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Story 21 October 2020
Public

Events - EIC ePitching with Investors on Fintech, Insurtech & Blockchain: Quantum Integrity went home with the prize

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Joana Moreira

Technology is continuing to influence and shape the future of the financial sector. From buying a cup of coffee at your favourite bar to transferring money to your friends and family, fintech is playing an increasingly large role in everyday life. October’s EIC ePitching with Investors brought together eight highly innovative EIC-backed SMEs with six investor firms to pitch on Fintech, Insurtech and Blockchain applications.



The eight innovators each had the opportunity to pitch their company to an investor jury, consisting of representatives from NFT Ventures, Anthemis, Downing Ventures, Finch Capital, Balderton Capital and Speedinvest. Afterwards the jury members could ask a range of questions and ultimately vote for the ‘best pitch’. This month’s edition awarded Anthony Sahakian, CEO from Swiss-based Quantum Integrity.

 

Quantum Integrity

The digitization of business is changing all aspects of the economy. Expense reports, insurance claims, signed legal documents, contracts, diplomas, medical prescriptions & even press photographs up until quite recently used to live mostly in paper form. This is no longer the case—many documents are created digitally & those that still start as paper are immediately scanned & further processed in electronic form. While forgery of documents & image manipulation have been known for decades, technology today makes it easy for anyone with basic knowledge of Photoshop to falsify digital images or scanned copies of official documents from birth certificates to bank statements. “We help businesses tackle image falsification and ensure trust in digital processes with our software solution. "QI detects, quantifies and qualifies manipulations made to digital images video and live video conference", Anthony commented. “We started back in 2015, my partner was worried about the development of social media and the ease of manipulating images through Photoshop. The first few years it was difficult, but since 2018 this field has been receiving more and more interest, deepfake came into the picture. Now it’s evolving, faster than we predicted. It’s a very exciting field to be in.”

 

Quantum Integrity has been an EIC-beneficiary since 2019. “The EIC funding helped tremendously, both with the R&D, as well as through these connections with investors. All in all, we received amazing support from the EU, as well as from EPFL, through professor Ebrahimi, Innosuisse and its director Annalise Eggimann , as well as Innovaud and Fongit.  As to what he was hoping to get from the session Anthony commented “We’re looking for a good match, smart money basically. I’m very pleased, and surprised, that we won this session. I’m hoping to round up some interested investors to talk to these upcoming months”.

 

Cream of the crop

Matthew Jones and Kathy Gromotka, respectively representing Anthemis and Downing Ventures, were two of the attending investor jury members. Matthew was especially interested in the Insurtech-solutions that attended: “We’ve watched the Insurtech-sector rapidly develop. The first phase of innovations , from 2014-2017, was focused on bringing existing products online or to an app-based environment. 2017 to this year we saw a lot of start-ups providing software for insurance providers. For the upcoming years, what I believe we will see are further innovative new products and the insurance of ‘untraditional’ things. Normally you would insure a house or care, now you will see insurances for financial volatility, risks of AI or IP.” As to why they attended the session, Kathy commented: “Getting new deal flow is always good, these panels are great, because the companies have been pre-vetted, it’s a shortcut. No one would say no to the cream of the crop of European start-ups.”

 

As for Matthew it was “important to support tech ecosystems and initiatives like this. Getting involved with what’s happening is important, we got to see some really interesting companies from a wide geographic range. All in all, I really enjoyed it, the passion and enthusiasm from the innovators was well on display today”. In addition, Kathy was pleased with the diverse investor jury, stating “that the wide array of investors, either geographically or in terms of sector, meant that many different questions were being asked, which is good for both the investors as well as the companies pitching”.

 

Looking for ways to connect to top-class investors and peers? 

We host regular ‘EIC ePitching with Investors’-sessions based on your company profiles in ScaleUp EU. Keep an eye on our events page for more information on future events. 

If you are interested in joining, don’t miss out and update your profile information straight away. If you need help, please contact us through our contact page (choose ScaleUp EU: claim access).



 

DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.

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