After years of continuously encountering challenges within financial services, we wanted to not just address some of these problems but solve them. And we knew that this couldn’t be exclusive to finance – it was a very apparent and complex issue within every industry, in every country.
The larger the organisation, the more global-scale its presence, the bigger the problem. We wanted to be the ones to end decades of data mismanagement and create a landscape that enabled businesses to understand how their data was flowing through their organisation.
So, in 2011, Solidatus was born. Since then, every new client, partner and colleague has been momentous. Every day that we have grown, expanded into new industries, progressed our vision and welcomed new faces into our team has been as big a deal to us. And perhaps none more so than the recent announcement of our Series A fund raise.
It has not always been a smooth journey to get to where we are now.
Picture the scene – Singapore, on a hot, humid November day a few years ago we were hard at work at the UK Government Department for International Trade fintech trade mission to the Singapore Fintech Festival. We were talking to people we’d never met and telling them about their most expensive, boring, problem – how to describe and manage their data better, cheaper, disruptively, quicker…the phone rings, it is a colleague in London about to tell us that there was a problem getting an invoice paid, an invoice that had been correctly sent out against a legitimate PO.
At this point it would be appropriate to give some more narrative – there were staff who needed to get paid and not much money in the bank; we had good contracts and our clients needed our software. More money should have been coming in than going out. We did what most would do if wearing a suit on a hot tropical evening, we went for a beer and we worried. A week later we had the money in the bank. Needless to say, we managed to gather enough in savings to allow us to continue. We didn’t tell anyone how close we came to disaster. We survived.
This is not a new story; it is one faced by founders at many/most start-ups and often goes untold. However, our determination paid off. Each time we went to meet a potential client they were impressed. It was not always perfect timing, but when we left, we knew that we had touched a chord and hoped that they would be back. So, it has proven to be. The trend was clear, the research, the long hours, the grinding hard work and self-funding of the first few years, along with the faith shown in us by early adopters, was bearing fruit.
Now we were profitable and sustainably so…why take funding. Well, simply, we were being outgunned by others in our industry that had bigger budgets. It was not the case that we were incapable of competing with technology and vision (quite the opposite), it was a simple equation of getting ourselves out there quicker and front loading our development faster.
Solidatus started off as a data lineage discovery and visualisation tool and remains this at its core. But – thanks to the dedication and passion of our team, as well as the experiences of our clients – it has developed into so much more than that. It has evolved the paradigms of software engineering and data engineering to look at things in a different way.
Together, we have built a core solution and continue to iterate it to make it best in class for data lineage, management and complexity. It is simple, flexible and not designed to solve only one problem. Instead, it conceptualises an organisation’s world and connects all relationships, data, processes and obligations.
It has meant that, over the years, we have been able to accomplish so much in a remarkably short space of time. From being the only new entrant to the Gartner Magic Quadrant in Metadata Management, to joining the ranks of the RegTech 100, and winning Best Data Governance Solution at the Data Management Insight Awards. Every year has seen a plethora of new achievements, and new successes that have gone towards setting Solidatus apart from other players in our space. To look back on all we have done in the space of a few years has been both incredibly rewarding and humbling for us as founders.
It’s because of this, that Solidatus was spotted by some of the world’s best venture capital firms, thus beginning our journey with AlbionVC, with them sharing the same vision we have upheld from inception. With this funding and AlbionVC’s sector reach, we now have the opportunity to expand even further than we could ever have imagined. We had then, and have now, a vision about where the market should be and are convinced we will disrupt it to make it a better place.
The £14 million Series A investment means our growth plans will continue to accelerate as we move into new markets, new regions and build out our team globally. Whilst holding fast to the very reason we created Solidatus to start with. Something that our clients and partners can trust; something that can change the very fabric of an organisation. We will continue to innovate and revolutionise the face of data management and visualisation well into the future.
