The following interview is a conversation we had with Avi Cohen, CEO & Co-Founder of Entrio, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11 Million Raised to Build the Responsible Tech Adoption Category
Avi Cohen
Avi, how are you doing today? I’m doing great. How are you?
Brett
I’m doing great, and I’m super excited for this interview and looking forward to this conversation. So I see you spent three years in Israeli intelligence. So whenever I have Israeli founders on, I always like to ask, what was that like? And more importantly, what did you learn from that experience?
Avi Cohen
I’ve learned a lot. I think I’m much older today, so you have to forgive me for trying to bring back the memory, but I think that was one of the best formatting years as a young person. You’re being drafted at the age of 18, which is young, but it’s also a great opportunity to equip yourself with so many tools. And I think that was a lot of also my exposure to technology. That was really kind of awesome to see all the greatest cutting edge stuff that were happening in that scene. Ultimately, that was something that I think profoundly impacted me as I was kind of thinking about, what do I want to do with the knowledge that I’ve acquired, the exposure that I had to apply it into the business world. So that was really great.
Avi Cohen
I think also, in a way, very maturing because you get a lot of responsibility under your shoulders as a young person. And it’s not startup that you can fail, right. And then build another one the next day. It’s something very meaningful. You’re serving your country, and I’m very proud of it.
Brett
When you were younger, did you always have the idea that you were going to become a founder someday, or where did that entrepreneurial spirit and drive come from?
Avi Cohen
Actually, not at all. I mean, when I graduated from the army, I actually was very fixated on going to the public sector. A lot of my family come from the public sector and working in different places. So I was like, okay, I see this as a natural path. After graduating from the army, but then I had a chance when I kind of went back to Israel after my grad school. So I went to grad school in France, and I also worked at the OACD. And I did a lot of things that tried to combine innovation and technology together with the public sector and public initiatives, just simply trying to make the world a better place. I also had some initiatives previously working in emerging countries and in Africa, and also there I tried to combine technology as well.
Avi Cohen
But when I went back after grad school, I had a chance to try to build bridges between financial institutions and technology companies in Israel, and going kind of into more of the uk market, trying to see what are the opportunities for uk corporates, especially from banking and insurance, but also retail. And then I started to meet a lot of founders. That was my first interaction with many tech founders from different places, anything from cybersecurity to data, AI, anything that you can imagine. And I was like, that’s kind of cool. You get to build something, you get to be a founder, you get to lead something that is generally yours. And I thought that was kind of the coolest people I’d met. I felt like there’s so much energy being with founders and seeing them crafting something with their own ends.
Avi Cohen
And I just ended up saying, okay, I’m going to quit my job and going to become a founder. And kind of met my co-founder, Moises. And from there it was like, you know the rest of this story?
Brett
Well, let’s dive right into the rest of the story. So take us back to it looks like January 2021 is when the company was founded. What were those early conversations like with your co-founder? And what was it about this business that made you guys say, yep, that’s it, let’s go build?
Avi Cohen
So we actually started earlier than this. Moises and myself, my co-founder, we met when he was working back then at Accenture, when we both did a lot of it, consulting projects, and we worked with corporates and with startups. And the majority of what we did at the time was trying to think of how to connect small, innovative companies with big corporates. And when we started off, we actually thought that the biggest problem that financial institutions were facing was getting exposure to external innovation, to external technologies, because everyone was saying the fintech wave is coming and how bank are going to deal with that. And we thought, okay, let’s try to build a platform that creates exposure to any bank in the world to get access to different technologies. But I call it the iceberg phenomena.
Avi Cohen
What we thought was the biggest problem above the water turned out to be a mistake. And when we started to talk to a lot of financial institutions, we understood that the problem is not actually above the water, is underneath the water. And what’s going on in the internal stack of the organization is the biggest challenge today for many financial institutions, to some extent, to basically any big enterprise today that has significant investment in tech and has accumulated over the last few decades, a significant amount of technology vendors and other type of technologies that have basically made their inventory much more complex than they intended to. So we actually understood that if we shift the focus and not necessarily look at what they can bring in as a new technology, but how can they better utilize the technologies that they already have?
Avi Cohen
That’s a much easier player, or I would say that’s a much compelling story for a startup, that it’s actually able to simplify and make the life of the enterprise. Day to day employees that are trying to make better sense of the technologies that they have and utilize this for any task that they need to do. So we kind of change this perspective. We decided to go and kind of help the organizations become more efficient and be more conscious about the technologies that they have. And that’s kind of how we created the idea that we want to tackle first what’s in versus before we go to offer them any technology out there in the world.
Brett
How long did it take for you to get your first paying customer when you had the platform ready to go?
Avi Cohen
So, you know, in the banking industry, especially with financial services, but particularly, I think with banks and insurance companies, the average sales cycle is something like 24 months from the first meeting to the moment you sign a contract. So it’s a very lengthy sales cycle. And we thought about, so we knew this, obviously, because were consultants and we knew that it takes time to sell banks. I always say to anyone, like, if you’re trying to be a fintech entrepreneur or enterprise software entrepreneur selling to banks, you have to think twice, because this is not an easy domain to be operating. It’s fun, it’s energizing, it’s definitely stimulating, but it’s tough, and people need to know this in advance. But the sales cycle is long.
Avi Cohen
So if you can find ways to shorten that sales cycle, that was the initial thoughts that we put into place, was, how can we make the life of our customers much easier to adopt the platform? And then ultimately what we did was, and I’m slightly diving into the product, but we created a situation where as a data company, we own the data and we created this data lake that encompasses every technology solution in the world, regardless if the bank has it or not. And that meant that the only thing that we actually needed from the bank is minimal access to any type of data that they have. That can give us a good sense of what type of vendors and technologies they’re using.
Avi Cohen
And once they given that information to us, then were able to build basically an environment that completely replicates the entire technology stack of the bank. And that actually shortened a lot of the process because we didn’t need much to get going. And the speed of adoption was very quick. It’s an immediate ROI because they can see, in a matter of days, they can see their environment that represent their entire vendor stack. And it means that the entire process of selling to the bank becomes a lot shorter. Now, it doesn’t mean that you sell in weeks, and it doesn’t mean that it takes you a quarter, but it can take anywhere between six months to twelve months to close the bank. And that’s definitely better than the industry standards, but we still have a way to go.
Avi Cohen
And I think also the question also differs between big banks and what I call global banks, to regional banks, to community banks. So there’s a different sales process with each category. What we’re seeing today is that it’s definitely moving much faster with the community banks and the regional banks, just because of their size. And what I call the elephant hunting with the big financial institution is actually, it’s taken a little bit more, but it’s actually doing a little bit better.
Brett
And let’s zoom out maybe just a little bit. I hate to use this word, but what’s the elevator pitch for the platform?
Avi Cohen
So, the elevator pitch is very simple. I mean, we offer a live solution catalog that helps financial institutions to optimize and manage and add to their tech stacks responsibly. So if you want to think about it in a comparative way, we’re kind of where Kupa meets service now. So we’re kind of bridging two worlds that control the access to the technologies of the organization. On one hand is the application repositories like ServiceNow and others, and on the other side, it’s the it sourcing and procurement system. That kind of guy controls what comes in and what kind of the business is asking for in order to approve it and process it. The platform was created.
Avi Cohen
That live solution catalog was created because we identify an inherited problem that exists in many of the organizations where there’s a disconnect between all of those systems, from procurement to it. It’s a very fragmented ecosystem that can include five to seven different tools that don’t necessarily communicate, and the data discrepancies among them is very significant. So what we wanted to create is sort of like a common denominator platform that can give access to solution based data and can streamline this data across every system inside the organization and make the life of every user really easy to understand what exactly we have in every category.
Avi Cohen
A simple example could be, if I’m a bank employee and I want to understand what does my bank use in order to do KYC, or how do we do loan origination, or actually how do we do ETL, and what type of technology we run to do AML correspondent banking. So for every question, there’s a very quick answer, represented by Entrio, because we know how to look at any solution from a feature and functionality level all the way up to the vendor entity that provides that solution. And that granularity, which is backed by a very robust taxonomy, which is one of our tech assets that we build into the platform, represents a very intuitive and easy way for anyone to consume data and to make conscious decisions about the technology that they’re using in the organization.
Brett
Who are you selling this tech to? Who’s that? Like, main buyer? Is it the CTO, it director? Who is it?
Avi Cohen
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we sit under the CIO division, but primarily our Persona is the head of enterprise architecture. And you think about them as the people that look at the organization and trying to simplify it, because the more simplicity means, the better that the organization can run. And going back kind of to the category perspective, we are all about tech adoption, and we’re trying to help the enterprise architects, to some extent, the entire tech organization, to make better use of the technologies that they own and make sure that they’re using as much as software as possible to make them more efficient and run faster. And if you remember, we talked about the sales cycle.
Avi Cohen
So if you look at it also from the sales cycle perspective, an organization can run much faster if they’re utilizing existing software versus if they’re trying to onboard new one, right? Like there’s always economy of scale and nimbleness if you’re using existing software, versus if you’re trying to bring something new, unless there’s no choice and you have to bring something new. We can also help with that, but we want to make sure that the organization is really maximizing under investment in tech. And that’s exactly how we’re trying to help those Personas, by making those smart decisions obviously, we look at different components like spend, like functionality, like usage, any type of information, even potential risks and compliance issues that can arise from different solutions.
Avi Cohen
But we keep a 360 degree overview of every solution and simply transitioning insights into actions so those Personas can really make good decisions about the technologies that the organization is buying.
Brett
What’s the go to market motion look like then for reaching those enterprise architects?
Avi Cohen
So our go to market is very much sales led. Like I mentioned before, we started with global banks as our customers. One of them that I can mention here in this podcast is BNY Mellon. He’s also one of our investors. But you can think similar organization of that size that are using our platform. And I always say that as a startup founder, these were good problems to have because we started with some of the biggest banks in the world as our customers. But at the same time, one of the key things that we looked at from a go to market perspective was if we can tackle the top 100 banks in the world, thats great. How do we move forward from there?
Avi Cohen
What weve been investing a lot of time in the last couple of months is actually how can we take the brand that we build, the new language, the branding, the new category around tech adoption and responsible tech adoption and so forth, and try to bring it into downstream potential customers, tier two, tier three, tier four, financial institutions, and try to adapt the value proposition and the language that can fit some of their needs. And that’s kind of the strategy that we’re applying right now, not just in banking, but also insurance, and try to see what are the type of the use case that can make sense not only for the big bands, but also for the small.
Avi Cohen
And we’re actually seeing a lot of alignment in a way, from a go to market perspective, because the same problems or similar problems that exist with the big financial institutions to some extent also exist in the smaller ones. Everyone is looking for the best way to govern their solutions, to get visibility, transparency. They want to make sure that they know what they own and what they’re using and what the relationship that they have with their vendors and their solutions. It’s pretty much similar approaches. It’s just the way that you tailor the use cases that make sense for the people that we sit in front. So a lot of Google banks care about cost saving and cost efficiencies and how can we make the bank more efficient, whereas the smaller banks have smaller it budgets.
Avi Cohen
But they do care about making sure that they’re in control of what they have.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Front Lines IO slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. What about the marketing philosophy? If we talk about marketing philosophy or marketing approach, what does that look like?
Avi Cohen
I think we’re very customer centric. I have to say. Like from day one that we started building the product, we’ve used our design partners, the banks and our initial customers as kind of our champions because we wanted to solve their headaches. Like, we didn’t want to be presumptuous to say, we’re building something just for the sake of thinking that we have the best of the most amazing product, but being very much detached from the industry for the market. And what we’re doing right now is we’re pretty much creating content that entertains them and educates them and making sure that whatever we do is just to help them make their job more effectively and how they can use our platform to advance their day to day tasks, but actually to also advance their careers.
Avi Cohen
We want to see entry or becoming a tool that is an inseparate tool from every other day tools that they’re using inside the organization. And my dream come true will be that someone says in the organization, have you checked out solution? And someone will say, well, just go to entry, or you can see all the information about that solution there. And if you want to use it, let me know. We can start an onboarding process or a permit to buy type of a process that can help you use that tool much faster. So we want to become part of the day to day activity, part of the business language that they’re using. And when the management thinks about responsible tech adoption, not just pouring endless budgets into it and to technology, but actually thinking sensibly, how can we use technology better?
