Biography:
Daulet Aitmakhanov is the co-founder of Finflow, a Kazakh startup building an AI-powered CFO for SMEs. FinFlow just closed a $500K pre-seed round. FinFlow currently does around $6K in MRR. Over 160 SMEs use the product.
Prior to Finflow, Daulet co-founded ISSU, an online perfume subscription service for the Kazakh market. He also worked as a CFO for CTOgram, another Kazakh startup building a marketplace for car servicing.
What did you learn while building ISSU that you’re implementing at FinFlow?
ISSU was a copycat of Scentbird, an American online perfume subscription service. I figured there was Kazakh market demand for such a product that no company was building for. We targeted mostly women between 18 and 35, with subscription prices ranging from $20 to $60 per month.
ISSU was an extremely operationally-heavy business. We had to find the perfume suppliers, package the perfumes, send them to the right address month after month… I vowed to make my next company more software-based.
Onto Finflow. You initially wanted to build for the US market, but pivoted back to Kazakhstan. Why?
My co-founders and I had all focused on the Kazakh market for most of our careers. We wanted a taste of something new, so we set out to build Finflow for American and European startup founders. Purchasing power is high in those markets, so there was an interesting labor cost arbitrage opportunity by keeping our team in Kazakhstan.
We got good feedback from early users, but realized that the US market was so flooded with similar solutions that it would take us a long time to get to par with local, well-funded startups. Our MVP wasn’t meeting expectations.
On the other hand, there was a blatant, unserviced need for a similar product here in Kazakhstan and in the wider region, so we geographically pivoted.
Can you synthesize Finflow’s product?
We’re building an AI CFO for SMEs. Our goal is to help companies that don’t have the resources to hire a full-time CFO access 60% of what a CFO can do (cash-flow forecasting, financial modeling, financial management…) for a fraction of the price.
This helps SMEs put together cleaner financials and better forecasting visibility, increasing their chances of getting loans with local banks.
Our product is localized for Kazakhstan: we integrate with 1C (the accounting software most Kazakh entrepreneurs use). Users can download their bank transcript, upload it to Finflow, and our AI extrapolates a financial model with 95% accuracy. We’re currently working on integrating local payment gateways.
RO insights: AI co-pilot for lawyers in Brazil
This idea of an “AI co-pilot” designed for a specific client persona can be especially useful in contexts where lots of documents need to be analyzed. This is the case for Finflow’s clients. It also works for lawyers.
Here’s how Rafael Bagolin, co-founder of Brazilian startup Jusfy (building an AI co-pilot for lawyers) explains:
“Jusfy’s vision is to become lawyers’ co-pilot. The ungodly amount of documents and information lawyers have to sift through makes AI particularly adapted to our product. We’re building an internal AI chatbot, fed with millions of Brazilian lawsuits. During the pandemic, the Brazilian judiciary digitized all 93 law codes, so we’ve plugged those into our AI.
Today, our AI can give lawyers updates on their cases, provide advice, inform them of the deadlines they have to file a certain petition… In the future, our AI will be able to pre-draft documents tailored to the lawyer’s case.”
Excerpt from Jusfy: digitizing Brazil’s lawyers, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
The financial data you collect on SMEs can be useful to local banks. Do you work with them?