Kostantin Stiskin
Podcast appearances as guest
Episode 20 - Kostantin Stiskin
In this episode, I sit down with Kostantin Stiskin, CEO and founder of Finom.
On the podcast
Kostantin has invested in fintech since 2011, when he was a VC analyst; his first deal was Zopa, and he later worked at Runa Capital.
From 2014 he started several ventures, including Genotek, one of Europe's larger genetics companies, where he later sold his stake to a Romanian pharmaceutical company.
He also founded an earned-wage-access company that is still running and profitable.
Finom was founded in 2019 with partners who had led Sberbank's SME division and launched Modulbank, a top-three digital SME bank in Russia.
Finom has four founders; one acts as operational CEO while Kostantin focuses on strategy, and they reshape roles roughly every year to year and a half.
Finom runs a matrix structure of functions and cross-functional domains and works on fewer things in parallel than peers, focusing on quality.
Finom's latest capital raise began in October 2023, term sheets were signed in November and the deal closed on 22 December.
Internal AI agents at Finom do the work of about 40 people, and it offers AI-driven accounting.
Compared with 2022, raising at the end of 2023 was easy; roughly half the VC market still lacks a clear thesis.
VC funds should have a real thesis or entrepreneurial plan rather than following the hype; undervalued niches, such as founders with Russian roots, offer an edge until others catch on.