If you have been following my "early adopters trilogy", you might recall I first introduced a simple test for determining when you are ready to start pitching your product to its first customers, the early adopters. And in its second installment, I discussed five important value catalysts you can obtain from these early adopters and how each can be critical to the success of your startup. Now, it…

ValueStream is excited to announce an expansion in our FinTech funding for companies in the ValueStream Development Lab, a startup accelerator purpose-built to service the needs of innovative technology and data providers to the Financial Services industry. With our newly expanded investment offering, ValueStream will now provide between $100,000 and $1.5 million in funding per portfolio company…

We look at a lot of startups that fall into the "social sentiment indicator" space-software products that track mentions on social media and newsfeeds and then use proprietary algorithms to ascertain what the public sentiment is about a stock, whether bullish or bearish. We're still trying to figure this space out. In our experience, professional investors consistently ask for tools to help them…

Our job at ValueStream is to dig deep to uncover new products that meaningfully challenge the status quo, but the average user of a new product doesn't have this level of motivation. Early-stage products are rarely as polished or functional as the incumbents they are attempting to supplant, so it's crucial for the differentiation to shine through. Or as I like to say_, the value proposition needs…

Professional investors are constantly in search of superior investment opportunities, and this of course requires access to superior information. And although we have seen an explosion of research and data in some areas, there's still a confluence of issues that limit access to information on companies in the emerging markets. The number of funds looking at emerging markets has exploded, from…

One of the things we find most interesting about Financial Services is the sheer number of "niche markets" that exist. However, when compared to other industries, the word niche seems misleading...after all these highly-specialized segments of Financial Services can represent trillions of dollars flowing between parties, billions of dollars in revenues, and unrevealed investment opportunities…

If you've ever run a small business (those things that provide 50% of all US jobs), you know that managing your cash flow correctly is critical to building a sustainable business. You manage your payables and receivables, negotiate terms to extend payments, and obsess over making sure your payroll clears every two weeks. Given how important cash flow is to small businesses, it's bewildering that…

To the friends of ValueStream Ventures, It's been over five years since we started this journey together. A lot has changed since 2013. For one, we have dropped “Labs” from our name as our firm has evolved from startup accelerator to venture capital firm. One thing that has not changed is our strategy of targeting FinTech, Enterprise Tech, and DataTech companies that solve substantial problems in…

The key to the future of consumer financial services is data...but not in the way most industry veterans think. Note this article originally appeared in Banking Perspective, published by The Clearing House New technology is allowing companies to capture more data about customers and their transactions than ever before. As an industry, we are starting to put that data to use in smarter products and…

As any successful lender will tell you, accurate data is key to underwriting—and the more of it you have, the better. But incorporating that data into an underwriting system can be operationally challenging at scale. While bank-sync (sharing personal information by providing bank login info) is gaining ground, the vast majority of underwriting data is still provided through paper documentation…