actually working on it, designing it,
because then There is almost like no chance to escape.
I'm personally always torn between doing such calls
with, as you already said, the smallest possible audience
or working with stuff like to do lists where you just send around to do
lists. But the problem is then always people lack the
context there or misinterpret interpret what is there.
Yeah, yeah, the context setting is really important
but I guess like the, the magic lies somewhere in the middle.
Yeah. So async,
Async, whatever can be done, especially in written form. I think
sometimes written form can reinforce things and bring things also back
on the same page later really, really effectively. But then
when, when there is a, the benefit of a discussion, benefit of
questions, then probably it's better to, to just jump on the meeting.
Exactly. From our awesome audience, I would like to know
what moment made you believe in your startup, share in the comments
or tag us on social media
until your darkest day. Moss made headlines with
layoffs like many other scale ups navigating the Fintech
winter. Take us to that day. What was
happening behind the scenes and what helped you push forward?
Yeah, it was horrible. Honestly it was
horrible, especially because in total it took 12 to
18 months. So we're not speaking about one specific day, we're
speaking about the whole journey that the company has to go through and that we
also had to go through. The context was
fairly straightforward. Markets turned,
we were over optimized on growth
and that setup was not fit for purpose anymore. The burn
relative to growth ambitions and especially to
cash. And the years of Runway was not in line. So
we had to take action on the other
side. We also made this promise. Right. So we
hired people, we kind of gave them an implicit or even
explicit promise. We're going to do our best to try to
make this company and you successful. Yeah, we're going to try to
coach you, to train you, to develop you, but we're also going to want to
create equity value in this company. And then we had
investors that gave us a ton of money that we
also promised we're going to do something great with that money. It's a
gene is the right roi, you know, you should invest here.
So honestly, there was also not really a way out. Yeah,
I think if you're serious about those things and if you're more accomplished, it's kind
of on the, on the fighter side. When it's uncomfortable,
you will still have to grind through it and.
Yeah. And then we just had to get our shit together. Yeah.
Honestly and literally we had to understand
where to think about what is the Future, that is a must have.
What are the strategic priors? What is the team set
up? What are the regrets? And no regrets.
Calculate this through, you know, through business case sessions and
everything that's needed. Discuss with the board, discuss with
people, team. Think about all of the consequences that it means for
the employees. You know, it's like, it's pretty significant. Yeah. Because
the market was in a downturn in general. So I would
say very heavy lifting and deliberate thinking
with many backs and forwards to then kind
of pull through. And now kind
of the second wave, second phase starts. Yeah. So
now you kind of completed your first milestone. The
culture needs to get, needs to be brought back on track. And
that's very, very, very hard. So here we learned our most painful
lessons. How, how to get the
motivation back when effectively there was a
severe issue. Yeah. When effectively things failed.
And, and this took a year. Now it's very. Now it's great
again. We are, we're so happy. Energy level is super high. Team is,
is motivated, pumped company grows. All of those things are now in
a good spot. But to get there was a very slow,
gradual and painful process.
You already talked in the beginning that you have a co founder. Let's talk a
little bit about the team demanding dynamics here. Moss scaled
to 250 plus people, processed over 5 billion euro
in payments and added key leaders like jan
Stehler from N26. What was
a painful lesson you learned about hiring trust or
involving your leadership team? Yeah. So
as I said before, the switch from
individual contributor, even like a co founder, mostly in the beginning
you just execute to a manager is pretty painful.
And I think the biggest kind of thing we had
to accept is it's hard skills and it's not talent or
soft skills or whatsoever. Yeah, they come into play a little bit. But there is
a, it's a hard skill to manage other people
and to do it right. Yeah. And at the starting point,
what is, I think is the most important element is the hiring
process itself. It's about the talent bar that is set. It's about the
expectations being very, very clear. What do we actually need?
What is the type of profile? What should they have seen in the past?
What is the minimum experience level? What are also markers
that make me believe that this candidate is worth speaking
and is more kind of interesting versus someone else. Right. Because
we have a. There is a huge market out there. Out there.
How does best in class look like? You know, like I'm sure
you had the situation where you interviewed someone and you
realized I must hire that person. Yeah. It's like it's this
very rare case and the 1% or whatsoever where you're so
excited you think this is the perfect fit. So how can I make sure that
that best in class kind of is visible at scale?
