Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem are you solving?
Sophie Thurner, Beatvest: Beatvest offers its users a beginner-friendly investment environment divided into two tiers: education and investing.
In this day and age, it is more important than ever to deal with your finances: The burdensome inflation situation in everyday life and the ever-widening pension gap weigh on the shoulders of the younger generations. Beatvest’s vision is to give these young people the opportunity to educate themselves on capital market topics, make fact-based decisions and build long-term wealth by investing in the capital market. Thus, financial education is made available to a broad section of the population and tailored to the users with the latest information technology.
How to invest? And in what?
But that’s nothing out of the box!
On the one hand, there are pure trading platforms like Broker. They offer a solution for users who already know where they want to invest and how investing works. We are starting one step earlier. We help users with the question of what kind of investment should I actually make and how do I go about it. For the vast majority of capital market beginners, the real problem is the transition between what has been learned through books or videos and the actual execution of the investment. This is exactly where Beatvest comes in.
What’s your founding story?
We met during a surfing trip in Fuerteventura. Because we not only share the passion for our startup, but also for waves and water. While I had already been active in the capital market for over 15 years when we met and was an old hand in the business due to my job at the British Financial Market Authority, tech startup expert Julia was only just beginning to deal with the topic. We talked for hours about the hurdles that investment beginners encounter. And we discussed solutions for how we could open up the capital market to the masses and thus make it a fair and better place.
We both quickly understood: This could be something really big – ‘Finance meets Tech and goes Startup’.
Beatvest: Making the capital market fairer
What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Initially, we were faced with the challenge of finding the optimal balance between “learning” and “applying what was learned”. Working with financial experts, industry insiders and educational institutions such as universities and schools shed light on the matter and helped us overcome this hurdle. We have received further valuable support from our “Sounding Board”. This is a group of 100 users who actively provided us with feedback during app development and with whom we built the product together.
How is business going?
Shortly before Christmas, we were delighted to see the release of our app in the Apple App Store. Since then, several thousand users have downloaded our app and are now actively dealing with their personal financial situation. A result that makes us very proud and happy. Nevertheless, we are always working at full speed to improve the app and provide our users with an even better experience.
Munich very attractive
How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
We find Munich very attractive as a location for our young company. In particular, the large number of first-class universities ensures a fantastic interplay of entrepreneurship, research and exchange. For example, we have already worked with the Technical University of Munich on several projects. We were always very impressed by the expertise and drive of the students and the university staff.
Hidden champion or shooting star?
Since we announced our funding round at the end of January, I would put us in the healthy middle between hidden champion and shooting star. The public interest we attracted has brought us many new users. We both like to be on LinkedIn a lot, so that our users also have a constant update on what we are working on and who is behind the product Beatvest.