Stockholm-based Gilion (previously Ark Kapital), a growth and lending platform, announced on Thursday that it has appointed Oscar Werner as its new CEO, succeeding co-founder and CEO Oliver Hildebrandt.
The announcement comes as Oliver Hildebrandt transitions to a new role as operating Chairman of the Board.
“We’ve reached a stage where we need a master scaler. Oscar scaled Sinch to one of Europe’s most successful technology companies alongside other Swedish stars such as Klarna and Spotify, and is one of the most prominent tech CEOs from our region”, says Oliver Hildebrandt, co-founder and operating Chairman of the Board at Gilion.
“As a founder and serial entrepreneur, I can’t think of anyone more suited to take on the role of CEO and guide Gilion towards becoming a global leader in transforming funding and growth forecasting for both tech companies and its investors,” adds Hildebrandt.
In December 2023, the Swedish company rebranded itself to Gilion as part of its global expansion initiative.
Who is Oscar Werner?
Previously, Oscar Werner served as the CEO of Sinch, a Communication Platform as a Service.
During his tenure from 2018-2022, Sinch established itself as the category leader and scaled from $400M to $2.8B in revenue and over $300M in profit.
Today, the company services more than 150,000 businesses, including 8 out of the 10 largest US tech companies customers include Google, Uber, PayPal, and Visa.
“Simply put, credit decisions will move from being made on static and old data to lots of real-time data. And AI will complement the human ability to assess what is a solid business,” says Oscar Werner, newly appointed CEO at Gilion.
“This shift should logically happen, without question. Will Gilion be the winner? Well, after having presented lots of Gilion term sheets to startup CEOs, and looked at hundreds of companies on the Gilion platform – it is obvious that they’re onto something,” adds Werner.
Banks often struggle to fund even the most promising startups because they are usually unprofitable in the early stages of development.
Traditional metrics like balance sheet and P&L do not accurately reflect a startup’s underlying performance.
Here’s where Gilion comes in and addresses the problem.
Gilion: Growth & lending platform
Founded in 2021 by Oliver Hildebrandt, Axel Bruzelius, and Henrik Landgren, Gilion (formerly Ark Kapital) has built a platform that allows for real-time access and analysis of all key data a company has, allowing a new way to evaluate and identify fundamentally solid startups.
The company utilises its proprietary real-time analysis, Gilion Scores, and predictions as the engine to provide access to long-term, non-dilutive loans to growth-stage companies.
As the company has a better understanding of the underlying performance, it offers Growth Loans with up to 2 years of interest-only periods before amortisation starts, and up to 6 years to repay the loan.
In 2023, Gilion expanded its operations to include Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and Finland and raised its capital pool to €400M, which is available to European founders and tech companies.
Founders can also use the platform to gain better insight into and grow their business with frontier forecasts, insights, and benchmarks.
“Having worked in the Finance industry for a long time, it is obvious to me that Gilion is creating something that can complement the existing actors in the industry. Executed well, it can potentially be very large.”, says Annika Falkengren, banking veteran and Gilion board member.
“By using more data, updating it on a second-by-second basis, and complementing with AI – Gilion aims to improve credit decisions which I believe is the key to making debt mainstream for strong growth companies.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/oscar-werner-new-ceo-of-gilion/
