These Founders Are Fixing a $1.7 Trillion Trade Finance Gap

Viacheslav "Slava" Oganezov grew up in Russia. Alex Fenechiu grew up in Romania.

Both watched something similar happen around them growing up: healthy, functioning family businesses shutting down not because they failed, but because they couldn't access working capital.

When they later moved to the UK to study, meeting at business school in London, they noticed the opposite problem.

In developed markets, funds sat idle in bank accounts earning negligible returns, while businesses in emerging markets couldn't get credit at any price.

That contrast became Finverity, a London-based supply chain finance platform the pair founded in 2017.

The company has raised $5 million in an oversubscribed equity round, bringing its total funding to $15 million, on the back of 15x revenue growth in a single year.

The Specific Gap They're Trying to Close

Finverity's stated mission is bridging what the founders describe as a $1.7 trillion global trade finance gap, later cited elsewhere as $3.5 trillion depending on the measurement methodology used.

Either figure represents the same underlying problem: the difference between the working capital businesses actually need and what's available to them.

The founders have pointed to a specific market failure behind that gap. Payers who enable trade often aren't getting good financial services, sellers aren't getting easy-to-use tools, and funders don't have enough reliable information to confidently deploy capital into these markets.

That's a more structural framing than most fintech pitches. Finverity isn't just building a faster loan product.

It's trying to fix an information and infrastructure problem that's kept capital from flowing to where it's actually needed.

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What Finverity Actually Built

The platform operates a dual offering.

A funding platform brings together corporates seeking working capital with institutional funders looking to deploy capital into mid-market trade finance assets, essentially a marketplace connecting the two sides of the gap directly.

Co-founder and COO Fenechiu has described a specific technical achievement worth noting:

Finverity built a system that allows financial institutions to launch new working capital products in four weeks, compared to the roughly 12 months such launches traditionally required.

The company also built accounts payable automation that integrates directly with a business's existing ERP or accounting system, letting suppliers get paid automatically as soon as invoices mature, along with dynamic discounting tools that let companies use spare cash to pay suppliers early in exchange for a discount.

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Real Traction, Real Geography

Finverity's growth numbers are genuinely strong for a company in a category that isn't chasing consumer hype cycles.

Revenue grew 15 times over in a single year across the Middle East and Africa, with the company also expanding into Eastern Europe during the same period.

That growth reflects real macro tailwinds in the regions Finverity targets.

GCC countries were projected to see GDP growth more than double at the time of this raise, driven partly by commodity price surges, while demand for supply chain finance in African markets like Kenya has continued rising as well.

Finverity has also formed a partnership with the National Bank of Fujairah to grow supply chain and receivables finance specifically in the MENA region, a meaningful validation from an established financial institution rather than just fintech-to-fintech partnerships.

The Funding and Who's Behind It

The $5 million round was backed by first-time Finverity investors Outward, Acrobator Ventures, and s16vc founders fund, with returning support from B&Y Venture Partners and a group of high-net-worth individuals.

Outward VC investment manager Andi Kazeroonian pointed to a specific structural reason this opportunity exists.

While technology has powered exponential growth in supply chain finance across developed economies over the past decade, many of the world's most important emerging economies have been left behind, still relying on paper-based processes due to prohibitively high setup costs and complex integration requirements.

The capital is going toward growing Finverity's team from 40 to 60 employees, and opening new offices in Dubai, Poland, and Kenya, geographic choices that map directly onto the founders' original thesis about where the trade finance gap is largest.

The Honest Read

Finverity is deliberately diverse by design, with team members and executives across Romania, Russia, Australia, Nigeria, Kenya, Ukraine, the UK, and Poland, reflecting the genuinely global, cross-border nature of the problem it's solving.

The honest caveat applies to most emerging-market fintech infrastructure plays:

The same macro conditions that create opportunity, currency volatility, less mature regulatory environments, and geopolitical instability in some target regions also create real operating risk that companies focused purely on developed markets don't face to the same degree.

Finverity's founders built the company specifically because they understood these markets from lived experience rather than from a distance, which is a genuine advantage.

Whether that experience translates into durable risk management as the company scales into new geographies with different specific challenges is what the next few years of growth will actually test.

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