Soldo is helping businesses across Europe spend smarter and we caught up with the founder and CEO, Carlo Gualandri, to find out how the business started, what the product is and what is in store for Soldo in the future…
Why was the business started?
In Europe every single company spends money. Therefore there are a number of existing processes to do with spending company money, many of which are inefficient. However most companies do not think of them as inefficient because they do not know there is a better way. What we are doing at Soldo is radically changing the way companies deal with these processes. We are building the architecture to enable companies to optimise all the processes that deal with money.
How did you begin building the product?
There are 2 two ways in which you can address a problem. The first, is by doing the minimum and then getting validation. The second, is building the foundations before building the application which sits on top. We actually did this, we built Soldo from the bottom up. From day one we had 15 engineers. We did not want to be building our product on someone else’s technology.
Can you tell us more about the product?
With Soldo, finance teams can empower employees to buy what they need to do their jobs, while addressing the limitations of corporate cards, employee reimbursements, petty cash and more. Soldo automates the whole expense management process, and allows finance teams to achieve greater control of the bottom line with real-time visibility over company-wide spend. Soldo allows business owners to focus on growing their business and not waste time on managing expenses.
What are your plans for growth?
As soon as you can guarantee your company’s survival through a crisis, you must start looking for ways that you can prosper in the post-crisis moment because one thing is not going to change: you still have to grow. Otherwise you won’t raise the next round and you’ll have just delayed your demise, not averted it. For us, COVID-19 is bringing in a huge transformation in companies’ digitalisation and mindset. Inertia had always been a limiting factor there, and fortunately the crisis is alleviating this. And again, this is opening up many more opportunities where we can work to understand and make the most of our new future.
