As a founder you must run your business while spending most of your time talking with investors. In our case we are fortunate to have five founders and an extremely skilled team that knows what to do, when to do it and how. It makes things easier, but still – fundraising is really hard work. I’ve come to the simple conclusion that personal chemistry is an important key to success. I think it must be easier to go through a divorce than to end the relationship with a large investor. Once the chemistry is in place, most things become easier. We are lucky to have found this chemistry with our investors and helping each other to find solutions to hard challenges has become fun instead of harrowing. We are on the same side of the fence instead of being on opposite sides throwing hard objects at each other.
At the same time, you should always have a very concrete reason why you choose venture capital instead of growing your business organically. If you look at LinkedIn or read articles about startups, it’s easy to think that venture capital is the only way to success. I beg to differ. If it makes sense for you to grow organically, then do so and you would have my outmost respect for being able to create a successful business without any other help than yourself. For us however, we have a very concrete plan on how to use this round and future investments to help create a brighter world together with our customers and partners.
Financial crime is a real-world problem that most people can relate to, now more than ever. When I moved from law enforcement into the banking sector, I realised that there is a disconnect between the way law enforcement agencies talk about these crimes and the way those same crimes are translated into the private sector point of view. This is why we started Acuminor, and we are lucky to have investors that are supporting our mission to put accurate financial crime threat intelligence at the heart of private sector organisations – bridging the gap between the real-world threat and the proceeds of crime.
Our latest investment round is another step on our journey to help solve this problem. Having established ourselves as a trusted provider in the Nordics countries, we are using this investment to focus on growth in new markets and scaling up our team.