The co-founder of unicorn FInTech company Scalapay has unveiled his next venture.
Raffaele Terrone is the former CFO at Milan-headquartered Buy Now Pay Later firm Scalapay, which in February 2022 raised $497 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation in excess of $1 billion, becoming Italy’s first unicorn company.
Terrone is now based in London and is building a system of intelligence and AI productivity for investment professionals in Desia.
He has raised a £2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Dig Ventures and featuring 2100 Ventures, Exor Ventures and Octopus Ventures. The round was joined by a group of angel investors, including Niccolo Maisto, founder of FaceIT, Mark Ransford, senior advisor at CVC, and Massimo della Ragione, former partner at Goldman Sachs.
The problem Desia intends to solve was experienced first-hand by CEO Terrone during his time in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, and in private equity at ICAMAP Investments.
Despite the wider financial industries making significant technological leaps in recent times, investment professionals are still required to manually sort through significant amounts of data and information.
Doing so is both time-consuming and costly. The data is often without any structure and productivity is severely impacted as a result.
Desia’s system extracts knowledge and data about potential investments and puts it to work by analysing the data in an automated way, saving investment professionals significant time and resources.
“I recall regularly sifting through data and information until the early hours during my time at Goldman Sachs in order to make fully informed decisions and strategies. With Desia the whole process would have been more efficient and successful. I wish it was available back then,” said Terrone.
At the same time, co-founder and CPO Alessandro Amaro and CTO Mehmet Öner Yalçin were leading the development of AI products for the investment team at Advent International that was facing similar issues.
The trio initially started working on Desia to help Terrone streamline the analysis of his angel investments They soon realised the commercial potential of what they were building and began to seek external funding to bolster the growth.
Terrone continued: “This initial funding round is a major step towards developing the system for more structured and complex investment analyses.”
Desia already has live users and has its eyes set on the UK, US and Continental Europe. The team headcount is currently 11, of which four are from Advent International, with experience in building and launching successful products at the intersection of technology and finance.
Ross Mason, founding partner at DIG Ventures, said: “Desia’s founding team, marked by their impeccable execution and deep market insight, is perfectly positioned to address an essential challenge within the financial industry.
“This reminds me vividly of the formative days at MuleSoft, where we similarly targeted a critical inefficiency in the market. Their innovative approach to automating data analysis leveraging AI promises substantial advancements in productivity for finance professionals.”