🔦 Portfolio Spotlight: Anility
In each newsletter, we shine a light on one of our incredible, mentors, founders, or companies, and this time it's 10x alum Anility. We had a chat with Patrick Connolly, Founder and CEO. The 10x 2019 alum shared his startup journey, what the future looks like for Anility, and their latest exciting news. Read all about their journey below.
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In a time where insolvencies are on the rise and B2B risk management is mission critical, Anility, a 10x alum, is disrupting the age old financial viability industry that historically has been dominated by accounting and professional services firms by creating a best-in-class software as a service solution.
Anility is a relatively new player in the financial viability industry – but for CEO and Founder Patrick Connolly, his company is solving a problem that he’s been witnessing across the construction and fintech industry for 10 years.
Designed to disrupt, Patrick was keen to break through after seeing “zero innovation” in the sector.
In the simplest of terms?
“We're really taking what was once an old school, disjointed manual, very transactional process to an all-encompassing SAAS solution.”
So, what is financial viability? Patrick explained to us the niche that he found through his experience.
“It's the process of assessing a business's financial health. And generally, it's used as a form of due diligence as part of procurement functions. So before you go and engage with a third party, supplier, or subcontractor, or builder or anyone, you usually go to a financial viability service provider to create a report that looks at our business's financial statements, along with some other information and makes an assessment whether they are financially viable, and they have enough cash in the bank essentially, to deliver the works without running into trouble or ending up insolvent.”
“We are a new player in this space. We are a SaaS company that is really disrupting the way things have been done previously. We use some AI, we use some smarts to make things faster, to do it at a better price point to have better insights. And we wrap that around a SaaS product that essentially allows our customers to order assessments, track the status of them, and collaborate on them.”
Patrick first faced this problem in the construction industry, where he worked for 10 years previously in the procurement and contracts space. From there, it was a journey of specialising in supply chain risk management and financial viability. And like all good startup stories, Patrick found pain points that he wanted to find a solution to.
“They were not fit for purpose, they were slow. The reports were designed for accountants, when the actual people reading these reports were [involved in] procurement or projects; people in construction who don't understand complex accounting jargon. And then there were also challenges around once we get the report, what do we do with it? How do we action that?”
“I just saw the process was broken.”
“I made the decision that I think there's an opportunity there, so I jumped out of a construction career and tried to figure out how to build a business and that's sort of where we’ve been going on that path for five years now.”
“The product and the vision and the strategy has evolved considerably over the last five years. But I think that's just what good startups need to do - you need to adapt; you need to change, listen to customers."
Then, in 2019, Patrick joined the UNSW Founders 10x Accelerator Program.
"I hadn't been exposed to startup life, lean methodology, development processes, I’d never worked with software developers. So, it was fantastic for me just learning how to run a business."
Patrick shared with us his highlights of the UNSW Founders experience.
“So much learning, continuous support, the community is great. Getting plugged into the different UNSW stakeholders that may have experienced some of the challenges that I had before as well to get their opinions and feedback. So, still to this day, I leverage the Founders community,
The leaps and bounds have continued for Anility, with their most recent announcement that they are now recognised as a registered ASIC Information Broker. This move means that the company can provide even deeper detail than they already do by pulling live ASIC data into their reports.
"That's a very rigid, lengthy process [and] only a handful of companies in Australia are on [the list].”
“After 12 months of integrating and completing the process, we got our formal approval the other week which is really exciting. It just means that our reports […] also provide information around the businesses and the people behind those businesses, directors and the like.”
“It's just another feather in the cap, which just adds to the service that we deliver out to the market and helps businesses, again, perform better and stronger due diligence on their suppliers.”
Anility is only looking to grow, and Patrick is keen to see what the future brings. On the success of his startup, he left us with one key message:
“It just comes down to perseverance. Just keep rocking up even on the days you don't want to.”
To find out more about Anility, visit https://www.anility.io/
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