This I think is really number one. But then what comes next
is the onboarding journey. And I think here
we made mistakes pretty significant and I think almost everyone has
made those mistakes unless they are already much further in their career.
It's so much context that is centered in your
heads that only you have. It's. Yeah. Or your co founder or a couple of
people in the company that needs to make a transition.
Right. So for the new leader to do a good job,
they almost need the same context that you have. Yeah. And
it's how to do this while everything is moving fast, while
you're super busy, while you need to kind of give them the right information at
the right time, keep them focused, you know, plug in other people,
I think is very, very, very, very hard. So I would
say the, the most painful lesson has
indeed been mainly around being really good
in onboarding. It's too expensive if it fails. The first
few days, the first month, they're decisive in
what kind of habits people get in. And that's actually
we want to set it up properly so that people can really
understand who is there. It doesn't help if you get hired
and your boss is not there for the first two. You
just by habit report to somebody else and when the new boss comes back,
you'd still talk more to the other person. That's for example, something
I have experience which is not great.
Let's talk a little bit about emotional toll. You're building
a highly. In a highly regulated space with
aggressive growth and investor expectations. How
has this journey impacted your professional identity,
mental health or family life, especially as a
father? Yeah. It's kind of the magic
question. Right. And how
I like to boil it down. Then I'm going to give you some specifics. Yeah.
But how I like to boil it down and challenge myself is
am I happy in the current setup? So how it's going
right now, is this giving me happiness and joy
or is it not? And fortunately I can still answer the
question with yes. Like I do not want to be. I really want to
run this company. I really want to work my founders with all of the
colleagues here. I love the mission, I really enjoy working
on finance, etc. Etc. Etc. There is a
big however though. Yeah. And the however is it has a lot
of cost yeah. So first, first
in the first two years of my, of my first son and then also second
son got born roughly 15 months later.
I did not sufficiently see them. Yeah. So I had to pay the
price of not being sufficiently there. And only
after those two years I caught up with some paternity leave.
Yeah. A month. A month to spend with the kids.
And this was not a good thing. Yeah. I want to clearly say this was,
this was a big cost to carry,
but I also miss my tennis routine, you know, in many cases or
I deprioritized. So.
So one part of the learning journey was also
it's not going to be sustainable. It's not going to work long term. And
in particular it will not. You will not be able to answer the question
of are you happy with the setup? With the. Yes. If
there is no balance. Yeah. So right now,
in the last two years basically revise some of those
decisions. Yeah. And how to approach it
and have found some more balance. It doesn't mean it's a good work life
balance. It's horrible with two small kids and
the company to run. But the sacrifices are
very, you know, are different. Yeah. So maybe
it's seeing some friends less often. Maybe it's
skipping a conference or, or, or a
dinner. Yeah, attack dinner in the evening. Maybe it's something, you know, it's like other
things you can still control to make sure
you don't go mad. Yes, I know
exactly what you mean. That's also something I had to learn. For
example, what I. I've been adjusting my whole
lifestyle, my whole life. For example, before 9
I usually don't do any course because I drop off my. My two
sons at kindergarten. Mondays I get to
sleep in because my wife gets also a day on the weekend.
And so I get up late, I do lunch and then I start working because
I do have a lot of customers and clients
in the US and they like to do really late calls.
And so on Mondays they can book me until like 23:00
o'clock in the evening on Mondays. But you cannot do this
by starting at 9am Plus I also
learned the really hard way that you have to take off the weekends, at least
for me. No work, no work emails and
stuff like that. There was a tough lot, tough
thing to learn. But in the beginning you just work, work, work and then at
one point your body screams no, stop.
That's something exactly I learned as well. Guys, we'll be
back after a short app break talking, for example, about a make or
break moment. Founder misconceptions and market
surprises.
Hey guys, welcome back with Ant, the CEO and co
founder of Moss, a Berlin based fintech startup
that raised 180 million years so far from
investors including Cherry Ventures. We linked it here in the show notes
our interview with Cherry and Peter Thiel's Vala
Ventures. Ante, let's talk about a make
or break moment. Was there a point
perhaps during the rebrand or during
regulatory approval where you had to
decide do we pivot,
pause or push through no matter what?
We had many of those moments
and the earlier you take them kind of the smaller the moment is.
This is kind of a little bit of the philosophy that we have. It's a
continuum. So by being on top of
data, by being on top of kind of the strategy and what actually
needs to be done, what the vision is, and then following through
with early signals, we had multiple of those points.
Yeah. So we, we, we, we asked ourselves, for example,
shall we expand more internationally? Yeah, like,
very fundamental question. It's a massive distraction for all of the
teams. The product needs to be brought up to speed. Ton of other,
other reasons why it's a distraction,
but also how it can drive revenue. The second big one was
do we really go for our own license? Yeah.
Do we, do we, do we really want to get regulated and
build the team that is needed to
run to be compliant or do we rely
on third parties? There is a banking as a service providers
currently the question is when do we expand beyond spend
management? This is a pivotal moment for the company as the product suite
suddenly becomes much more comprehensive. So
yeah, there are 100%, there are those moments
and you will have to take a decision on do we do it or do
we not do it. And hopefully most of those
moments are happy moments. Hopefully. It's not a
moment where you say we have to pause, we have to shut down the
market, we have to shut down the product, we have to stop the company. This
will be horrible. Of course. I see.
Yeah, it's a steady fight. I would say that's also how
it feels here. Talking a little bit about founder
misconceptions, what did you
absolutely misjudge in the early days of Moss?
Either about the market, your customer,
or what it takes to truly digitize a
finance department. I can, I can, I can tell you a little
secret that maybe it's not really a secret. Don't worry,
it will be just between you and me and like 50,000
listeners on the podcast. Yeah. Then that's
fair. That's okay with this. Secret is fair.
If someone has not. Not misjudged
a ton of things, then they probably
didn't start the business.
The. My main point is it's. There is such
a huge ocean of
unknowns and there are so crazy big
complexities that if you take them, if you look at them
from a starting point, it's a wall that you cannot
climb. There is no way you will ever launch
a company. If you knew all of the obstacles,
you would just not do it and no one would give you money for it.
Yeah. So one
example, we got super passionate about the broader
finance suite. We had to find a minimum
viable product, though. And it's this kind of. It's the one shot
you have. You collect the seed funding, you build the first product.
You want to show some traction. If you pick the wrong piece, you're
dead. Yeah. And it can try to raise new money, but very likely it's not
going to work. So we were
super nervous about it, of course. And then we picked something
that retrospectively was actually way too
complex. Yeah. So we thought we can launch
a next generation credit card like the first of its kind,
but not in a way like banks do it. Yeah. American Express
or any other bank.
It was a platform where customers could issue
physical virtual cards with one mouse click.
Set limits. Do like a ton of stuff that you cannot even do.
Yeah. Like this whole card issuing platform was just
a beast. And then on top, it had the finance suite.
Right. So how do I connect? How do I. How do I now attach receipts
to single transactions? How do I assign accounting
categories? How do I do the coding? How do I connect with Data or with
NetSuite or with Exact. With Xero, like all of those ERP
systems, we entirely
misjudged the complexity of doing this.
Fortunately, the consequence was it was just very
painful and took a bit longer. But.
But it still kind of worked out and we saw many of those things
again. Yeah. I remember the day when we're sitting in the Cherry
office. It was an off site. We always ask them if we can
work in their big boardroom. They have a nice room. It's a bit
detached from the office. So we go there and then we discuss the serious
stuff. And I remember when we discussed the serious decision, when
are we. Are we like, are we going to leave the territory of Amex and
now expand into accounts payables or not? Yeah. Do we want
to build a suite where customers can also process all of their
incoming receipts? Yeah. That's very different from card transactions.
And I also remember that when we took the decision yes.
We brutally underestimated the requirements.
So this is three years ago. We're still working on the product and expanding the
product. I think the short and sweet answer is
if you don't misjudge to a certain degree, you're probably
never start. You should not entirely kind of fail,
but you will definitely misjudge. Yeah.
That's also what I felt when he said that if you really know
how big the problem is, you likely won't
start here.
You've described Moss as finance software
that actually works like your team does. What
trait in yourself once felt like a liability
and and ended up shaping Mosso's user
first design. Yeah.
So there is an interesting insight about
this, about this industry and also
here it actually took a while to get there. Even though it's super simple.
