A Danish fintech startup, co-founded by a Romanian, has officially launched, after a EUR 5 million funding round. spektr, a Copenhagen-based fintech, has gone public following a €5 million funding round from Northzone, an investor in Klarna and TrueLayer among others, the technology fund of Danish PreSeed Ventures and Seedcamp.
This is a startup that wants to change the continuous processes of “due diligence” in the financial field with an automated solution, according to Business Insider.
Behind spektr is a team of experienced serial entrepreneurs, including CEO Mikkel Skarnager, Ciprian Florescu, Jérémy Joly, and Jan-Erik Wagner. Skarnager and Florescu successfully sold their previous startup HelloFlow to Canadian company Trulioo in 2022.
spektr’s platform offers financial companies an automated solution for risk assessments, customizable to adhere to rules and laws across different markets. Recognizing the exponential growth of the compliance field globally, with an estimated cost of $10k per employee in larger financial companies, spektr aims to simplify risk-based monitoring with a user-friendly platform that does not require specialized IT skills for the user.
“With the spektr-platform, we can make ongoing due diligence an efficient function with commercial value for companies rather than being a costly expense. When looking at the explosion in the number of employees and expenses, I am convinced that there is great potential in making compliance a better business,” said CEO Mikkel Skarnager. “We’re off to an incredible start, thanks to both the platform and the generous support from our investors. This journey brings back memories of our success with HelloFlow, but this time, we’re aiming for something even bigger and long-lasting,” he added.
Who is Ciprian Florescu?
Romanian Ciprian Florescu is 29 years old and co-founder of both HelloFlow and the spektr startup. He graduated from the Faculty of Computer Science at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University in Iași in 2015, to then go for a master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, completed in 2017.
When he and Skarnager sold the startup HelloFlow, Ciprian Florescu took over the position of Vice President Engineering at Trulioo until April 2023. Since May 2023, Florescu has been working at spektr, where he is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO).