Techstars Startup Digest Athens - Issue #4

👋 Hello hello Athens,

Paul here! Trust that you enjoyed the past two weeks, despite the December fever that most definitely is hitting you. Now as the year comes to an end, it’s time to sit back, relax, and reflect on the things that kept us sane, productive, and of course, innovative.

Since this issue will be the last one before the holiday season, I would like to wish you all in advance a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Cheers to an amazing 2022!

In this issue of Techstars Startup Digest Athens, we might not have many events to share with you, but we definitely have a super interesting featured startup, already innovating and revolutionizing credit risk modeling.

Enjoy your week and see you in the next one,

Paul

In this issue, we will be deep-diving into credit risk modeling and reporting and how RISKROBOT™, developed by SPIN Analytics automates a very resource-heavy process, leveraging Artificial Intelligence.

First things first, let us start framing the problem, to understand better where RISKROBOT™ fits in. For years, credit risk modeling was a time-consuming procedure, but necessary for all financial institutions to understand better their credit risk. Firstly, this was done by a huge number of workers using statistical models until Artificial Intelligence was introduced and accelerated the whole process. Still, the average time for a new model to be built and used is up to 9 months. Moreover, in this post-COVID world we are now living, the economies, markets, businesses, and consumers, changed their behavior, thus making the existing models dangerously outdated.

RISKROBOT™, developed by SPIN Analytics, is a new approach, using the technology of Artificial Intelligence to combine expert judgment with classic risk modeling and Machine Learning techniques on Big Data. With the specific combination, RISKROBOT™ can easily produce accurate predictive analytics to make credit decisions and risk management easier, faster, and sector agnostic. As mentioned in the Microsoft Risk Management White Paper, RISKROBOT™ can achieve up to 10x acceleration in credit risk reporting and modeling.

Recently, RISKROBOT™ joined the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to streamline the integration of the tool into their customer’s infrastructure, accelerating credit risk digitization. The specific collaboration with Microsoft Azure is one of a kind as Microsoft selected SPIN Analytics as the only application for the regulatory credit risk modeling.

On that note, SPIN Analytics which is a team of ex-bankers and data scientists is further expanding its international growth by forging a strong Global Advisory Board. It consists of Sue Harnett, Ex-Senior Exec of Citigroup, Gautam Mukharya, Chief Risk Officer of HSBC Singapore, and Andrew Stott, a global banking and consulting veteran with over 40 years of experience.

If you’re interested in finding more information about RISKROBOT™ and SPIN Analytics, do visit their website as you can also request a demo of the product. On the other hand, if credit risk modeling automation is something that could be of value for you or your business, check out RISKROBOT™ in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

👼 The first Greek Business Angel’s co-investment fund is now official! Genesis Ventures, founded by Dimitri Maroulis and Stergios Anastasiadis, was recently backed by the European Investment Fund with an amount rounding up to 20 million euros.

💰 Cube RM, the AI revenue management software, announced its Series A funding round with $8M raised. The round was led by Runa Capital and the Greek-based Marathon VC.

📚 A lot of talks have been developing in the past days about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). This piece by George Zarkadakis on rethinking DAOs in a world of complexity and polarization is by far one of the most interesting.

🏃‍♂️ Product Community Greece, is launching a new blog! The first piece is a presentation of a continuous product discovery framework for agile teams, written by Antonis Rousounelos, Software Product Manager at Blueground.

💸 Greek-based VentureFriends announced that they have raised €90 million for their third fund, aiming for a hard cap at €100 million.

📬 If you find this digest interesting, do share it with friends and let them know where they can subscribe.

💬 Athens-based startups or events interested to be featured in a future digest, let’s talk. Always happy meeting new people and growing the community!

🎉 Feel free to connect with me and let’s keep in touch.