Accounting, a profession that dates back two millennia before Christ, has changed quite a bit over the years. From recording expenses on clay tablets, to paper bills and today, with the help of innovative startups, completely digital! No wonder Datamolino, a Slovak b2b solution for digitising paper invoices, has just secured 500K euros from the Slovak Innovations and Technologies Fund (FIT). This seed round follows a 40K-euro financing from Wayra Academy, where they were among the first cohort. Read our coverage of their Demo Day here.
inventures.eu caught up with Datamolino CEO Andrej Glezl to get some of the details. Glezl confirmed the FIT investment, explaining that the fund will invest up to 500K euros, 300K of which have already been provided in exchange for 12% of the company.
“We, as founders, have a right to split this investment into 300K [euros] from FIT and raise up to 200K from a co-investor,” said Glezl. This entire financing round, be it from FIT alone or from a co-investor, will represent 20% of the company. “The remaining 200K euros is guaranteed by FIT, if we do not raise it from a co-investor. In regard to co-investors – we’re in discussions with several interested entities and individuals, but it is too early to mention any names,” added Glezl.
Datamolino, a software built primarily for accounting professionals, drastically reduces accounting effort by processing invoices and receipts in the form of physical paper, scans and PDFs, thus almost eliminating the necessity for manual data entry on the side of the accountants. On top of the optical character recognition technology used to process these documents, the startup employs human checkers in order to guarantee the accuracy of the output.
Since July, the company grew from six people to a current headcount of 16, with the expectation of extending the team even further in the coming months. The growth of the customer base, however, seems to be even more impressive.
“We’re still in beta and we now have more than 300 testers registered to test our beta product,” said Glezl. “We are gradually introducing the product to these testers and seeking their feedback. We’ve prepared an updated product version based on the feedback gathered from November 2013 until mid-January 2014.”
The newly acquired funding will be used for product development, in particular for bringing Datamolino from a closed beta to a live version. Also, the startup is dedicating part of the financing to establishing service and customer support, followed by marketing efforts and market validation-related expenditures. “We’ll also invest into the deployment of our product in various markets,” said Glezl. “We expect to launch this new beta version in the coming weeks. Commercial launch is prepared for May 2014.”
“Validation, validation and more validation” is Datamolino’s mantra for the coming months. The startup is also preparing their strategy for market entry – currently the UK and Germany seem to be at the top of the list, over the course of 2014. And there’s even a series A round financing planned for 2015. Fingers crossed!
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