The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
I already wrote about marketplaces or experts twice. The employer wants to find out something about a remote market. A local specialist doesn’t mind discussing professional topics for 300 bucks an hour. The platform connects them and charges a commission. One of this markets subniches is the strive of investors to get a better understanding of the public companies’ businesses until eventually being able to forecast the tendencies of the financial rates. It’s illegal to call the employees directly, but one may talk to a competitor or an industry expert. A big fund interviews someone from Yandex.Market team, and individual retailer from marketplaces, and representatives of a big brand, and based on their evidence, buys or sells Ozon’s shares with better confidence.
Tegus, the American startup of the day, added another element to the traditional model: It re-uses the calls. Each dialog gets recorded, deciphered, cleared of any personal data mentioned, and published in a subscription-based library. The next fund’s analyst reads old interviews and can either do without calling the experts or asks deeper questions because the answers to simpler ones are already known.
At that, if the client’s research budget supposedly doesn’t decrease, the startup’s economics improves significantly. It doesn’t share the revenue from subscription with anybody, the expert gets paid for the call once, no follow-on royalties are presupposed.
In November, Tegus brought in USD 90M of investment.
#uber #fintech #investments #roundb #usa
Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.