MoneyFriend.co, a startup that uses a chatbot to help millennials manage their personal budget, is the winner of the competition NewFinance FinTech Open Mic Night – Dragons’ Den Edition. The contest was held at Campus Warsaw on 15th December during one of the monthly meetings dedicated to fintech startups. It was the first Dragons’ Den in Poland that concerned only the fintech area.
Three judges, called the “dragons”, decided which of the seven pitching startups deserved a victory in this contest. The first judge was Andrzej Żurawski, who is the Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Faktorama, as well as the Investment Director and Partner at BonusCard Fund. David Putts, the second judge, is an Angel Investor in Global Tech Businesses and a Chairman at Billon. The third member of jury, Marcin Kurek, is a co-founder and Partner at Protos Venture Capital.
Łukasz Czerwiński, the CTO and co-founder of MoneyFriend, gave the winning pitch about his company. It is a chatbot integrated with the Facebook Messenger that gives the user easy-to-understand tips on his personal budget. For example, the algorithms of MoneyFriend allow for analysis of the user’s bank account and suggest the maximum daily expenses. The team also plans to implement additional features, as for example recommendations of the best available savings account or notifications about incoming transfers.
Czerwiński himself is a programmer with profound experience in software engineering. He has recently returned from the Silicon Valley, where he got involved in the startup community and organized meetings for Poles in California who are interested in tech startups.
The title of the Best Newcomer went to Monika Kania, who presented the startup Xchanger.io. It is a platform that compares exchange rates at various brokers for both regular currency exchanges and international money transfers. (We wrote more about them here.)
MoneyFriend received multiple awards sponsored by BeesFund (a crowdfunding platform) and dLK Legal (a law firm targeting financial and tech-oriented companies). Xchanger.io, the Best Newcomer, received an award of 3 mentoring sessions on the business model of the company from Marcin Kolczyński of Fluent.
The next meeting of NewFinance dedicated to chatbots and A.I. will take place at Campus Warsaw on 2nd February. Łukasz Czerwiński, the winner of Dragons’ Den, will be one of three speakers during this event. You can find more information about it here.
