The story of nVest, Sivan Atad’s startup that won the Pitch

Last night, guest judges chose Sivan Atad’s startup nVest as the winner of $115,000 in prizes at the Pitch, SmartCompany‘s early-stage startup competition.

nVest works with banks, businesses and startups to help them create modern offerings within their online products and apps that end customers and retail investors can use to trade stocks.

“It’s an interesting problem space,” the judges said. nVest was chosen as the Pitch winner out of six shortlisted startups.

“There is a real need to reduce trading costs, so it’s a good market fit. nVest also showcased good signals around partner engagement and understanding around broader market trends from businesses who want to buy versus build.”

As winner of the third instalment of the Pitch, Atad joins an esteemed group: Amber Linz of Zipr and Amy Benson of Diolog. With 20 years of experience working with banks and other corporates, Atad has built a number of apps and products, and gained rich experience in this world. He fills us in on the startup and the win.

Tell us about nVest

nVest is on a mission to innovate and disrupt in the stock trading space and investing in general. We’ve built technology that can be applied on top of any investment infrastructure, whether that is exchanges or brokers in Australia, or in other countries, and help them modernise their offering to their end customers, the retail investors.

Our mission is to democratise access to the stock markets initially, and to other asset classes as we go. We’re doing that on a B2B model, so we are powering apps that bring those capabilities to their customers. Those apps could be banks, banking apps, investment apps, it could be super apps, or all sorts of other wealth decks or financial products that want to embed investment capabilities.

Our solution is an API driven capability, so our clients can integrate with the API easily and reduce a lot of the complexities that they would have otherwise had to build a product. There are some examples of B2C products in the Australian market today that use the embedded capabilities of companies from other regions that give access to their market, for example the US. Other Australian companies had to build their own technology to get some of those capabilities, which is very expensive and still limited. Locally you can already see how companies like CBA have started embedding those capabilities into its banking app, making their CommSec and CommSec Pocket available to customers to invest into through the main banking app. I think that CBA is still on a journey to introduce more of these types of capabilities and make it even more accessible to their customers.

So, in a similar way, our platform can be used by other companies like banks to embed capabilities into their banking app and simplify the investment experience so that it’s not something that you need to do on a separate trading app.

What was your approach to delivering your winning pitch?

Yesterday wasn’t our first pitch, we’ve already pitched in a couple of other events but I’ve pitched nVest countless times over the last 12 months, and I think it has gradually got better and better every time. What I pitched at the event is the result we’ve learned over the last 12 months, and the adapting of our pitch and our product offering to the market needs. I think that our offering is also very well aligned to the companies who judged the competition, we are very passionate to innovate and disrupt at scale which could attract many great partnerships with leading Australia corporates.

What’s next for nVest?

It’s very exciting. Yesterday we actually also announced the launch of our sandbox, so it was quite an eventful day. Over the next few weeks we are gradually onboarding companies and innovators into our sandbox to enable them to start experimenting with building the future of investing, and learning how we can fine tune our offering and our product.

We have a very exciting and talented team working on this product. So far, more than 20 people have contributed into this project, many of them working in the evenings and the weekends. We are looking to keep expanding our team, we are also looking to do a raise so that we can bring them onboard at full time capacity. This will enable us to better support our customers and enable larger partnerships and bigger business.

What words of advice do you have for other founders?

It’s not easy at the moment but we are all in a similar situation, and I think that the hard times can make you better. My advice to companies right now is to stay patient, to focus on building value, and find ways to make it through these times, because it’s going to improve. I think it’s already starting to turn, and the patience pays.

If you manage to improve your offering and make good progress during this time, it’s a huge positive sign for clients and investors. It’s a huge validation for your company to achieve things while the market is bad, those will be the big winners when the market is good.