Irish fintech startup Assiduous is hoping to make corporate finance advice more accessible for SMEs following a successful funding round in which the company raised €1 million to support its development. And the company’s founders are hoping this will help it on its journey to an eventual stock market initial public offering (IPO).
After working for 20 years in corporate finance, Fergal Meegan told The Irish Times he wanted to find a way to give that same advice to companies earlier in their life cycle without the prohibitive costs for smaller companies. “The goal is to make corporate finance advice accessible for smaller businesses,” he said.
Mr Meegan founded the company with his long-time colleague Barry Murphy, to fill a gap in the market instead of trying to to compete with the major corporate advisory firms.
“Access to corporate finance advice is far beyond the average business owner,” he said. “The vision for this business is to democratise access to that advice. When you get to enterprise level, you have the resources to pay whoever for whatever advice you need. But when you’re on the journey [...] you can’t afford that.”
Based out of NovaUCD, Assiduous has just launched its virtual corporate finance software service, Corporate Finance Autopilot. This seeks to support SMEs preparing for strategic, financing and liquidity transactions with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Mr Meegan said the funding would allow the company to expand its technical team across 2025 and 2026 and to “build the company for the next few years. That’s what the money is for, as we try to inject three decades of domain expertise into the platform.”
“There are Silicon Valley paradigms around ‘move fast and break things’ but this is business owners and their businesses. There is no chance we want to move too fast and break anything for our customers. It’s just too important.”
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The founders are targeting growth to €1 million in recurring revenue over the next two years. “After that, very quickly we want to go from €1 million to €10 million in revenue,” Mr Meegan said.
The NovaUCD spin-off is collaborating with Euronext Group to facilitate access for Irish companies to markets earlier in their life cycle.
“We have been involved in the listing of more businesses in Dublin than anyone else, so we want to list our own business and grow it as a public company, to create an Irish multinational. We are not building this for sale, we are building the company to endure. All of the sustainable principles we have for our customers are the same principles that we want to grow this business.”
The company has received support from Enterprise Ireland and is part of the European Institute for Technology Digital’s Equity Portfolio.
EIT Digital’s interim head of acceleration and growth, Dénes Csiszár, said the company had “prospects to solve some of Europe’s critical strategic and financing challenges for SMEs using the latest artificial intelligence innovations”.
