The hottest start-ups to look out for from the INSEAD MBA 2020 Class!
By: Mona Tiesler
Tags: Remote Working, Investment, Startup, Coffee, Fintech

I am in the process of completing my MBA at INSEAD and have come across incredible individuals along the way. I was hoping that I would be able to say this before I started but was sceptical at first.

Coming from a consulting and entrepreneurial background myself, I was curious to meet others from similar backgrounds, as well as those with completely different experiences. Luckily, I had the opportunity to get to know and learn from some truly impressive fellow students.

What we will all do after our MBA is varied and, for some, uncertain. I have embarked on the journey of becoming a venture capitalist and venture builder, looking for new, exciting opportunities in the early stages. Many others have embarked on the brave, high risk, high reward path of entrepreneurship, and the “must know” start-ups in my opinion, are the ones I want to introduce to you in this blog.

Out of Office Spaces: OoO Spaces is a membership platform that enables you and your remote workforce to tap into the most suitable hotel spaces for you to work from, be productive and collaborate with others. The spaces are carefully selected to meet the needs of remote workers focusing on internet connection and ergonomic work set-up and offer additional well-being benefits, such as use of spa facilities or laundry services in the hotels. In September 2020, this start-up launched in London and is now working with over twelve well-known hotel partners such as Marriott, Hilton or The Standard. OoO Spaces is currently serving TECH executives, scale-ups and sales teams across the city. Services include solo-working rooms to meeting rooms or co-working spaces. As many companies are moving out of traditional office spaces completely, OoO Spaces is the perfect solution for the remote work force to deeply focus while working in a solo-room or meeting clients or investors in a professional environment. In addition, this on-demand solution significantly saves company costs compared to traditional office real estate.

COVID-19 has shown the benefits of remote working, allowing companies to be able to access talent across the globe without expensive relocation packages — as Mark Zuckerberg shared in his inspiring speech earlier this year. However, working from home does not work for everyone all the time due to the many distractions at home. Beyond COVID, teams — especially sales and recruiting teams — will continue to need to tap into various meeting and work spaces across cities in the long term. OoO spaces existing customers appreciate the flexibility in time and locations across London as well as the variety of spaces offered. Riding the wave of the enthusiasm of remote work, OoO Spaces launched at the right time, in the right place and managed to secure pre-seed funding by winning the INSEAD’s COVID venture competition. Anna Miklas, the CEO and Founder of this venture, shares OoO Spaces’ vision to repurpose underutilized spaces across metropolitan areas from restaurants to art studios, from pop-up stores to kitchens: “Hotels are our current entry point, but we want to come to an empty space near you soon — so you can work from anywhere.” To find out more, check out OoO Spaces yourself! Capchase: Capchase is a founder-friendly financing solution for SaaS that makes it fast and easy to secure capital for growth. Capchase pays you the annual value of your subscriptions today, so you can invest in your growing business. It offers SaaS companies a non-dilutive financing option that provides quick access to working capital. This means that SaaS companies can get the future value of their cash flows today, and instantly recover customer acquisition costs, sales commissions, and operating costs, all while extending the runway. SaaS companies can avoid the burden of incentivizing customers to pay upfront with heavily discounted contracts, while still collecting the fully-priced ACV from Capchase. This allows customers the flexibility of paying on a monthly basis, and you the benefit of upfront working capital. Capchase has raised $4.6m seed funding from the investors that put the first $$ ito companies like Lyft, Palantir, Dropbox, Airtable, Brex, Opendoor, etc. and has entered a phase of explosive growth. Capchase operates in the US mainly but is expanding to Europe. Luis Basagoiti describes Capchase as: “financing on auto-pilot for SaaS companies. Building a company from scratch is a feat in itself, so founders should focus on product development and distribution and leave the rest to Capchase.” I am very excited to see what fantastic achievements Capchase will have to show for — watch this space for updates on their journey! kafi: kafi is a bit different than what you may expect from blogs like this one. kafi is an entirely new way to experience coffee: in a bar. It is a Swiss coffee-based snack that wakes you up and gives you the energy you need as a young, busy professional. Essentially, kafi is coffee you can eat. Unlike chocolate, this coffee snack only contains roasted coffee beans, no cocoa beans. With only three organic ingredients, kafi has maximum taste with fewer calories than chocolate. Also, each kafi bar contains as much caffeine as a cup of coffee to give you a long-lasting energy boost without compromising on a great test. kafi has launched in Switzerland but is also available all over the EU through its website eatkafi.ch. Florian Keller and Jonathan Roth say about kafi: “kafi is the perfect office or home office snack to help you overcome your afternoon slump or get you through never-ending Zoom meetings. Our vision is to create the Nespresso of edible coffee: A large variety of Swiss quality kafi bars from different origins and intensities. For that we are currently exploring partnerships with leading Swiss chocolate manufacturers and coffee roasters.” kafi was developed in cooperation with ZHAW, the leading Swiss university in food sciences, and has received a Swiss government grant to research this innovation further. Also — it tastes delicious! Try for yourself and order today on eatkafi.ch!

If you want to know more about the start-ups or the founders, get in contact. There will be a second edition of this blog introducing three further upcoming start-ups from our INSEAD 20D cohort — stay tuned!