Open data startup Okredo has closed a €1 million seed funding round led by the Lithuanian Business Angels Fund and Presto Ventures, with support from Startup Wise Guys as well as several angel investors.

Okredo said that this round of funding will be used to expand into new European markets, amidst a backdrop of growing regulatory support for open data.

The Lithuanian startup’s SaaS platform helps SMEs assess the credibility, financial strength and sales potential of new and existing business partners and customers.

With the EU’s Open Data Directive going into effect this year, businesses and other enterprises in member states are now required to report on data points that range from debt loads to changes in the c-suite.

While this data is technically now ‘open’ (a work that remains in slow progress), it is actually hosted in a myriad of different agencies, some of them private, and these agencies are under no requirements to package the datasets in any kind of SME-friendly way.

With AI-driven analysis, Okredo enhances raw, open data and packages it in the form of modules and reports through a user-friendly and customizable web GUI.

These modules and reports provide credit scores and insights which are dynamically updated during the entire lifecycle of a partnership, from identification of potential leads to monitoring of overall changes that can affect the business relationship – giving alerts, for example, when an account might be upsold.

In the event of customer non-payment, Okredo can help businesses determine whether negotiating, going to court, or publishing the debt on the platform will be the best course of action.

Gerda Jurkoniene, Co-founder of Okredo said,

“Open data provides an immense economic opportunity for organizations, and we want to give even the smallest of businesses the means to effectively evaluate risks and explore new sales opportunities in order to thrive and prosper.

 

Our vision is bold: we want to become a leading open data platform in Europe within the next five years. We are confident in our abilities and the capabilities of our platform to be able to scale quickly to new markets while at the same time provide best-in-class service to our customers.”