CASE

Danish Student Kickstarts Entrepreneurial Journey and Achieves Investments

CASE

Danish Student Kickstarts Entrepreneurial Journey and Achieves Investments

The number of business opportunities offered in the world’s tech hub Silicon Valley is hard to overlook - but cracking the code on how to best utilize them is another case. As part of our FinTech scholarship program, one of our Danish students found a way to make it through Silicon Valley with her AI-powered bookkeeping assistant, hard work, and drive. From dream to reality, Line Ettich shares her entrepreneurial journey.

The road to success in Silicon Valley

There are many roads to making it through Silicon Valley – And Line Ettich’s journey is one of many to inspire future entrepreneurs across the world. At the age of 12, Line visited San Francisco with her parents and as she passed by UC Berkeley on a road trip, she instantly knew that she wanted to study there one day. 13 years later, her dream came true with the FinTech scholarship program facilitated by Innovation Center Denmark in Silicon Valley, Spar Nord Fonden, and the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk (CDAR) at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). The experience at UC Berkeley combined with her entrepreneurial idea has fuelled her interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, and today, it has allowed her to continue her journey scaling through Silicon Valley.

From Student to full-time Entrepreneur

Line pursued a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Service Management with a focus on innovation at CBS, followed by a master’s degree in Management of Innovation and Business Development. The emphasis on innovation was particularly a driver for Line at the very early stage, as she mentions “Innovation courses always fascinated me because they require a lot of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. It seemed natural to nurture this curiosity with an innovation-focused master's degree.”

While the master’s program equipped Line with important academic insights, it lacked a practical approach to innovation and entrepreneurship. An essential gap, which the FinTech scholarship program, in collaboration with UC Berkeley, seeks to fill in. Connecting research and academic competencies with entrepreneurship and practicalities is critical to keep advancing and meeting the complexity and challenges of our modern high-tech society. Line reflects on this:

“My courses at CBS were mostly theoretical. At UC Berkeley, they threw us into the cold water. We went out and talked to customers, tested different hypotheses, and designed an entire pitch deck. We even presented it to real investors, which ultimately launched our current startup.”

As a FinTech scholar, the students are required to work on a FinTech idea alongside their studies, to provide them with hands-on experience in entrepreneurship. Combined with practical learnings from UC Berkeley, it lit the spark of creativity and action. Line’s original Fintech idea, which landed her the fellowship, focussed on solving the opaque educational system in the US. However, based on the learnings and knowledge she gained from the program, she ended up developing something even more special: Veriply.

Line Ettich

Line and her team incorporated Veriply last October and shortly after, they received a pre-seed investment from Plug and Play to help kickstart the entrepreneurial journey. They recently finished two incubation programs: the first of which was at Copenhagen FinTech, the go-to place for Nordic FinTech Innovators, and DTU Skylab, a university-led startup program. They are now working around the clock to release the first iteration of their product with beta testers, which will initially be available for QuickBooks Users around March.

WHY SILICON VALLEY?

It is no surprise that Silicon Valley is one of the world’s most well-connected ecosystems. Line’s case serves as an example of how knowledge, research, and innovation go hand in hand. Not only is it important to understand why Silicon Valley has long been such a successful technological node, but it is also key to understand that we need to invest in education to foster an environment, where entrepreneurship is nurtured in universities and across the whole ecosystem.

FINTECH SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

Since 2019, the FinTech Scholarship has been facilitated by Innovation Center Denmark in Silicon Valley, Spar Nord Fonden, and the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk (CDAR) at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). For the past three years, 20 fellows have had the opportunity to emerge themselves into one of the world’s most global ecosystems for innovation and technology to work on their own business idea.

Veriply

Together with her two co-founders, Daniel Tsentsiper and Gustav Hartz, the trio is solving an essential financial trade-off faced by SME’s worldwide – the cost of maintaining good internal controls and the hidden risk of errors and fraud. SMEs lack the capital and manpower to manually validate every bookkeeping entry, forcing them to rely on flawed and ineffective methods, such as statistical sampling and rule-based controls. These methods result in a high number of false positives and negatives, which amplifies the manual work burden while overlooking significant risks. It is estimated that SMEs experience a median loss of $150k each year and take around 14 months to uncover fraud - if ever. This shouldn’t happen, nor should it require SMEs to spend excessive money and time manually validating every transaction.

To address that issue, Veriply is developing an AI-powered bookkeeping assistant that helps SMEs quickly discover, investigate, and prevent errors and fraud in real-time. The software syncs directly to the accounting software, analyzing the data for a series of error and fraud indicators to calculate an aggregate risk score for each transaction. Combined with simple error explanations and instructions, it empowers users to prioritize urgent threats, prevent losses, and save time by performing targeted investigations.