¿What is UNIQ Ventures?
It is a Fintech Venture Builder, which identifies, creates, and develops digital businesses focused on the finance, insurance and legal verticals with a global projection and great impact on society.
The pandemic has put in check numerous companies around the world, but there are also those that have resisted with fortitude and aspire to grow. This is the case of Uniq Ventures, the first startup factory in the ‘fintech’ and ‘insurtech’ sector operating in Spain. Founded in 2018 by André Caçador, a telecommunications engineer who already treasured extensive experience in the sector, the firm has a staff of 20 employees that it plans to double this fiscal year and has centers in Barcelona and Andorra. “We like to analyze opportunities aimed at the end consumer, with a strong focus on making them very scalable and easy to use on smartphones. We are also interested in ‘Software as a Service’ type projects,” says Caçador, who serves as CEO.
Features of Uniq Ventures:
- They have a permanent multidisciplinary team.
In order to face new challenges, an outstanding team is needed for their execution. Venture builders are composed of profiles with great skills, who come from different fields such as technology, product, digital marketing, business development,… and help in the formation of a talented team to lead their startups.
They conceive new business ideas.
The most common way to achieve this is by detecting opportunities that are not yet solved, or by replicating existing models in a creative way.
At UNIQ Ventures we have a team of experts in detecting these ideas, and once approved by a selection committee formed by important executives and mentors, we proceed to execute these new startups autonomously.
- Raises and invests capital in your startups.
Companies associated with a venture builder automatically receive help in getting funded. This can be achieved through its own venture capital fund, through its connections with industry investors, or a combination of both.
They have pooled resources available.
Venture builders are involved with different companies, which is why they have great advantages in terms of knowledge and resources that they share among their “daughter companies”, and therefore can provide support in different areas.
Their collaborative ecosystem offers, in addition to the knowledge, methodology and operational services of their different companies. Services such as finance, human resources and legal, which add a lot of value and are usually very expensive. In this way, growth costs are shared and scalability is distributed among the different companies of the venture builder.
Once the business opportunity has been identified, they move on to the ‘discovery’ phase, in which they study very theoretical aspects of the proposal, such as competitors, the target to be addressed or the competitive advantages, among others. Once the business plan has been verified as feasible and the solution to be launched on the market has been decided, the entrepreneurial and executing team is hired to make it a reality.
“The usual thing is for entrepreneurs to join and then look for ideas, and we do it the other way around. We detect a new opportunity and look for people with the necessary professional skills who also fit together,” he explains. A task that entails some difficulty. “It is difficult for us to find profiles with experience in digital that have financial knowledge, so we give it to them,” he points out.
- Delivery phase
The next step is to present the idea to the network of investors and raise the capital to take it to market. “We usually close around half a million euros in this first part,” he says. Then they enter the ‘delivery’ phase, in which the team starts to execute so that the solution is operational in six months.
At the beginning of 2021, they launched Octans, an open finance and artificial intelligence platform that connects banks with companies and enables the latter to offer financial services. October will see the launch of Vesto, an app that will help anyone to make their money more profitable. In these two initiatives, Uniq Ventures has mobilized one and a half million euros. Between now and 2026, it intends to launch around twenty projects with which it will mobilize some 10 million.
- Challenges to be met
The firm has set itself the goal of becoming a reference in southern Europe and Latin America. “In these markets, there is a lack of a player to drive the fintech ecosystem, and we believe that our formula can lead us towards this,” he says. In the case of Spain, he thinks that this niche has not yet reached maturity: “The US and the UK, even Germany, France and Austria are well ahead. They all have ‘fintech’ unicorns and here it will take a few years to happen because the base of successful companies is very small.
Asked about the causes of this situation, he points to the lack of infrastructure. “In Spain we are going to a banking oligopoly environment where there will be four or five entities with more than 90% of the market and a very old infrastructure that does not support these ‘fintechs‘. There is talent and capital, but there is a lack of infrastructure and more investment in the base. You can create a sandbox, but if you don’t have good projects and it is not efficient at the operational level and gives them wings, it will fail,” he warns. He also lacks greater involvement of corporates that finance these startups through their corporate venture capital funds.
