ValueStream Labs Has A Plan To Accelerate The Fintech Industry

ValueStream Labs, a company dedicated to accelerating the adoption of new technologies in the fintech space, is on a mission. The company recently announced that it has expanded its fintech funding, providing between $100,000 and $1.5 million in funding per portfolio company.

This is significantly larger than any other accelerator in the space, but that's only part of the story. The other part involves the success that ValueStream Labs has already achieved.

One of its first companies, Estimize (a startup that crowdsources estimates from more than 4,500 hedge funds, brokerages and independent analysts), is quickly becoming a go-to source on Wall Street. The company took home two awards at the 2015 Benzinga Fintech Awards Gala and recently announced that it has raised another $3 million to change the way earnings are crowdsourced. ChartIQ, another winner at the Benzinga Fintech Awards, was also accelerated with the help of ValueStream Labs.

"We first invest like an accelerator where there's terms for the company that includes the initial (up to $100K) investment with all the support and access that we provide around customer development, product strategy, recruiting, PR," Greg Neufeld, founding partner at ValueStream Labs, told Benzinga."[We provide] access to a large ecosystem of evangelists, beta testers, developers, decision makers."

Neufeld said this is "really what you need to prove out your business model after you've built some form of product."

"That's where we really like to get started, is where there's a tangible product we can get in customer's hands, either in beta or post-launch," he added. "And then once we feel comfortable with the trajectory the company is going on, there's likely to be some interest in funding, not just around us but from the community."

Related Link: Why Raising Millions Of Dollars Is Not A 'Stamp Of Credibility' For Startups

Engaging With The Community

Neufeld also said that ValueStream Labs likes to "engage with the venture community."

"We're in financial services, where high-net worth and large asset managers and strategics of all sorts have some kind of dedicated capital or balance sheet capital they can invest into fintech startups and we want to participate in that next round as well," he said. "So we invest first like an accelerator, and then like an early stage capital business."

Looking ahead, ValueStream Labs is working with ClearFactr (a startup that rebuilt spreadsheets to make them more useful for financial analysis) and Sensai (a Concept Intelligence Platform) to bring more innovation to the industry.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.