The Story of Sciencey: Building the AI-Powered Future of Banking Infrastructure
Sometimes the best startups come from seeing the same problem twice. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sciencey founder Ankit Ratan shared how his first enterprise software startup taught him a crucial lesson: “enterprises are these inefficient beasts.”
After graduating from IIT India, Ankit spent two years working with financial services giants like MetLife and Citi. This experience shaped his understanding of enterprise inefficiencies, leading him to launch his first startup, Crosslink, focused on enterprise data analytics.
While Crosslink was financially successful, Ankit found himself at a crossroads in 2015. “It was going well in the sense it was financially a good company. It was solving problem, having customers, but it was turning out to be a services business. And to be frank, I was too young to do a services business. I didn’t have my heart in it.”
The Pivot That Changed Everything
Sometimes inspiration comes from unexpected places. While contemplating Crosslink’s future, Ankit was taking a Coursera course on entrepreneurship. As part of a case study, he created a concept called Sciencey. “Somehow I kept building greater and greater conviction on that,” he recalled.
The idea resonated strongly enough that he brought on two co-founders: Arpit, a lawyer, and their CTO who dropped out of college to join. By 2016, they had their founding team working full-time on transforming how banks handle digital customer journeys.
Finding the Right Problem to Solve
Banking is undergoing what Ankit describes as a “once in a lifetime change.” The challenge isn’t just internal digitization – it’s also about distributing banking products through new channels. “Banks now have to distribute their products not only through their branches, but through partners such as Google or some ecosystem player where their customers want credit cards,” Ankit explained.
The old model of branch-led, relationship manager-driven banking is struggling to adapt. Banks need to automate processes while maintaining compliance and security. This is where Sciencey found its sweet spot.
Rapid Growth Through Technical Innovation
Instead of requiring banks to spend millions on expensive vendor software and months integrating different providers, Sciencey built a single stack combining fintech APIs and workflow tools. This approach has driven remarkable growth – they now process “15 to 20 million journeys a month” on their platform, with a current ARR of $15 million and 100% year-over-year growth.
The company operates across three key geographies: the US, MENA (Middle East), and India. Their expansion strategy has been opportunistic rather than rigidly planned. As Ankit noted, “unlike, I think, b2c, in b2b, I always like to say that everything is not some cool strategy. Sometimes you’ll get this large deal with some large bank and you’ll end up in that region.”
The Future: Creating a New Category
Looking ahead, Sciencey isn’t just aiming to be another banking software provider. They’re working to establish an entirely new category: AI-led customer journeys for banking. As Ankit explained, “We believe this is a category in itself. And Sciencey is planning to be a category leader in AI led customer journeys for banking.”
Their vision extends beyond just handling transactions. “What truly is not scaling is this myriad of human manual operations and every bank is creating their own journeys for account opening, for loan origination, for address changes,” Ankit noted. By standardizing and automating these processes through AI, Sciencey aims to help banks compete effectively in an increasingly digital world.
As banking continues its digital transformation, Sciencey is positioning itself to be at the forefront of this change, helping banks who “cannot spend millions of dollars on IT technology become competitive to their fintech peers, even to their large banking peers, by using Sciencey as their core customer journey platform.”