Building on the success of the previous editions of Catapult: Kickstarter, the LHoFT Foundation is excited to announce the 10 selected participants of the fourth edition of this unique program of Fintech startup development that will begin on 28th November 2022.
For this Fourth Edition, the LHoFT team and jury partners selected 10 impressive Fintech ventures from a field of over 120 applications. The program will close on the 9th of December with a final pitching event at the LHoFT, in front of a highly credible jury, as well as investors and audience members .
Developed by the LHoFT Foundation and supported by the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy, “Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 – Fall Edition” will support 10 amazing Fintech startups over the course of two weeks, with the aim to develop their business models, focusing on business scaling and risk management, and bring them connectivity with the Luxembourg Financial Services ecosystem. As the name suggests, the programme aims to kickstart business growth through expansion to Luxembourg leveraging outstanding mentors, tutors and through connectivity to the local ecosystem.
Over recent years, Luxembourg has built up a supportive and robust Fintech startup ecosystem through collaboration between key public and private decision-makers. Aligned with Luxembourg’s ambition to create a leading startup and entrepreneurial nation, the Catapult: Kickstarter program is dedicated to further catalysing Fintech innovation in Luxembourg and beyond.
In order to effectively leverage the strengths of Luxembourg’s community and capabilities, the selected firms focus on delivering services to financial institutions (B2B), with particular emphasis on Insurtech, Regtech, Fundtech, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets, B2C payments, Cybersecurity and Sustainability as ESG-related Fintech remains a key area of focus.
The two-week program is tailored to the particular stage of the participating Fintechs and is structured around classroom tutorials, customer discovery, challenges, one-to-one meetings, pitching sessions, entrepreneurs’ feedback sessions, and mentorship sessions.
The 10 participating Fintech companies will meet multiple partners across those two weeks, including Luxembourg For Finance (LFF), Société Générale, and Middlegame Ventures (MGV), providing advice on their business models, funding strategies, and industry product testing.
The program will begin on Monday 28th of November will close with a final pitching event on Friday, 9th of December. Five of the ten participating firms will be able to access up to 50,000 EUR in subsidies from the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy, based on the fulfilment of eligibility criteria.
The 10 Selected Fintech Startups of the Catapult: Kickstarter 2022 – Fall Edition are:
Bilic – United Kingdom: Bilic is a London-based blockchain security forensics and data analytics startup offering products to help defence agencies, government agencies, intelligence agencies, and financial institutions investigate, detect and prevent insecurity on blockchain networks.
Byrssa – Czech Republic: BYRSSA is a trusted European digital execution platform for SAFE based seed funding and Security Token Offering. Byrssa is the first European licensed equity crowd funding platform based on standard SAFE contract for seed and on STO for priced funding. Byrssa’s mission is to simplify, accelerate and disintermediate the early stage start-up fundraising process.
Invoport – Luxembourg: Invoport helps the fund administrators digitally process the fund operations to increase productivity and quality in addition to providing the investors an online portal to monitor the fund performance. It is composed of (1) a cloud computing expert software where users can accomplish the funds operations via its online platform and (2) an interface for the investors where they receive the information shared by the fund such as capital call, distributions, and reports.
Lyyna Insurance and Financial Services – Switzerland: Lyyna empowers financial institutions to leverage their data to offer the right insurance to the right customer at the right time. Lyyna is a SaaS provider which empowers retail banks and other financial institutions to leverage their transactional data (e.g. payments, financing requests, etc.) as well as other customer-related data (e.g. chats, emails, existing contracts) to 1)- recognise the right signals indicating that a customer is experiencing an insurance relevant life moment and 2)- decide if they want to offer insurance for that particular customer.
Omnio – Bulgaria: OMNIO is a multi-platform solution that detects suspicious activity, generates assessments and recommends a course of action for your cases. It significantly reduces the risk of failure, resulting in less time spent on compliance and no additional costs for additional staff, external advisors, or regulatory fines. Designed for businesses of all sizes, it is a cloud-based/ on-premise solution that lets employees manage compliance, monitor transactions, detect frauds, assess risks, and more.
Paperless IO – Germany: Paperless lets the users create, sign, manage, and automate intelligent documents on a single platform and for more productivity and a better experience for everyone involved. In more detail the platform allows you to create Smart-Paperless-Documents that allow data input and real-time data validation, different signee workflows and are responsive for every mobile device. In addition, the Smart-Paperless-Document can be filled and signed on every language the document has been created in.
Pelt8 – Switzerland: Pelt8 is a B2B SaaS and suite of APIs powering the sustainability ecosystem by turning complex disclosures into clean data. We make it easy for small to large companies to deal with their growing disclosure requirements through our automated reporting while providing them with the processes and controls to do it in a clean and auditable way. Selected data points can then be shared with various stakeholders from system to system through machine readable formats.
RegTech Datahub – Denmark: To replace existing market data vendor for all MiFID II/MiFIR reporting needs, RegTech Datahub supply the customer with all instrument static data necessary to comply with the many different reporting requirements under MiFID II/MiFIR, i.e. – Pre & post trade transparency reporting – Transaction reporting – Best execution reporting – Cost reporting (running + annual) – Loss reporting – SI calculations/surveillance – ISIN Look-up/ ISIN creation.
SDG Assessment – United Kingdom: ©SDG Assessment is a sustainability, environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance reporting tool that assists SMEs and large businesses with benchmarking their performance in relation to UN Sustainable Development goals (SDGs) by encouraging organisations that complete the self-assessment process to commit to addressing pertinent UN SDGs. The ©SDG Assessment app aims to adopt a five-step approach outlined in the Sustainable Strategic Growth Model: Learn, Develop, Implement, Optimise and Sustain bolstered by blockchain technology that supports information security and enhances the company’s customers journey experience.
Symbiose Management – France: Symbiose Management is empowering people to address climate change from the bottom-up, by providing the first negative CO2 investment product based on tree plantations for investors, with their innovative platform and strong ecological commitment.
