When I originally started Keese, all I wanted to do was focus on building, selling, and growing our product and team.

As a startup of 6 people in 3 countries, with 2 bank accounts per international subsidiary (not including individual currency accounts within the bank), and with no CFO or VP Finance, I realized that I was spending too much time dealing with our financial situation.

And then this happened:

When we raised our initial funding from Techstars, we budgeted our Israeli cash flow at 1 USD=3.3 ILS but by November 2021, it was 1 USD=3 ILS (if you could even get that market rate from your bank..).

~10% of my Shekel budget was cut over a month, and I couldn't do anything about it.

That's when we realized that we needed to adapt what we were building, and solve a much bigger issue that companies face around the world. That's when we started building Keese.io.

We realized quickly that the difference between an Israeli startups that raised $10m in Nov 2020 vs Nov 2021 is 4 million shekel.

And to be honest, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Given the unprecedented inflation rate in the US right now and risks of hyperinflation all over the world (especially given the recent Russia and Ukraine situation), currency management is a trillion dollar issue for startups and global companies.

Combining this global currency uncertainty with the exponential growth of companies hiring abroad and with startups raising more money than ever before, more companies than ever are overly exposed to currency risks.

In other words: Any company that has international exposure and is not holding or hedging that currency is acting irresponsibly. And it’s surprisingly A LOT of companies.

It’s akin to driving without insurance. It’s all OK until it’s not OK.

We immediately started working with the amazing community we had built with our international consumer app, and we launched our Beta business platform.

Our Beta users have raised anywhere from 5-35 million dollars (or are bringing in millions in revenue), have payroll, expenses, or incomes in more than one currency; yet their finance teams are usually only 1–2 employees focused on company growth, not on optimizing their currency.

Arbitrarily sending last-minute international transfers ad-hoc is a recipe for disaster. Companies that do this are (1) tied to the daily exchange rate, (2) need to manually calculate how much to transfer, (3) wait 2-5 days for the transfer and conversion, and then (4) repeat this process every month or so.

We upgraded our bank integration technology, and are now aiming to solve this problem for the millions of companies that need to worry about their global currency exposure.

Moving forward, Keese will help CFOs and founders understand how much of each currency they need to hold, based on their global cashflow.

We not only have a beautiful dashboard for CFOs, but we automate the entire currency management process.

We do this in 3 ways:

1. Identify the risk: A real-time cash flow dashboard that analyses all of a company's incomes, expenses, and transactions across the world to allow the CFO/founder to visualize the company’s currency needs. This saves tens of hours of a CFO's week normally spent reviewing multiple bank account statements and transactions.
2. Eliminate the risk: We offer the ability for companies to ‘lock-in’ an exchange rate up to 1-year in the future.
3. Continuously manage the risk: We facilitate and process any internal movement of funds within a company between banks and currencies, locally and Internationally.

At the end of the day, we want to let you run your company without ever worrying about fluctuating exchange rates.

Be prepared. It’s responsible.

We’re still just getting started on this path, and would love to hear how we can help your company be better prepared for the future.

Thank you,

Daniel Rubin

CEO

Keese.io