We are stepping into a new decade, and it is also a new decade for the Grow VC Group. Our journey since 2009 has been in the middle of digitization, fintech and data disruptions. Now is a good time to look a little bit back and especially forward.
We started with the world’s first equity crowdfunding service. Quite rapidly we realized that the startup equity crowdfunding market is not a huge business, especially it was not as scalable as we expected. Now 10 years later we can see, it is still a small business and not many platforms can really make money in that market.
We had a portfolio of online finance, crowdfunding and finance platforms. During the last five years we have sold or closed down most of those companies and now prepare to close down the whole portfolio that comes from the crowdfunding roots. The only company in that portfolio is now Difitek that is also more a tech company, offering an open API platform to implement digital investing and lending services.
At the same time, we have built new portfolios of companies. We are still active in some finance technology areas, but we would like to see a transformation from fintech to techfin, i.e. to have services where technology really disrupts finance services or creates new categories of services. Now too many fintech services have been only new tools or channels to offer very old services and we haven’t seen, for example, really new business models or concepts to develop new services.
We see digitization and data are really in key roles to change all businesses. Our new company portfolios include, for example, the following companies:
- Prifina develops new models to control and use personal data. It offers tools to own and control personal data, but take it beyond ownership and really offer tools, how individuals can leverage their personal profiles to get better services, prices and usability.
- Robocorp develops Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions based on the cloud-first open source model. RPA has been a fast-growing market, but the open source model and cloud-based orchestration will take the whole market to a new level, and can expand the market from a few billion to hundreds of billions. RPA is the basis also for the future AI solutions, enables digitization of many services, enables to outsource work for robots (robosourcing) and creates a new developer category, Software Robot Developers.
- Startup Commons develops services and models to better measure, digitize and systematically develop startup ecosystems. Startups have become a fundamental part of the economy in most countries, regions and cities, but investments and development are still often done without systematic processes and metrics. Startup Commons makes this development much more systematic.
Although we have had changes with our focus and companies, we still have the same principles as a decade ago: we build global business from day #1, we are very entrepreneurship driven and we are always willing to challenge existing models and businesses. We want to work with people and companies that share the same principles.
We don’t know what changes will happen in business during the next decade. We believe there will be a lot of changes, new challenges and opportunities. Anyway, there are always opportunities for entrepreneurs that are willing to create new and better services. It just needs the right attitude to see the opportunities and make them happen.
To all our companies, people, partners and entrepreneurs around the world, we wish a successful New Year and start of the new decade.
