Danish startup raises €3M to automate financial client onboarding

Uniify, which up until now has been completely bootstrapped, has raised €3M with among others People Ventures, Forward VC, and business angels such as Jannick Malling, Leif Abraham, and Heini Zachariassen. The goal is to market their tool for collecting financial client data toward an internationally neglected SME segment in Europe.

In recent years, customer onboarding has become a difficult process for financial companies. A lot of companies are wondering “what does a successful onboarding process look like?“. Financial companies must 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 when starting a new company.

Uniify’s vision is to disrupt the way financial SMEs in Europe onboard and screen their customers today and in the future. For the SMEs 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
says Niclas Adegnika, CEO at Uniify.

Therefore, Uniify has developed a solution that helps companies collect necessary financial information about their customers in a fast, easy, and secure way. This can be, for example, income information, identity information, sanction lists, and Open Banking.

We are in a favorable 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,
says Niclas Adegnika

Uniify has raised €3 million and thereby officially ends its days as a fully bootstrapped company. The investors are among others People Ventures, Forward VC, and founders of Public.com Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham. The goal is to hire more people and expand into new markets. For a start, the focus will be on the UK, due to the size of the market and its role as Europe’s financial hub.

Targets an internationally neglected SME segment

According to Uniify, the market in Europe has tended to exclusively develop digital solutions for the enterprise segment, which makes it difficult for SMEs to find solutions that suit their needs.

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,
says Vince Wols, Partner at Forward VC.

Investments from international and Danish VCs

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,
says Christian Damsgaard Tost, General Partner at People Ventures.

Uniify’s investors consist of People Ventures and other purpose-driven VC funds such as Forward VC and Spring Capital, and business angels, among others public.com founders Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham, as well as the founder of Vivino Heini Zachariassen.

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,
adds Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino.

About Uniify

Uniify was founded by Martin Sandø Jensen, Niclas Adegnika and Troels Burmølle. The vision is to change the way financial companies onboard new customers. Uniify wishes to revolutionize financial customer onboarding in credit scoring, identity verification, KYC, KYB, and more. They help companies save time and money by making customer onboarding faster and safer while improving the user experience.

On the customer side, customers do not need to obtain all the many different documents when applying for a new loan or when leasing a car — which will significantly increase the financial companies’ conversion rate.

The investors

People Ventures
People Ventures is an operational venture capital company that invests in Nordic early-stage tech startups, especially in digital health and enterprise software (B2B SaaS). Around half of People Ventures’ team consists of experts in areas such as product development, technology, finance, commercial development, and people & culture. The operational team works closely with the fund’s companies to help accelerate growth.

Forward VC
Forward VC (the Netherlands) is a European VC Fund with a focus on early-stage companies in the Nordics, UK, and the US. The VC fund takes a practical approach to investing, with a focus primarily on software solutions. As they like to make ‘founder bets’, they focus on supporting early-stage entrepreneurs and helping them accelerate their growth.

Spring Capital
Spring Capital invests in scalable technology-driven startups. The fund makes €75-200K investments at the seed stage, typically as part of a larger round with a focus on startups from the Nordics and the CEE region.

Vækstfonden
Vækstfonden is the Danish state’s financing fund. In partnership with banks and private investors from home and abroad, they select and develop the companies that Denmark mustn’t miss.

Business Angels