London-based Desia raises €2.9 million to transform the investment professional's work stack | EU-Startups

Desia, a system of intelligence and AI productivity for investment professionals, announced a €2.9 million pre-seed funding round led by Dig Ventures, with the participation of leading VCs including 2100 Ventures, Exor Ventures, and Octopus Ventures. The round was joined by a group of angel investors, including Niccolo Maisto, Founder of FaceIT, Mark Ransford, Senior Advisor at CVC, and Massimo della Ragione, former Partner at Goldman Sachs. The investment will fund the company’s development and growth, which ultimately aims to transform the financial investment industry.

Despite the wider financial industries making significant technological leaps in recent times, investment professionals are still required to manually sort through significant amounts of data and information. Doing so is both time-consuming and costly. The data is often without any structure and productivity is severely impacted as a result. 

Desia is being developed to revolutionize the investment professional’s work stack. Using AI, the system extracts knowledge and data about potential investments and puts it to work by analyzing the data in an automated way, saving investment professionals significant time and resources. 

The problem Desia intends to solve was experienced firsthand by co-founder and CEO Raffaele Terrone during his time in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, and in Private Equity at ICAMAP Investments. 

Raffaele Terrone, co-founder and CEO at Desia, said: “I recall regularly sifting through data and information until the early hours during my time at Goldman Sachs in order to make fully informed decisions and strategies. With Desia the whole process would have been more efficient and successful. I wish it was available back then.”

At the same time, co-founder and CPO Alessandro Amaro and CTO Mehmet Öner Yalçin were leading the development of AI products for the investment team at Advent International that was facing similar issues. 

The trio initially started working on Desia to help Raffaele streamline the analysis of his angel investments, following the success of his first company, BNPL unicorn Scalapay. However, they soon realized the commercial potential of what they were building and began to seek external funding to bolster the growth. Terrone continued: “This initial funding round is a major step towards developing the system for more structured and complex investment analyses”.

Ross Mason, Founding Partner at DIG Ventures, added: “Desia’s founding team, marked by their impeccable execution and deep market insight, is perfectly positioned to address an essential challenge within the financial industry. This reminds me vividly of the formative days at MuleSoft, where we similarly targeted a critical inefficiency in the market. Their innovative approach to automating data analysis leveraging AI promises substantial advancements in productivity for finance professionals.”

The team headcount is currently 11, of which 4 are from Advent International, with experience in building and launching successful products at the intersection of technology and finance.

Desia is Terrone’s first business venture since the runaway success of BNPL service Scalapay. In February of 2022, the company raised $497 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation in excess of $1 billion, becoming Italy’s first unicorn company.

In his latest venture, Terrone can now lay claim to the serial founder mantle, noting that after taking a brief respite from the intensities of startup life, his focus is now squarely on developing Desia, both the product and the team. Desia already has users live and making use of it. The team has its eyes set on the UK, the US and Continental Europe. Ultimately, Desia intends to transform the entire financial services landscape by harnessing the power of AI to extract and make the best possible use of data and information in an automated manner.

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