Picking up its first investment, Cophengagen-based Uniify has secured €3 million as the demand for simple automation tools in customer onboarding processes rises. The startup now plans to grow outside of Denmark and hit international markets.
Customer onboarding is a critical part of any business. It’s about smoothly connecting your customer to your product, learning about them and starting a positive customer experience. A key part of that is collecting, storing and analysing data. With enhanced digitisation and increasingly strict rules and regulations, it’s not such a simple process – especially for SMEs, who until now, haven’t really had a dedicated tool.
For financial companies, the process is even more complex. They have to follow strict rules in order to live up to current and ongoing regulations within, among other things, lending, wealth management, and leasing — a task digital development has not been able to keep up with. Up until now, this has been causing a number of difficult, manual processes.
Bootstrapped until now, Copenhagen-based Uniify believes it has a solution. Investors clearly believe in it as well as the startup has just secured its first investment.
Niclas Adegnika, CEO at Uniify: “Uniify’s vision is to disrupt the way financial SMEs in Europe onboard and screen their customers today and in the future. For the SME customers, we make their work easier when, for example, they lease a new car or need to borrow money for a new house, as they don’t have to collect and search for information themselves. For our customers, it increases the conversion rate and the manual workflow is significantly reduced when payslips, identity information, and other financial information are obtained digitally via Uniify.”
Funding details
- €3 million raised in this first investment round
- The funding was led by People Ventures, Forward VC and Spring Capital
- Business angels include public.com founders Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham, as well as the founder of Vivino Heini Zachariassen.
Founded by Martin Sandø Jensen, Niclas Adegnika and Troels Burmølle, Uniify aims to change the way financial companies onboard new customers. It essentially unifies data in credit scoring, identity verification, KYC, KYB and so forth. This helps companies collect necessary financial information about their customers in a fast, easy, and secure way.
For companies, the platform helps save time and money by making the process much more streamlined and safer. For customers, the process of accessing financial services runs much smoother – no need to worry about finding all the different documents each time they apply for a new loan or to lease a car, for example.
Vince Wols, Partner at Forward VC: “With growing concerns around governance and compliance, particularly in the financial sector, the expensive and time-consuming process of onboarding clients is becoming an increasingly painful challenge for most companies. As a Venture Fund, we have seen these processes, and the, quite frankly, outdated systems from up close. Learning about the product Troels, Niclas, Martin, and their team have built, the pragmatic approach to creating onboarding flows, and the way they’ve built their company so far, had us excited about the team and the service they’re providing. Matter of fact, we might know of a few regulatory authorities in our industry who could stand to consider Uniify’s services.”
The Danish company are addressing a market need for Europe’s SMEs. Until now, digital solutions have tended to focus on the enterprise segment, but Uniify has developed its platform for smaller companies – democratising access to vital tools.
Niclas Adegnika: “We are in a favourable situation as we are currently the only ones who have gathered all the necessary data sources and partners in one unified solution. We are experts in financial onboarding and not the classic compliance, KYC, and credit tool. There are many of them, and they do not yet offer the same opportunity to automate the onboarding of customers as we do.”
Now with this investment, the team aims to grow. it’ll hire more team members and expand into new markets – the UK being the first destination on the list.
Christian Damsgaard Tost, General Partner at People Ventures: “Digital, financial threats will be a huge challenge for future generations, and this places high demands on companies, who will all need better ways to structure and obtain financial data on their customers. With more and more requirements and financial services rising, making customer onboarding simple will be an art form in the future, and the potential in Europe in the next few years is several billion euros. This, coupled with a team that has executed the way they have over the past few months, is truly unique.”
Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino: “The team behind Uniify has managed to build a product in a short time and got a lot of customers on board. The product also solves a widespread problem among companies in a no-code solution that makes it easy to implement and use as a building block for more complex solutions.”
