aql hosts Nordic-Baltic fintech pitch session
20 of the most promising fintech startups from across the Nordic and Baltic countries descended on aql HQ yesterday.
In Leeds for the DIT Nordic-Baltic FinTech Mission, the delegation made the trip to aql’s headquarters for an investment pitching session. Each startup had three minutes to pitch to a group of investors, including aql’s founder Prof. Adam Beaumont, followed by one-to-one discussions.
Beaumont opened the session by talking about his own journey, and his years-long crusade for data integrity – the means by which you can tell who created a piece of data and when they created it. “If you want to be smart about data, and you want to create data-driven businesses, it’s not about locking the data up, it’s about opening the data out and having good provenance.”
Estonia in particular, he explained, shows the way forward, noting: “two years ago, I went on a business trip to Estonia and I found myself having lots of conversations with people like me. When I’d say, ‘integrity’s really important’ and ‘good data provenance is really important’, the answer that would come back is ‘yes, we know. We’ve got a company that does this, we’ve got a startup that does that, we’ve got an e-Residency scheme. We actually know who all our citizens are and we can prove which data is owned by whom, and our citizens also understand what good data management looks like’.
I kind of felt at home. And I went back again. And again. And again. And I think it was after trip number six – this is about when Brexit started to happen and I had a lot of worried people asking, ‘does this mean the end of these conversations?’, and I said, ‘well, we may be leaving the EU, possibly, who knows, but we’re not ending our relationships with Europe’.
So, I did a thing. I formed an investment company. We’ve been working with Estonian businesses. We’ve invested in Estonian startups, and that’s been an exciting and easy thing to do.”
The visit was part of a two-day programme to showcase the UK’s Northern Powerhouse cities of Leeds and Manchester, and was a collaboration between Whitecap Consulting and the Department for International Trade. Leeds is the UK’s biggest financial hub outside London, and home to a host of cutting edge financial firms and major sector innovation.
