Blog

Image credit: WE.VESTR

Being an entrepreneur has its perks – making your own decisions, flexibility for maintaining a work-life balance and above all, personal satisfaction for driving change. However, all that glitters is not gold. Entrepreneurship is not without its challenges as massive amounts of paperwork and time spent managing milestones, investors and funding, and a multitude of other things can take its toll. Heavy lies the crown. 

In comes Amsterdam-based WE.VESTR, a platform for equity management dedicated to save founders’ time and money and help them invest in growing their startups. The company announced the launch of its platform today, with the vision to make entrepreneurship easy in practice as well. 

🏆 Meet the 20 EIT Digital finalists!

Get to know the amazing finalists here

Get to know the amazing finalists here Show Less

The platform that puts founders and investors in control

WE.VESTR is an initiative launched by Floris van Hoogenhuyze, former CEO of Barqo, and Maarten Graven, past founder of Flamyngo, CityShare, and First Check, in 2020. The platform is backed by Amsterdam-based investor Venturerock, which was founded by Marc Wesselink.

With a team of 12 employees, the company wants to help founders spend less time on paperwork around capitalisation tables and focus more on their business instead.

The platform aims to make it easier for founders and investors to manage information on share distributions, legal documents, and KPIs. In addition, it also enables companies to implement new compensation schemes without involving a notary. By doing so, WE.VESTR wants to make it easier to issue shares to reward people for their investments in time, finance, and intellectual property.

Floris van Hoogenhuyze, who was previously CEO of Barqo (a private boat rentals startup) explains, “At Barqo, I was constantly faced with the challenge of growing the business while also managing shareholders and trying to attract new investors. All the paperwork and back-and-forth that I had to deal with wound up costing me around 70% of my time during the first three years. Maarten Graven recognised how inefficient this can be. That’s why we teamed up to develop WE.VESTR, so that founders can focus more of their time on their core business.”

What is ‘Startup Co-op’?

Besides tackling the complexity of shareholder management, WE.VESTR has also developed  ‘Startup Co-op’, a digital register to make the shareholder management of startups more flexible. The company believes that this model allows aligning the entire supply chain of a startup from the very start and can contribute to the cap table and equity management of a startup.

According to Van Hoogenhuyze, “this makes it easier and more transparent to reward an employee or stakeholder with shares. Thanks to this register, founders don’t need to visit a notary nor do they have to worry about compliance. By making it easier to reward employees with shares, startups also become more attractive as employers.”

Fintech Files Powered by AWS

In the new section Fintech Files, in collaboration with AWS, we are keeping tabs (pun intended) on the thriving fintech industry in the Benelux. Want to learn more about the benefits of the cloud, or talk to one of their experts? Visit AWS Startup Loft to register for the latest events, get free 1:1 support from AWS experts and discover more resources. Build and scale your (fintech) startup with $1,000 in AWS Activate credits, free tools, technical support and training to quickly get started with AWS.