Kozminski Techblog

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Crowdfunding is a great way of raising capital by start-ups that happily choose such kind of financing rather than traditional methods like taking credit, applying for VC or going public. It gives a great opportunity for small businesses not only to collect money but also to receive priceless feedback from potential customers. Nevertheless, crowdfunding has many drawbacks, both for beneficiaries and investors. That’s way, a former VC consultant, Piotr Pisarz came up with an idea of revolutionizing the ways of financing promising businesses, in every stage of their activity.

According to the co-founder of Uncapped, the VC funds typically invest only in few start-ups a year that after a time-consuming process of screening and analysis are expected to succeed and finally become a unicorn. Meanwhile, many other, innovative and creative ideas are being rejected and lose an opportunity to work out their way to success. To help them, the revolutionized concept of funding has been created by Polish and British entrepreneurs.

However, Uncapped is not exactly a fund. They describe themselves more as creditors, who already experienced the rigour of bank and VC funding systems.

The entrepreneurs were able to create a revenue prediction system that allows to automatically make an offer in only 24 hours. The only actions that an applicant has to undertake are signing up on the fund website and connecting its sales & marketing accounts (with the usage of platforms like Stripe, Shopify and Facebook). All this takes approx. few minutes – there has never been an easier way to raise capital for company development before.

Since their evaluation system is based on a set of tailored algorithms, the only requirements the company has to meet are at least 6 months of trading, over 10£ monthly revenue and an online model such as e-commerce, SaaS or D2C.

Another advantage that Uncapped has over VC is the flexible repayment program, which makes the borrower repay a fixed percentage of daily sales until the total amount including definitive flat fee is recouped. There is no repayment date and in case the revenue drops, so do the repayments.

The custom algorithms made impossible come true. Uncapped can provide capital to hundreds of companies annually thanks to a well-established system of the automatic forecast of one’s revenue. Offered funding ranges from £10k – £2M, based on companies needs and repayment capabilities. That’s the first European revolutionary fund with great forecasts for further expansion.

Sources:

https://www.weareuncapped.com/

https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/uncapped-czyli-nieograniczony-rozwoj/3875

https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/02/uncapped/

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In the era of wide access to the Internet and modern technologies, things tend to change at the pace we have never experienced before. In ancient times our ancestors mainly acquired things with the use of cashless models of transactions – barter. Then people began to trade for salt, mussels, and gems. The first coins are said to be used around two hundred years B.C., and since then we use them to acquire goods. Some of us may also remember cheques that currently are not that widely used by society anymore.

The first mobile transactions were made through text messages, which system, by the way, is widely used in African countries nowadays. Popular payment cards accompany us since the mid-1980s, and probably we could not imagine modern consumption without having one in a wallet, on our mobiles or other electronic devices. Moreover, every couple of years we are offered new ways of card payments using (Polish) BLIK or text messages. The market changes at high speed, offering new innovative solutions to make things even easier and safer. One such solution was born in Wrocław.

PayEye, because that’s how the start-up is called, was an idea of few businessmen from Southern Poland. Thanks to their technology, the customer no longer needs a card, mobile or any code at all. The only thing required to make a transaction is you, and more specifically, your EYE! PayEye has developed an iris biometric system that assigns a unique code to each customer. According to the PayEye CEO Krystian Kulczycki, the iris was the best choice for human identification purposes out of all biometric methods, since it is highly effective and safe. There are no health nor thief concerns regarding the featured method of recognition.

To use PayEye there are few steps to be completed. First, you need to register online using your ID and then create your own personal pattern at one of the PayEye Partners or at home.

The PayEye system is already available in almost 100 locations in Wrocław and its environs. You can use the iris to pay in restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels, gas stations and more.

PayEye is officially accepted way of cashless payment. The start-up uses self-developed POS terminals as well as an authorial set of algorithms that process the image into a unique payeye code. Polish businessmen claim to be the world pioneers in developing and releasing the payment system based on biometric technology. For sure that’s something we can be proud of. The question, however, is whether this could possibly replace current systems domestically and finally internationally.

Sources:

https://payeye.com/

https://spidersweb.pl/bizblog/payeye-polski-startup-platnosci/

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202012/biometric-payment-tools-deployed-by-paybyface-wee-digital-payeye-and-fujitsu

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Probably everyone was said the importance of education and how knowledge can help us to succeed. Besides good schooling, there are plenty of other factors that influence our future working life. A late study has revealed a commonly ignored factor – the place, where you grow up. Doubtlessly, an average European child has better chances of upward mobility (the ability to rise to a higher level of income) than one living in Africa. But the research tackles the inequalities across the country rather than continents. The study has been conducted in the US and focused solely on different cities and districts within them.

The idea of creating an evaluation of opportunities for advancement based on the place of residence was a result of Raj Chetty’s curiosity. He is a Harvard University Professor of Economics and an economist.

We all have heard about privacy concerns associated with Big Data. Chetty’s study, however, has drastically changed the way people perceive such data and presents a great example of its practical implementation within society. “The availability of these types of data [Big Data] can really revolutionize our understanding of key social problems and lead us to better policies that can improve everyone’s welfare.”; “The power of these large data sets is that you can essentially find experiments when you have adequate data if you’re creative.”, Chetty says. Thanks to his work, various policy initiatives could have been undertaken to fight with inequality.

The graphic, being a result of the study, presents rates of upward mobility across the country. Simply saying it tracks US citizens born from 1980-82, and their income. In order to create the following diagram, millions of data have been used. It consists of income records of 20 million children and their parents across the US. The data was made accessible by the US Internal Revenue Service, which has provided tax data without information identifying private entities.

According to research, children who moved to areas characterised by lower-poverty achieved on average 31 per cent more earnings than those who didn’t. Moreover, those children had more chances of attending a college and live in better neighbourhoods.

In the below link you may find access to the website with precisely analysed data.

https://www.opportunityatlas.org/

Sources:

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/09/harvard-economist-raj-chetty-profile-people.htm

https://opportunityinsights.org/course/

https://www.businessinsider.com/income-inequality-upward-mobility-map-us-2018-2?IR=T