[TNW STARTUP RALLY] Meet kompany: the online background check for companies

As we get ready for TNW Conference, and the Startup Rally, the Rude Baguette sat down to talk with kompany, one of the startups who will be competing this week. kompany was founded in February 2012 by Russell E. Perry, Bernhard Hoetzl, Peter Bainbridge-Clayton and Iris Pittl to provide easy and instant access to international  business background information for SMEs and business professionals around the globe. With established partnerships with over 20 data providers, kompany allows users to search and purchase reports on individuals, organizing publicly available data from governments as well as other data sources. I sat down with kompany’s CEO, Russell E. Perry to talk about how kompany plans to ‘wow’ the Startup Rally judges this week:

Elevator Pitch: What is kompany in one sentence?

kompany empowers professionals with easy access to International Business Background Information.

 What’s the problem you are the #1 solution for?

Every entrepreneur understands the concept of pressure all too well. Every day they take decisions that have an impact on their team, their investors and the future of the business they built. Many of these decisions are based on facts while some are based on instinct. 90% of small and medium-sized enterprises do not verify business partners. They do not access verified information beforehand. What happens when the data and thus the decision are in fact wrong? How would you explain a business deal that has gone awry to your team, your board or your family? How do you tell them that you have been duped by a business partner who never existed or did not deserve the credit line you granted them? kompany allows to verify your business partners before getting tricked, before signing a contract or even before meeting them in person.

Who are the incumbents in this space? Why are you better than them?

There are a few local companies that are trying to cover their national markets. However, we are the only provider who has a global approach since the very beginning. We are convinced that we are global by design, because kompany was intended to cover international markets since the very first draft of our business plan. Following our mission, our products are cross-jurisdiction, cross-country and cross-language. Every time we open a new country, we introduce tailored-made products for that specific market and make them available in the local language. We can provide, for instance, a German register report in English. We also target a completely new segment for this type of service as we are addressing prosumers. Large credit agencies so far have always addressed large corporations.

What will you be showing off at TNW? What’s gonna blow the judges away?

We do not want to let the cat out of the bag until we get on stage, of course. However, it is safe to say that our focus will be on three things: the past, the present and the future. What we have achieved so far – 14 months of building and growing kompany. Today, we are a team of 15 international professionals from 8 countries, speaking 10 languages. If you want to be global, you need to think global from the very first moment you set the foundation of your business. We will be also talking about the present. We currently cover more than 21 million companies in over 20 countries. We want to guarantee the consistency of the documents you can purchase as they are retrieved directly from government databases. Finally, we will provide visitors with a sneak peek of our future. How we want to visualize over 100 million companies in 120 countries and made these sets of data available to the developer community.

What have you done in the past 3 months? What do you plan for the next 6 months?

The past three months have been extremely intense and we have been able to hit three important milestones: enforcing the team, uniforming our pricing and giving broad access to verified information. Also not to forget, we spent quite some time working on the next big thing, which we will be announcing on-stage at TNW. The next six months will be vibrant for sure. We have an exciting series of milestones lined up, expanding our markets to new challenging countries and we are going to offer new products including some cool stuff that has not been seen on traditional markets yet. Our vision is to turn big business data into verified information and make it available to everyone.