Interview With Dmitry Volkov, Serial Entrepreneur and Investor

Dmitry Volkov is a serial entrepreneur and investor, and the founder of Social Discovery Group, the world’s third-largest social discovery company with over 180 million users. He is also the Founding Partner of SDVentures, which has invested over $500 million in more than 20 venture projects, including Khosla Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Volkov is an early investor in OpenAI, Revolut and Patreon. He holds two PhDs and is the author of two books.

How Can Startups Make Use Of Regulation To Grow?

Regulation is usually framed as a burden, as it involves more cost, more scrutiny and ultimately, more delays. But for the most strategic startups, regulation is an opportunity. When a young company treats compliance as a strategic moat rather than a cost centre, it can move into markets that slower, legacy competitors avoid.

We saw this in UK fintech. Regulation usually slows down innovation, but UK FinTech managed to turn it into a competitive advantage. It’s no coincidence that Andreessen Horowitz calls the UK a “FinTech regulatory superpower”: here, strict rules were transformed into a catalyst for competition.

Strict rules became a competitive advantage rather than a limiting factor. Andreessen Horowitz described the UK as a “FinTech regulatory superpower” for a reason: startups learned to digitise compliance from day one. Revolut secured an EU banking license in just two years and then expanded across the continent long before traditional banks could catch up.

While incumbent banks moved cautiously, FinTech newcomers sprinted ahead. Revolut secured an EU banking license in just two years and expanded across Europe faster than many legacy institutions could react.

Digital banks “digitilized” compliance from day one, allowing them to pass regulatory checks where traditional banks faced failures. Their readiness to adopt PSD2 and Open Banking early paid off — customers gained access to modern services long before conservative banks could catch up.

The same dynamic applies today with AI regulation, GDPR-style privacy requirements, and the upcoming AI act. Large incumbents often delay entry into highly regulated categories because their legacy infrastructure cannot adapt quickly. Startups, however, can architect compliance directly into their technology stack. That creates a window where they can win market share, build trust, and establish the standards that others later follow.

This mindset is a cornerstone of the AI-first banking model my team is building. When compliance is engineered into the infrastructure, instead of added later, regulation becomes an accelerant, not an obstacle.

What Do Investors Look For When Scoping Digital Projects?

In most cases, the investors don’t just invest in the product itself but in the system that can deliver it.

Investors rarely evaluate a product in isolation. They evaluate the system capable of delivering and scaling that product. They want to see founders who deeply understand the problem they are solving, why it matters now, and how technology will enable disproportionate impact. They look for early signs of customer demand, evidence of disciplined execution, and a clear path to sustainable economics.

Strong teams stand out not only for their vision but for their ability to adapt quickly and operate within regulatory frameworks, something especially important in fintech and AI. Today’s investors increasingly expect startups to demonstrate how AI is woven into the core business model, not added as a feature. This is one reason Molit.ai resonates, as it is designed as a complete operating system powered by AI, not a traditional bank with AI layered on top.

What Does Digital Growth Mean To You And What Defines It?

In general, digital growth doesn’t just mean to acquire more users but to create more value per user with lower marginal cost.

Digital growth is not simply the expansion of the user base, it is the ability to create increasing value for each customer while reducing marginal cost. This requires a repeatable acquisition engine, strong retention, and operations that become more efficient as the company scales.

True digital growth emerges when customer data, automated systems, and intelligent decision-making reinforce one another. AI plays a central role in this evolution because it transforms linear processes into adaptive, real-time systems. In our case, digital growth means designing a banking platform where AI elevates every interaction, from onboarding to financial planning, so the system becomes smarter, more personalised, and more valuable with every user.

Is Europe Stifling Growth And The Emergence Of Its Own Openai With Too Much Regulation?

Europe faces genuine structural challenges, such as heavy pre-market compliance, fragmented national regulations, and significantly less available capital compared to the US. These factors slow down the path to scale far more than regulation alone. But Europe is not incapable of producing breakthrough AI companies. The region already leads in payments infrastructure, privacy engineering, and responsible AI frameworks.

What Europe needs is greater harmonisation. This would accelerate faster investment processes, and it needs to be supported by regulatory structures that allow startups to reach scale without navigating dozens of different legal environments. If these conditions improve, Europe could absolutely produce AI-first platforms, including in finance, that operate at a global scale.

How Important Is Marketing, Digital And Otherwise, To The Growth Of A Digital Business?

Digital banks have achieved significantly higher customer satisfaction compared to traditional institutions. In the UK, for example, Monzo maintains an NPS of around +70 versus the market average of ~30, that’s a massive gap.