Finance and finance software were almost the first
proper. It was like first technology. Yeah. So amongst the
first. Yeah, let's call it like this. So what I want to say with this,
the ERP systems like SAP
or accounting software, it was the early days of
digitization, of putting codes into a piece of software
to run something in a digital way. Having said
that, they are their biggest, biggest, biggest pain.
If you boil it down to kind of
all of the pains that exist is the user experience.
Yeah. It's not that they don't offer functionality.
They have the broadest suite of functionality. They had 20, 30 years
of time to build all single functionality.
Where it breaks is the user experience. It's not
state of art. It doesn't adhere to the standards, neither in
design nor in the flows. It's
maybe less user centric, it's maybe more infrastructure centric.
Not all data is available kind of.
That's actually their biggest pain. So what we understood
and I'm so happy that our lead product
designer, Moritz, who was the only person in
that team when we started, got this very early, is
we will only be able to create this.
A very distinct and long term
differentiating factor. If we exceed
customer expectations on user experience. We have to
take an entirely different lens. How we look at those
workflows, how we design the platform, how
we incrementally optimize it. Yeah. Over and over again,
small stuff, big stuff. To create this compounding effect
of a superpower. And I think in this
regard we are very proud and we know it's true
and the market confirms it. Moss does have the best user
experience. If an, if an accountant, a controller, business
owner, a tax advisor, if they, if they want to have this
iPhone like experience. Yeah. You find everything by Yourself pretty
much the connections make sense. You can find, you
can, you have the right settings that you need and that's an
objective that we widely have achieved. Yeah, entirely. Will be too
optimistic. Ton of stuff to still do but.
But much better than anyone else in the market. Mm
hmm. I was wondering
if I could ask our audience the same question. What was
one founder trait you've turned from a liability
to superpower? Maybe even with your co founder. Let us know
on AX BlueSky threads or LinkedIn.
With over 5000 SMEs onboarded,
what unexpected insight changed
the way you understood CFO workflows, span
patterns or ERP integration pain points?
Yeah, there is. So first I think it's important to
segment the market a little bit. Yeah. Now it's getting, I don't want to get
too technical but just for the, for the audience also to get a better
understanding. There are small businesses, right? Micro
enterprises could be a solo trader, one person, could be two, could be
five, but basically a very simple and kind of
easy to communicate setup. Then there is the mid segment. It's the
companies to start with, let's say 10 employees and then go up to
500 or thousand. It's kind of the traditional
kaimo as you said, the traditional SMBs to choose like English
words. And then there is mid market enterprise
companies that operate globally, have huge organizations,
many entities, etc. Etc.
In that mid segment. And this is our core and this is where
kind of the, the biggest share of the GDP lies.
Yeah, this is kind of the biggest segment in terms of kind of the GDP
in business. The very surprising
insight was that they are not
zero digitized. It's not like
that. There is no software they use. I
mean they use anyways accounting software and erp. But even
beyond that the point was it was very
unsophisticated single point software. Yeah. So
for example there is a tool that allows you to
build approvals. So you as a company you
want to stay on top and control what people buy. So what you do, you
build an approval flow and now you want to buy something for
10k. Someone needs to sign off and not doing this kind
of an accident or via email or via signatures. The only way is
to bring it into a tool. The challenge though is if
you have one or two or three of those tools, you have
to manage your workforce on the tool. You have to onboard them, they have
to log in, they have to run the process and like who wants to
have three, four different tools to get the job done.
It's like it's a nightmare. So
the kind of. The most interesting insight was there are tools out
there, but they have one big deficit. They don't
connect the dots. They are isolated pain
points. It's isolated solutions. They are
not connected to the broader software landscape.
They are covering only fractions of the pains.
And this is an option for us to tackle. We
decided this is the way to tackle.
You've said Moss aims to be the most
intelligent finance stack for Europe's SMBs.
Paint the picture. What does that look like in five years?
Does it include Treasury AI, embedded
FPA, cross border FX? Yeah. So now,
now I love speaking about the future, but it's also very
hard to predict.
Maybe starting first with the fundamental belief. Yeah. And I think this is
what shapes like a lot of thinking for us at Moss and also for me
personally and my co founders. The first
layer that we tackle is the workflow. It's
creating a digital experience. Now, for
some, this might already be groundbreaking. Yeah. But if we are
honest, it's only the baseline, it's only process efficiency.
