Australian FinTech company profile #182 – Upworth
1. Company Name: Upworth
2. Website: www.upworth.com.au
3. Key Staff & Titles:
Alexandre Chavotier – Co-Founder & CEO
Maxime Chaury – Co-Founder & COO/CCO
Carlos Rios – Co-Founder & CTO
4. Location(s): Sydney, Australia
5. In one sentence, what does your fintech do?: Upworth unlocks your richest life by getting your money right.
6. How / why did you start your fintech company?: We were stunned by the lack of transparency and competition in the personal finance space in Australia. We identified a lot of conflict of interest, and few solutions to actually support Australians to grow their wealth at a reasonable cost.
7. What is the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?:
– We raised A$1 million in 2023 for our pre-seed (ie pre-product)
– We are the 1st company in Australia to launch a free and independent Savings Account Scanner to compare your savings accounts with the entire market easily
– We are IABCA excellence in innovation finalists
– Many users trust us with the privacy and security of their financial data, and chose us to support them in their property financing strategy as their mortgage brokers
8. What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?:
– It is not about the idea but the execution. Having good ideas is easy. Executing them is hard. There is no substitute for hard work. Yours.
– Don’t overthink, overplan or overbuild. Iterate and test fast, and keep getting better at it.
– 95% of people will think you will never make it. Be humble enough to learn from their insights. Be crazy enough to show them wrong.
– You can’t bring major disruption by pleasing everyone. Be fine with this: you will have passionate advocates and passionate antagonists. For long, most people will be neither though (the apathetic majority).
– If you are disrupting, it means one of your main tasks will be educating the market about the new value you provide.
9. What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focused on Australia?
– Our initial focus is definitely Australia. We will be releasing an in-depth budgeting/expense categorization tool to help Aussies understand their spending better (across all bank accounts/apps)
– We do believe in the power of AI to facilitate the personal finance conversation: this will be available on Upworth as well
– Our medium/long term ambition is definitely global: becoming the one stop shop/personal financial passport for the world.
10. What other fintechs or companies do you admire?:
– Revolut and Wise for their focus on building maximum value, simplicity and transparency to their users (unlike most of the financial industry)
11. What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?:
– Interesting: we are learning so much from our users. The feedback they provide really helps us decide on the next features we develop and we can’t be grateful enough for this.
– Funny: when we realised ‘Upworth’ (literally) was the name of a crewmember of a spacecraft in a horror movie who got killed by a dangerous alien creature while in the shower (according to dead meat wiki)