Avi Cohen
They look at Entrio as the go tool for that. And I think our whole marketing philosophy right now is all about educating our customers better, making sure that they understand what we’re trying to do, but also getting a lot of the feedback from them because we want to make sure that we’re steering this in the right direction.
Brett
What’s the most important feedback you’ve gotten from a customer or a prospect that led you to make change in the product?
Avi Cohen
That’s a really good question. I think that theres a couple of them and we had to iterate really fast. I think one of the key ones that actually relates to an interesting feedback that we received for one of the customers is that I think organizations does a bit of inflation and overwhelming amount of solutions that theyre facing today. This is part of our business. Youre talking about thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of applications. Fill out the application running inside the organization, alongside open source, alongside in house development. So there’s so many tools that they need to deal with. And what we had to, in the beginning, we only had a web application that was the only way to work with entry o. And at some .1 of our customers said, guys, why don’t you launch an API?
Avi Cohen
And we actually said what would it give you that the web isn’t giving you? And the feedback was really interesting. They said that the organization is so accustomed already to a certain UI and Ux that they would rather have all of the beautiful things that we can provide, all the data quality, the data maintenance and the data enrichment that we can provide. But it doesn’t have to come through our own UI. It can come through an API and it can plug into their system. And actually their point was, let your data make our system more intelligent, but don’t try to force your UX and UI on us because we have people that have already made their life very much accustomed to the bank systems.
Avi Cohen
And I think that was really a really strong feedback because that actually helped us to create a parallel product, the API. When we go into an organization and we say, hey, we know we’re a startup, we know that you invested a ton of money already in deploying either internal system or the likes of service now and other, that’s okay, we can coexist. It’s not a choice of us or them. If you want to keep your current UIs and UX from whatever system you’re using, let entry or make your system just more intelligent and let us feed our data into this. And I think that was one of the best feedback that we received from a customer.
Brett
What about market category? How do you think about your market category?
Avi Cohen
So we actually created a new category and it was a challenge that were facing this intersection of maybe we should try to fit ourselves into an existing category, just go forward with something that we believe is kind of a blue ocean category. And went forward with a category that we called tech adoption and we refer to it as responsible tech adoption, especially in the last year climate where the financial markets were at, and there was a lot of talks about becoming more efficient and reducing budget. So we wanted to be kind of adding a slight angle around being more responsibly with how you treat tech.
Avi Cohen
But the category is tech adoption, and we’re kind of trying to bring more awareness to the category and kind of sell our target and to make sure that our targets have context already in the market of what we do and how we can kind of be more clear on the definition. But responsible tech adoption means that to some extent, in the last couple of decades, you’ve seen a lot of financial institutions kind of operating in a type of what we call like a wild west, buying any software out there, sometimes unnecessarily, but buying any type of technology, any type of software that they think that can be valuable for the organization, and kind of creating this internal spaghetti, if you’d like, of the internal stack where there’s so much unnecessary technology.
Avi Cohen
Today we met with one particular bank where one of the managers told us that they already have 20 different local no code solutions internally. And that was a staggering number, because the reaction was that this is a fairly new technology domain, right? You’re not talking about something that was invented like 20 years ago. You’re talking about a specific domain that is relatively new and they’re losing control. Even with a fairly new technology domain, they’re losing control on how they’re managing so many multiple tools around it. So when we talk about tech adoption, one hand is you already have a lot of technology. So let us help you adopt this technology in a much more sensible, responsible way.
Avi Cohen
And if you need new technology, if you need to stay ahead of the curve, and you want to make sure that you’re using the most cutting edge and progressive technology, then we can also help you identify what’s out there and how you can bring new technologies into the organization. But I think that a lot of organizations will learn over the next couple of years that technology adoption is one of the key pillars in promoting business success. And if you look at any enterprise today, any financial company, anyone that wants to be a leading enterprise, technology is a significant component in how you drive business success.
Avi Cohen
And that’s why we think that tech adoption is an inseparable part for any manager, any leadership, any board, any organization that wants to put the technology at the forefront in order to make sure that they’re maintaining their market share and continue to grow.