Right. You basically can do the job in a more orchestrated way and maybe a
bit faster and a bit more automated. The true power
comes from intelligence. Yeah. So how can I
digest that data and how can I use that data
in a way that makes people work smarter?
Yeah. Not. Not just harder. And by
comparison, here would be. For anyone who is working with CRM
software and in sales, think about Salesforce. Yeah. The,
the company, Salesforce, the product.
It's good if you can create a customer journey and a
buyer list and basically move away from a Google Doc, from Excel to
having it in Salesforce. But the magic is when you get all of
your KPIs, when you understand what the sales cycle is,
what the big deals are, when the follow updates are, when it automates your
ways of working, when it gives you the intelligence to say I'm on
track or I'm not on track. And it's the same thing with
Moz. We are building the foundational layer and
we are moving very fast on that front. But once
we have done this, we'll move and invest much more into the intelligence
layer. Because we want our customers, we want the finance teams,
the business owners, to just spend as little time as possible with
admin and focus most of their time on the
activities that change and drive their company. Yeah. And we
call it business partnering. Yeah. So you work with the team
to grow sales, to reduce costs, to improve margins
or whatsoever. So having said that. Yeah, it's the foundational
layer. This really great workflows end to end across
accounting, across controlling. Very likely not just focused on
spend, what we do now in five years from now, very likely also focus on
the revenue side. But then it's the layer on top,
it's kind of the cash flow forecasting, it's the budgeting,
it's a lot of additional use cases, effective cost
controlling, etc. Etc. That connect all of the dots in
the dashboard and then help businesses improve, help
businesses grow. Sounds pretty
good. Sounds like you'll have some kind of AI
agent best controlled
via audio and you tell him make a casual forecast this
and this and this changed and let me know tomorrow what are the
implications. Yeah, yeah. So I love
that. If I may, if I may say, I we're so excited about the
AI. AI kind of AI segment,
category, trend, whatever want to call it. And
one fun fact up front, AI has been
leveraged in finance since many, many years already. So
OCR, extracting information from documents and
categorizing it is basically a certain
form of AI and it's already in
most software since many, many years. What
fundamentally changed with the introduction of the LLMs and with the
power of the LLMs was to supercharge other parts and
connect more dots and more context and more information.
And yeah, so we for example right now are,
have a very, very powerful AI automation
platform. So let's say a customer submits an invoice.
19 out of 20 actions that have to be
taken, such as, you know, the service date, the
account category, the cost center, like everything finance
needs to do for the transaction. 19 out of 20
the machine can do for you in an automated way and an
accurate way. Yeah, and this is just think about this change. So just think
about you have to do one step out of 20. Yeah, it's a
very, very brutal improvement and it's just
starting. Yeah. So on compliance
checks, there's so many other areas
where, where AI will supercharge the
offering and it's not necessarily going to be kind of just
an AI agent. I think it's almost like it's a
misused terminology. It will be part of the software suite. The
AI will enable a better workflow and better
insights for customers through a specific user experience.
It might be a prompt, it might be kind of just in the background, you
don't even see it. It's just, it's just, it just executes the job
or it might be a different ways, but it's kind of,
it is going to be part of the software. Let's face it
this is well, but I had in mind if
it's from a psychological perspective, easier
for person to interact with an AI
agent that at least has some personality. I'm thinking about
Jarvis here from Ironman or or
Skippy. Sci Fi readers would know
them, but that's a completely different topic. If anybody out there is
researching on that or knowledgeable about it, hit me up Joe,
celebrate IO and we can talk about and maybe even find an
interview for you. Let's reflect a little bit for the
closing in the Future version of ANTO 5 years
older post series D looked back at this moment.
What would he say to you right now?
Yeah, so I'm thinking about what the future me
will say. Yeah, this is a very very good question. Yeah.
So I hope it will say stay hungry,
push, but don't stress out too much.
Everything will be fine. I hope this is what they will say.
Everything will be fine.
Great. Awesome Ante. Thank you
very much. Awesome interview. Hope to have you back soon
and we'll now hop into the founders
world and talk a little bit behind the scenes
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to access to the Founders vote. Thanks y and all
the listeners. Really really enjoyed. My pleasure.
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Sam.