From Finance to Fintech: The Story Behind a Mission to Transform Mid-Market Operations

From Finance to Fintech: The Story Behind a Mission to Transform Mid-Market Operations

Sometimes the most ambitious companies are born in the most challenging moments. In April 2020, as the world grappled with unprecedented uncertainty, Julio Martinez made a decision that seemed to defy logic: he would launch a new company. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared the journey that led to this pivotal moment.

The Roots of Innovation

Julio’s story doesn’t begin in Silicon Valley, but in India. Back in 2006, inspired by Muhammad Yunus’s Nobel Prize for microfinance work, he took a sabbatical to work with microfinance institutions in Maharashtra. “I was collaborating with two microfinance institutions in the west area of Maharashtra. So based on Mumbai and traveling around the place, that of course gave me the great opportunity to also dive into a new culture and learn many more things,” Julio recalls.

This early exposure to financial innovation would later shape his approach to building technology. After returning to traditional finance, he eventually found himself driving innovation at Banco Sabadell, where he ran “inno cells” – a venture builder and investment fund. “We launched four fintech products to market and many others that didn’t work. And we also conducted venture capital investments across the UK, Israel, other places in Europe, and actually the US as well,” he explains.

The COVID Launch

When COVID hit in early 2020, the timing couldn’t have seemed worse for launching a company. “If you remember back then, now we know it’s with the benefit of hindsight, we know everything finished relatively okay. But back in the day, the world was melting,” Julio recalls. “I remember VC’s running headless trying to help for portfolio companies. I remember nobody was fundraising fighting.”

But Julio and his co-founder saw something others didn’t. Through extensive customer research – over 100 interviews with finance leaders – they had identified a critical problem: finance teams were drowning in manual work. “We see finance teams and revenue operations teams spending a lot of time, actually 60, 70, 80% in some cases of their time, in manual tasks, cleaning data and scrambling through data and fighting with spreadsheets,” he explains.

Building for the Mid-Market

While the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) category wasn’t new – “exists in hyperion in the eighties,” as Julio notes – the mid-market represented an underserved opportunity. Their approach wasn’t to create a new category, but to reshape an existing one by “providing enterprise grade flexibility and functionality with some adaptations and peculiarities for the mid market.”

The strategy paid off. The company achieved “more than ten times year growth” in its early days, later settling into “more the three times year growth” as they scaled. This success came from a deep understanding of their market’s needs and a focus on delivering clear ROI rather than just excitement about new technology.

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Julio sees an opportunity that extends far beyond traditional financial planning. “We are becoming the operational planning system for companies in the mid market,” he explains. This evolution means working not just with finance teams, but also “revenue operations teams, business operations teams, HR teams as well.”

The goal is to become the central nervous system for mid-market companies’ operational planning. As Julio describes it, they’re tackling the data problem that sits at the heart of modern business operations: “These companies in the mid market are sophisticated. Usually they have a good tech stack in terms of ERP, CRM, data warehouse, bi solution, has, the hiring solution as well, ATS, there is a lot of data with increasing volumes of data scattered in many places across the company.”

For Julio and his team, this complexity represents not just a challenge, but an opportunity to fundamentally transform how mid-market companies operate. By automating away the manual tasks that bog down finance and operations teams, they’re enabling these professionals to focus on what really matters: driving strategic value and better decision-making across their organizations.