The Croatian startup Farseer was the winner of Podim’s 2020 pitching competition.
Farseer is an innovative, low-code platform for financial modeling, planning and analytics. It’s ideal for companies overgrowing spreadsheets, and for those that want better insights on their profitability and cash flow.
We got in touch with Farseer’s founder, Matija Nakić, to see how they are doing and what has changed in almost a year.
The last time we talked Farseer had just won the Podim pitching competition, had a team of 5 people, and aimed to contact 25 clients over the year. What has changed since then?
Farseer is now 12 people, with 5 large corporate accounts and 15 SME’s using Farseer for every aspect of their financial planning and analytics. The product has developed immensely, and we keep pushing bi-weekly improvements. In just a few months, we have grown from a part-time project of the founders into a mature business, delivering game-changing software, implementation services and support for our clients.
We also got a seed investment and we all feel great things are ahead of us. There’s this crazy buzz in the office air, I love it. 🙂
Wow, that’s awesome to hear! Tell us, what was the biggest step forward for your company during the last year?
The biggest step was getting funded which enabled us, founders to quit our jobs and start working full-time on Farseer. Recently we won an RfP for a major 3-year contract with a government-owned gas distributor – this together with some upcoming deals is qualifying us for the major league of FP&A software.
We all know 2020 was crazy. How did the pandemic impact you? Did you have to adapt in any way?
Startups are always crazy. It’s so crazy that the environment that’s not benefiting established companies just might benefit a startup.
Luckily, during this crisis a lot of companies have realized that they can not run their business without planning in multiple scenarios, tracking all relevant KPIs and even predicting what could happen considering the data. We have always wanted Farseer to be a pain-killer rather than a vitamin, and our results in the pandemic year show that we are on a good track.
Looking back, how did you benefit from attending Podim last year? Where would you say it helped you the most?
There is a very clear ROI (return on investment) since we know we got one corporate client through an article on us winning Podim. 🙂
We got great exposure from it, but most importantly, Podim boosted our confidence. We started thinking – if these smart people believe in us so much, maybe we should start too. Funny story – when entering the pitching competition last year, we didn’t even know what the prize was. We went to find out what it was, after they announced us as the winners.
Thanks for the update, Matija. We’re sure the future has great things in store for the Farseer!
