Momentum Monday - FinTech
Sustainable spending, quantum computing, home buying, and more!
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This week I had the chance to check in with the FinTech cohort of the Momentum Accelerator and what an awesome group it is.
As someone who’s worked in financial services and fintech this is one of my favorite areas of innovation, so I loved hearing about what each of these startups are building. Check out the startups below that are building the future of FinTech.
Footprint
Footprint is a more effective, more targeted channel through which businesses that have a positive environmental and/or social impact on the world can reach consumers who are eager to spend with businesses that align with their values.
According to the Footprint team, 61% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers prefer to buy from sustainable brands, and 57% of consumers more broadly are willing to change their consumption habits to reduce their negative impact. This means there’s a huge opportunity to bridge the gap between socially conscious consumers and sustainable businesses.
Footprint provides consumers with the ability to analyze their personal financial accounts to quantify the environmental and social impact of their spending habits. Footprint also recommends customized behavior modifications to improve a user’s aggregate impact, and incentivizes these modifications by offering rewards through sustainable brands (e.g. discounts, cash back, exclusive products).
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Mike Nieset in particular, and am excited to meet the rest of this awesome founding team. The group is hard at work developing a beta product that they plan to test with a small group of consumers towards the end of the summer.
How you can help: Sign up for their waitlist and be one of the first to use Footprint to spend your money in a more sustainable way! If you work for a business that you think might value Footprint as a partner, reach out to the team at csafko@mit.edu
Boston Quantum
Boston Quantum is a quantum computing enterprise software startup, which will enable companies to realize the quantum advantage. Their initial focus is on tackling the significant computational bottlenecks hindering the financial services industry, with the aim to develop a growing suite of quantum enterprise software products that address combinatorial optimization and predictive analytics problems faced in finance.
This exciting team includes MIT PhDs and MBAs with expertise across quantum engineering, finance, and chemistry. Their target customers are investors at hedge funds, mutual funds, and cryptocurrency trading firms. For the summer, this team is working to find early customers and conduct a pilot program.
How you can help: If you’re interested in bringing quantum advantage to your portfolio management and trading activities, email bostonquantum@gmail.com. You can also check out their website!
Aprueba
Aprueba is revolutionizing supplier based financing. Selling on net-terms is by far the most common way of transacting between businesses; however, offering net-terms credit is messy, extremely manual, and a drain on resources.
Aprueba is every SMEs credit team on demand. It is a B2B net-terms & credit management platform where SMEs can perform instant credit checks, automate collection tasks, and convert invoices to cash.
Aprueba facilitates credit checks using a mix of traditional and alternative data, allowing SMEs to make better decisions regarding net-terms credit. This allows SMEs to focus on their core business by setting their collections on autopilot and maintain healthy cash flows through access to tailored financial products. Aprueba also supports micro companies by allowing them to access net-terms credit from their suppliers.
The team is currently targeting small and medium sized businesses in Mexico (including building materials, manufacturing, and B2B services industries) with $10M annual revenues or less, 10-100 employees, and a 1 to 2 employee credit team.
How you can help: Check out Aprueba and schedule a demo today!
Realize Home
Realize is creating a seamless purchase experience for agents and home buyers. Realize is a centralized, buyer-facing transaction management platform targeting one of the largest sales forces in North America, real estate agents.
Realize is a next generation transaction management platform that’s creating a common platform for agents, buyers, and all other purchase stakeholders (inspectors, insurers, attorneys, mortgagors) to collaborate. Realize helps agents get more time back in their day, letting them do what they do best — using their expertise to get people into homes they love. The team is targeting real estate brokerages, and is in the process of identifying beta users.
How you can help: Check out Realize Home. If you bought a home in the last three years, know a real estate agent, mortgage broker, home inspector, insurance agent, real estate attorney, the Realize team would love to talk you - email them at contact@joinrealize.com
Slyde
I first heard of Slyde back in March, after attending the MIT FinTech Conference, one of the first pitch competitions I ever wrote about for Recap. In a subscription driven world, Slyde is a consumer FinTech company that saves consumers time and money by allowing them to track, manage, and pay their bills and subscriptions from a single place.
Slyde's mission is to drive wholistic financial wellness for consumers. Slyde had recent success, including being admitted to the DCU FinTech Innovation Center in Boston and securing a bank partnership with Central Payments. They recently launched a private beta of dozens of users, and have a waitlist of over two thousand users they acquired without spending any money on marketing. Focusing on improving financial wellness broadly, Slyde plans to lead with subscriptions and ultimately embed financial products (like payments) natively within their system.
How you can help: check out their website!
Folioficient
Folioficient is building Sentiment and Risk models for hedge funds and institutional asset managers in cryptocurrencies. They’re targeting hedge funds and institutional investors between 50MM - 500MM AUM that are deployed with crypto currency assets and derivatives.
How you can help: Follow their page on LinkedIn and reach out to learn more!
If you want to help spread the word about these awesome startups, consider forwarding this email to a friend. You can also subscribe to the newsletter below, and chat with me on Twitter!
Have thoughts on this post or any of the startups? Let us know what you think in the comments below!