My Big Idea: AI funding platform Gilion

‍Hi Henrik! What’s your elevator pitch?

Gilion is a full‑stack AI funding and investment platform that lets VCs, banks, and PE firms make better investment decisions. We plug into a company’s real-time financials so that investors can assess their creditworthiness, based on over a billion live operational data points. Much of this data is traditionally overlooked in due diligence, so we’re expanding the intelligence that is at an investor's fingertips. As a result, risk appetite is reassessed as the picture of the business becomes clearer.

‍Why does the market need it?

Everyone talks about why Europe needs more innovators that scale, but the truth is that most European growth-stage companies are completely overlooked by the market. Europe has underfunded its scaleups by $375bn over the past decade, and relies overwhelmingly on foreign capital: 70% of venture scale-up funding in Europe originates from non-European sources.

Venture capital is extremely well-serviced in the early stages in Europe, but as companies scale, the funding environment is much harder, except for a small number of businesses with sky-high valuations.  VCs are busy chasing outsized returns, while banks require years of profitable history that fast-moving tech businesses can’t reach by definition. 

That leaves a huge number of steady, well-run companies with no growth funding option. We built Gilion to close this gap, offering non-dilutive growth loans to founders we saw potential in, and intelligence to institutions who, with more data, will see that potential too.

‍What made you think there was money in this?

The start of my journey with data was under Daniel Ek at Spotify, at a time when nobody was using user metrics to their full potential yet. Developing a comprehensive data strategy was a big factor in us scaling from a Swedish startup to the default music streaming service.

When I moved into investing, the lack of focus on data was glaring. It became clear to me that investors had all these metrics that they didn’t know what to do with, and information remained underutilised or even undiscovered entirely. I saw huge investments made based on a good gut feeling, and a complete lack of representative financial information.

More recently, as AI tools came in, many were designed to be bolted onto old due diligence processes. What our competitors don’t understand is the fact that tools are only as good as the data feeding them – we wanted to make the data itself better. 

‍What’s your biggest strength?

Our unabashed focus on data. Our product allows investors to make decisions based on real-time data, comparing incoming pipeline to prior successes, failures, and real-world investment behaviour. It updates end-to-end with every new deal and serves as a data layer that covers all customers connected to the system. The result is a complete, up-to-date 360° view of every company, team member, and the firm’s own investment philosophy — stored independently of any LLM.

This helps companies access real, accurate risk for the first time. That difference lets us predict a company’s revenue twelve months out with more accuracy than any traditional lender, and back companies investors haven’t been able to justify.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Making sure the product you’re shipping is worth everybody’s time and delivers what it promises. We tested our model on our own money for four years before we rolled it out to other investors.

The temptation in this industry is to scale fast and sort the proof points later. We took a different route. Our mission was to convince the industry that has traditionally run on half-opaque information that a different kind of input exists, and it is accessible to them.

How do you market the company?

Always start with the problem and not your product. Founders and investors don’t want to hear about another AI solution – they want to learn more about the issues they face every day. Ultimately, we built the data layer of Gilion to help solve problems we encountered in our own investment purposes. If it made us better investors, it makes us confident the platform can do the same for others. 

Many of the team are founders, builders, developers at their core; we know how difficult it is to build a company and want to make that process easier. We understand founders’ frustration about their well-performing businesses being turned down by investors, but also investors’ nervousness about writing big cheques when they don’t have the information to be certain. As someone who has sat on both sides of the cap table, I find I have a lot of common ground with our customers.