Hey Samuel what made you start Bippit?
I previously worked for over a decade in the Wealth Management industry, but it was always incredibly frustrating that the Financial Planning services still cost at least £500, and were only available to the super rich.
But now, with next gen technology like A.I. and Open Banking, we can actually automate financial plans for people… and the best part about being able to automate them, is that we can deliver them for the price of a cup of coffee!
So we built Bippit to deliver financial plans for students and young professionals who haven’t built any meaningful savings yet. You simply connect your accounts to Bippit’s app, we use A.I. to analyse the data, and this delivers an achievable financial plan that takes the guesswork out of managing your finances.
What funding have you received so far?
We closed a modest Angel round earlier this year to get us to market, and we’re now preparing an institutional Seed Round to fuel our continued growth
How did you find using SeedLegals?
I genuinely can’t imagine how we would have navigated the complexity of our funding round without Seedlegals… from negotiating terms, formalising employment contracts, and managing our cap table, I think we have saved 100’s of hours and 1000’s of pounds in total
As founders, we’re constantly on the look out for tools and tech that will save time and allow our modest resources to deliver the most progress. Seedlegals offers that in spades, by seamlessly dealing with some of the most time consuming admin that a Startup will have to deal with.
How did you find your investors, and were they angels or VCs?
Before finding & approaching a number of idea-stage investors, we first bounced our ideas & proposition off some VC’s in the fintech space that I was connected to through my Wealth Management career.
After further developing the idea, and refining our message, we closed our round with a group of high level Angel Investors who we found through our network and from requesting warm intros on LinkedIn.
Any advice for finding the right investors?
A good way to start is by using resources like Crunchbase or LinkedIn to search for Angels. Focus first on those who’ve invested previously in companies at the same stage & in the same industry as you, and then branch out from there.
3 pieces of fundraising advice?
- When you find a good lead, and think you’ve presented well, a “no” can be tough to take. Remember that it’s just one person’s opinion. Be gracious, and make the most of it by asking for feedback so that you improve your pitch for the next meeting.
- At the end of a meeting, be clear with the investor about what you’re looking for, and find out how they feel about the deal. If they have any remaining concerns before making an investment, try to address them in the room and push things forward.
- Understand that Angels and VC’s are not so different from you and me. They too have an overflowing inbox, and never enough time to deal with their workload. Be politely persistent, but try not to alienate them by being a pest.
What’s next on the horizon for Bippit?
Bippit’s Beta will be launching in October 2019, and the waiting list is growing quickly on
We’re moving as fast as possible, so we can get our financial plans into people’s hands, and start dealing with the unnecessary confusion that surrounds this part of our lives.