This loyalty directly converts into organic growth: according to Nubank’s IPO filing, 80–90% of new users join through referrals from friends or family, without paid marketing. As a result, Nubank’s CAC sits at just about $5 per user. In contrast, major legacy retail banks typically face acquisition costs in the tens or even hundreds of dollars. Nubank creates a strong viral loop where satisfied customers bring in the next wave through referrals, reviews, and word of mouth, allowing sharply reducing advertising spend.

Marketing is central to digital success because it drives awareness, trust, and ultimately, usage. Digital businesses grow by attracting attention efficiently, converting it into engagement, and translating that engagement into long-term value.

Fintech provides a clear example of how powerful this can be. Monzo’s exceptionally high customer satisfaction in the UK translates directly into organic growth, while Nubank famously built a user base in which up to ninety percent of new customers come through referrals, according to their IPO filings.

Their low customer acquisition cost; about $5 per user is the result of consistently delivering an experience that people want to share. For an AI-first bank, this dynamic becomes even more powerful. When the product actively improves customers’ financial lives in real time, marketing becomes less about persuasion and more about amplifying genuine value.

What Is The Biggest Thing That Startups Miss Out On When Seeking Investment?

Many founders talk enthusiastically about features, yet struggle to articulate the underlying business model. Investors want clarity on who will pay, why they will pay, how the company will scale, and what drives unit economics.

Startups frequently underestimate the importance of behavioural understanding, which involves fully comprehending how customers make decisions and how they respond to pricing, as well as other factors such as engagement. Without these insights, even strong products can fail to monetise effectively.

AI-first systems can help by allowing companies to analyse behaviour in real time and learn quickly, but only if founders are prepared to incorporate those insights into strategy.

How Do Regulations And Ethics Work Together To Better Things For Startups?

Ethics often evolve faster than formal regulation, especially in emerging fields like AI and fintech. Regulation tends to crystallise those ethical expectations over time.

For startups, this relationship is not a burden but a form of long-term risk management. Building ethical discipline early reduces future regulatory exposure and helps maintain customer trust even as the company scales. In AI-first businesses, this is particularly important, because the underlying systems influence every customer interaction.

This is why we designed everything from the ground up to align with both regulatory requirements and ethical standards. For us, this is not an afterthought, but an essential part of the product’s architecture.

Digital Payments In Europe Are Faster Than In The USA. Why Is More Not Made Of This?

Europe’s payment infrastructure is among the most advanced in the world, with SEPA Instant, PSD2 and Open Banking laying the foundation for fast and secure transactions.

However, these achievements are spread across many markets and rarely communicated as a unified European success story. Regulators tend to prioritise safety and stability over global narrative-building, whereas US companies such as Stripe and PayPal excel at telling a cohesive story about American fintech innovation.

This disparity in storytelling, not capability, is why Europe’s leadership in payments often goes unnoticed. Yet this strength positions Europe well for the next stage of innovation, especially as AI-first financial products begin to emerge.

What Do The Next Few Years Have In Store For You?

If digital banks made banking on a smartphone as easy as using a social network, the next stage is making money work for us automatically. Imagine a financial assistant that functions like Google Maps: you set point B (saving for a home, optimizing loans), and AI charts the route, steering your finances in real time and adapting to “market traffic.”

McKinsey forecasts that the rise of such “agentic AI” could significantly erode the profitability of traditional banks. Up to $170 billion in global banking revenues is at risk  because AI will eliminate the very “customer inertia” that banks have historically monetized.

My goal is to build products that address the next generation of financial challenges by using AI not as an add-on, but as the operating foundation. If the last decade was defined by mobile banking, the next will be defined by autonomous finance.

This means systems that act like Google Maps for money. Customers will set goals, and AI will chart the most efficient route, adjusting in real time to market conditions. Analysts at McKinsey estimate that up to $170 billion in global banking revenue is at risk as AI removes the inertia that traditional banks rely on. We see this disruption as a historic opportunity.

This vision underpins Molit.ai, an AI-first banking platform in which every element, as mentioned, from onboarding to compliance to financial advice, is operated entirely by AI. Traditional banks retrofit automation into old systems, while we start from zero with AI as the core logic. Customers can open accounts, receive cards, manage finances, send international payments, and receive day-to-day financial advice without human friction.

Our goal is to transform banking into a lifestyle service where the interface becomes a conversational layer powered by large language models to make it simple, intuitive, and, especially, deeply personalised. It is the first attempt to redesign a bank around AI as the central operating principle rather than a peripheral feature.