Brett
What was that decision like? Or those discussions like internally, as you were deciding to create a category or to play in an existing category.
Avi Cohen
So, you know, like a lot of the debate that we had at the beginning is that we saw that sometimes were being automatically referenced to some existing tools, and there’s the whole area around SaaS management and SaaS licensing, SaaS optimization and all of that. And were like, okay, that’s fine. But if you look at enterprise and primarily financial institutions, SaaS represents a very small portion of their technology stack. So at least 75 or 80% of their technology stack is still either on prem or is being delivered in a different way. That is not SaaS. So SaaS is a very small part of it.
Avi Cohen
So even if you have a SaaS optimization tool, it’s not something that’s going to help a financial institution that has such a large diversity of products, including very specific core banking products and other peripheral products that are supporting the bank. So we didn’t feel comfortable trying to align ourselves. And also, that wasn’t the product. The product is a data engine that really tried to, at the very minimum, tries to help the organization make sense of what they have before we apply any application layer that helps them to optimize and manage their technology stack. So we wanted to be in a position where we’re creating something that brings a new perspective in how organizations are looking at technology management or technology governance that wasn’t created before and that wasn’t so niche that wouldn’t apply to the customer segment that we’re working with.
Avi Cohen
And we’re tackling big enterprises, and they haven’t seen a solution like this in the market, especially when we started to kind of confront more and more with big financial institutions and other enterprises. And even now, today, when we go to smaller financial institutions still, I mean, many of the challenges that we see with them is that they just can’t apply or can consume any of the existing type of other parallel solutions that I mentioned before, just because they don’t necessarily see how this can be applying to a very intensively regulated environment such as financial institutions. And that’s kind of where I think we decided to make that decision of sticking into a new category and see how we can kind of better educate people around it.
Brett
As I mentioned, the intro there, you’ve raised over 11 million to date, or about 11 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Avi Cohen
It’s a painful process, but the moment that you nail it’s almost like you’re opening the doors to basically having a very successful fundraise the moment you land the first term sheet, it’s a very long process until you get there. Because I think when we started this, it was pretty much still a rough time post the bubble of 2021, and there was a lot of skepticism in the markets and investors were really being more cautious about the decisions they were making. And we wanted to reach a phase where we had enough traction and feedback from customers that we can really go out to investors and say, we’re not making this thing up. This is really tangible proof that banks are experiencing this problem. So the moment we got our term sheet, that was from communities capital.
Avi Cohen
The moment that we got this, it was amazing how so many opportunities came in our way. We got to build this amazing ecosystem of investors around us, including VC’s, like vintage investment partners from Israel and like Fin Capital from the US. Sell adventures Ali co own partners, but also corporate investors like BNW and american family. And I dont think we would be in this position unless we reached that very specific milestone and timing in the fundraising where we felt that this was mature enough to bring a significant amount of investors and the diverse ecosystem of investors into the company.
Brett
Final question for you. Lets zoom out three to five years into the future. Whats the big picture vision look like here?
Avi Cohen
I think it goes back into what I said before, but I would love in a few years from now that Entrio becomes a standard technology and every financial institution in the world, every time they’re trying to make a decision about buying a technology or discarding a technology, or trying to think of how to make the business better and will be like a reference type of a platform, where all decisions around technology are made through the insights and the volume of the data that theyre seeing at Entrio.
Avi Cohen
I mean, part of our goal is to create this kind of a network between financial institutions, even if its anonymized, but anonymized network that really helps to make decisions based on real data and not just what they hear from consulting companies or from anyone, you know, from year to mouse or anything like this, but actually based on real data and based on what the industry is consuming and perceiving as the best technologies. And we hope to be in that place where we standardize entry or is just one of the key tools that any organization takes into consideration every time they’re making technology decisions.
Brett
Amazing. We love the vision. All right, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in, they want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go?
Avi Cohen
I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. I’ve always connected with anyone on LinkedIn and always like to respond to anyone. So definitely look me up at LinkedIn and happy to connect.
Brett
Amazing. Avi, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Avi Cohen
Thanks, Brett. Really appreciate it.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Front Lines IO podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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