The Story of Entrio: Building the Future of Enterprise Tech Adoption

The path to founding a successful enterprise software company rarely follows a straight line. For Avi Cohen, it started in an unexpected place – the public sector. After serving in Israeli intelligence and studying in France, his initial career plans were focused on government work.

“When I graduated from the army, I actually was very fixated on going to the public sector,” Avi shares in a recent Category Visionaries episode. “A lot of my family come from the public sector and working in different places. So I was like, okay, I see this as a natural path.”

The entrepreneurial spark came while building bridges between financial institutions and technology companies. “I started to meet a lot of founders,” Avi recalls. “That was my first interaction with many tech founders from different places, anything from cybersecurity to data, AI, anything that you can imagine. And I was like, that’s kind of cool.”

This exposure led to a partnership with his co-founder Moises, but their initial vision wasn’t quite right. They started by trying to connect small, innovative companies with big corporates. However, through customer conversations, they discovered what Avi calls “the iceberg phenomena.”

“What we thought was the biggest problem above the water turned out to be a mistake,” he explains. “When we started to talk to a lot of financial institutions, we understood that the problem is not actually above the water, is underneath the water.”

The real challenge wasn’t helping banks find new technology – it was helping them better utilize what they already had. This insight led to Entrio’s current focus: creating a live solution catalog that helps financial institutions optimize and manage their tech stacks.

The pivot proved prescient. Today’s financial institutions are struggling with technology sprawl, as evidenced by one bank Avi encountered that had “20 different local no code solutions internally.” This complexity is exactly what Entrio helps manage.

Building for banks hasn’t been easy. “If you’re trying to be a fintech entrepreneur or enterprise software entrepreneur selling to banks, you have to think twice,” Avi warns, “because this is not an easy domain to be operating. It’s fun, it’s energizing, it’s definitely stimulating, but it’s tough.”

But the challenge has pushed them to innovate. When customers resisted adopting new interfaces, they created an API-first approach. When long sales cycles threatened growth, they built a data engine that could deliver value with minimal input from banks.

Looking ahead, Avi envisions Entrio becoming the standard platform for technology decisions in financial institutions. “I would love in a few years from now that Entrio becomes a standard technology and every financial institution in the world, every time they’re trying to make a decision about buying a technology or discarding a technology, or trying to think of how to make the business better and will be like a reference type of a platform.”

The goal is to create “this kind of a network between financial institutions, even if it’s anonymized, but anonymized network that really helps to make decisions based on real data.” It’s an ambitious vision, but one that addresses a growing need as financial institutions continue to grapple with increasingly complex technology landscapes.