🚨 Disclaimer
All research on startup and the whole investment memo has been done for personal use of Akim Arhipov.
Salv is on a mission to beat financial crime.
Imagine a business where an investment of hundreds of billions annually returned a success rate of 1-2%. That’s the level of effectiveness in compliance currently. But this isn’t just a business concern – it’s a problem that affects our entire society.
Taavi Tamkivi (co-founder) left Wise in 2018, where he was serving as a Global Lead of Compliance to start anti-money laundering company. He quickly came across to realise that given industry needs a bigger shift than just advice as companies are lacking modern tools to fight financial crime.
2019 saw a pivot, an addition of Jeff McClelland (ex-Skype, ex-Wise) & Sergei Rumjantsev (ex-Wise) as co-founders and Salv was born.
Banks work in silos & info moves slowly, leading to:
- Limited information - banks only have their data to decide whether to report to police
- Slow requests - to any other banks, which means they never ask
- Criminals without borders - happily exploit any bank with bad tech or processes
- Gigantic fines - for failing time and again to stop criminal money flowing through
Salv is offering the solution - Collaborative crime-fighting in networks.
Salv is connecting FinCrime and Compliance teams across bank to share information about high risk customers.
Salv’s anti-money laundering SaaS platform is Automatic, Adaptive, Instant and consists of 2 segments of a product:
- Salv AML Platform - SaaS tools in order to perform Screening, Monitoring and Risk Scoring built for modern payment realities. More than any other system on the market, it helps financial crime teams to adapt to new criminal patterns and regulatory requirements with ease, and make decisions on instant payments at scale.
- Salv Bridge - Addresses the critical challenges faced by banks in the realm of information flow and communication inefficiencies. By seamlessly integrating with existing banking systems, Salv Bridge serves as a conduit for breaking down silos and accelerating the exchange of vital information. This transformative solution enables banks to proactively identify potential criminal activities, minimizing the reliance on customer complaints for detection.
Smart AML Platform Demo →
Smart AML platform consist of 3 different pillars, let’s examine them one by one:
The Bridge Demo →
Criminals work in networks while financial institutions often work alone and with limited data. It takes a network to beat a network – it’s time to take information sharing between financial institutions to the next level.
Salv Bridge is a secure, cloud-based solution that allows financial institutions to exchange and strengthen data on bad actors. It’s 100% encrypted and fully compliant with data protection regulations.
Salv Bridge is suitable solution for: Banks / BaaS providers / Crypto / Neobanks / Fintechs / MSBs
Functionality:
Below, you can also find a Product roadmap from here on:
The total market of European compliance reaches 156bn€ per year.
Compared to some other sub-nieces within banking verticals, Salv is tapping into several of those slightly:
- Salv’s focuses first and foremost on an emerging compliance category, but also supplements by offering related technology for the same teams within banks & fintechs:
- Screening tech;
- Customer monitoring, risks;
- Bridge - Collaborative Crime-Fighting (EMERGING).
2022 PLANS
Important events in 2022
In 2022, Salv managed to successfully grow its revenue, develop and expand its product offering, strengthen its security controls, close another investment round and receive international recognition for its collaborative crime-fighting solution.
Most important events in 2022:
- x2.3 revenue growth - ca.1,2m€ / spend was at ca.2.8m€
- Successfully completed SOC 2 Type 2 audit, to strengthen internal security controls
- Expanded to Baltics and Eastern Europe and founded subsidiary in Poland
- Won the RFP to launch Salv Bridge across 11 banks in Latvia
- Recognized by FATF (Financial Action Task Force) and Moneyval audit on Estonia
- Closed 4.5m€ euros Seed round investment from existing and new investors
2023 PLANS
In 2023 Salv’s key focus has been ramping up Salv Bridge product group sales and continuing improvement of both of our product groups. This has led to improvement of unit economics, gross margin from existing business and cost of acquiring new customers. Salv plans to double its revenue by the end of the year and launch Salv Bridge networks in the Baltics and UK. Leading into 2024, the priority is to expand the networks in the UK as well as launch additional networks in Scandinavia.
On the product side, Salv’s main focus is on launching new components for Bridge while keeping the core focus on privacy by design as well as gradually improving the functionality of Platform to enable Salv to serve larger banks. To finance the growth of the business and launch Bridge networks in the UK and beyond, Salv is going to involve new investments from existing and new investors.
Currently, Salv is showing stable growth and margin for all of its product lines:
As things stand, about 70% of the revenue is coming from the AML Platform but focus of 2023 is to grow % of the revenue delivered by Bridge. Salvs growth is focused on Partnerships as there is a clear network effect once bigger players are being onboarded to the system.
Salv is currently looking at the pipeline of networks worth 125m€ ARR
CLIENTS
To highlight a few:
- LHV Bank (EE / EN) / LHV Pank offers a range of banking services, including retail and corporate banking, investment services, and asset management. It is one of the main competitors in the financial industry.
- SEB Pank (EE) / SEB is a prominent financial services group with a strong presence in the Nordic region and the Baltic countries, offering a wide range of financial services to various customer segments
- Lightyear Financial Ltd (UK) / Lightyear Financial Ltd is a UK-based financial technology company that provides an investment application platform that allows users to invest in stocks and ETFs without unnecessary barriers and fees
- UAB ZEN.COM (PL) / is an electronic money institution based in Poland that focuses on managing card payments in the internet and offers payment gateways, crypto top-ups, and a financial app for managing multiple currencies and sending money internationally
- TrueLayer Limited (UK) / TrueLayer Limited is a London-based company that specializes in open banking payments and provides secure access to banking infrastructure, enabling companies to leverage open banking for smarter and faster online payments.
Now, it is becoming more relevant than ever. COVID-19 had a huge impact on the volumes of cashless transactions, while the war in Ukraine and all the sanctions that are being implemented towards Russia are forcing criminals to move the assets. It is extremely difficult to keep up with all the limitations, regulations and sanction these days. REFERENCE
We are looking at an excellent team of specialist, who are most certainly up for the task.
Taavi Tamkivi, ex-Wise / Co-founder / CEO
Jeff McClelland, ex-Skype / Co-founder / COO
Sergei Rumjantsev, ex-Wise / Co-founder / CTO
Gristel Tali, ex-Katana ERP / CPO
Lauri Haav, ex-Monese / CGO
Ca. 60 employees in total as things stand
Organisation:
There is an extensive list of competition, yet, there is not much competition when it comes to all-in-one solution, which Salv is representing. The competition comes from two places:
To give you some names:
Amount: 4-5m€. (3.3M is planned for the next 12 months, and any additional included will cover growth for additional months)
Valuation pre money: 27.554m€
Cap Table (fully diluted): ca.44% founders / ca.2% early advisors and employees, 44% VCs and Angel investors, 9% ESOP
Investment type: Equity
Committed so far: 2.1-2.7m€ from new and existing investors (Passion Capital, ff Venture Capital, G+D Ventures)
Raised until today: 8.2m€
FFF Members
Total allocation: 300 000€
Minimum ticket: 10 000€ First come - first serve
Fee structure: 7% one off + 7% carried interest per SPV
📞 For all the question, feel free to reach out to Tim Vaino, 56893204 / tim@fff.vc / WhatsApp
