Fintech is often located in Frankfurt, e-commerce in Berlin and logtech in Hamburg – why the startup Fulfin – which is active in all three areas – still sees Munich as the perfect location for its project, now in our 7 Questions.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
E-commerce is growing six times faster than gross domestic product. Due to developments in online marketplaces, a new breed of online seller has emerged. They are young, growing extremely fast, and have outsourced the majority of their value chain. These young entrepreneurs suffer from a lack of credit, which severely limits their growth. We want to change that.
We are an innovative fintech founded by experts in e-commerce and supply chain finance. Our team is diverse and experienced, drawn from England (Nathan, 43), Austria (Fredi, 44), Sweden (Peter, 38), and Germany (Tobias, 35). Nathan met Peter 10 years ago in Switzerland, and Fredi met him over two years ago in Germany. Tobias joined last year.
Our startup Fulfin offers loans to e-commerce retailers via a digital platform with API interfaces to online marketplaces (like Amazon), banks, payment service providers, logistics providers, and warehouse managers. This allows us to create a very precise picture of our customers. Our scoring model considers our customers' e-commerce sales data, product data, and financial data. No other financial service provider examines e-commerce sellers' data as intensively as we do.
2. But that has been around for a long time!
No, that really hasn't been done yet. We enable our clients to use their inventory as collateral for loans and repay us from their sales success. This is absolutely unique in this segment. Our innovative collateral process and e-commerce scoring not only allow us to better understand our clients' risk profiles, but also drastically reduce the risk of lending.
Biggest challenge: Bootstrapping
3. What has been your biggest challenge so far?
That's a very good question. Everything went so well from the beginning that we don't want to complain. The biggest challenge we faced was bootstrapping the company until we reached the point where we could prove to our ideal investor that we had an exciting business model. To do this, we not only had to build our technology with very limited resources, but also issue the first loans with our own money.
4. Let’s get down to business: How is business going?
We're making great progress. We receive applications almost every day, even though we still do very little marketing. We're equally pleased with how strong the team has become and that we've convinced a truly great investor. We're now entering the next phase of the company, which is all about scaling, and we feel very well equipped for the journey.
Motivated and highly trained employees are extremely important
5. What does Munich mean to you?
We're Munich residents by choice and love what the city has to offer. I came to Munich in 2001, and although I also lived in Zurich for a while, I never felt like I was away.
Munich is a perfect location for our company. We have already benefited greatly from our good relationship with TUM in our first year and are currently participating in the LMU EC Accelerator program. We are in the Plant1 and feel very well looked after in the Munich startup ecosystem.
When you think of fintech, you might immediately think of Frankfurt, when you think of e-commerce, Berlin, and when you think of logistics, Hamburg, but none of these cities offers us more advantages than Munich. Fintech is exciting, but not easy, and motivated and highly trained people are extremely important for our company. In Munich, we have already been able to attract many top talents to our vision.
6. How will your startup become the next unicorn? Or will we see you soon at Epic Fail Night?
Our first product is merchandise financing for Amazon sellers, but we're planning many more products for other segments. The pillars of our concept are to obtain meaningful customer information from digital sources and to drastically reduce loan risk through collateral. There's truly a lot of potential in this area. Banks aren't able to serve the customers we can, so the opportunity for growth is definitely there.
7. Isar or English Garden?
Oh, difficult. But in the northern part of the English Garden, you can have both, and we think that's very nice.
