Credxp

Credxp was a start-up I (right), Liana (center) and Robert (left) co-founded back in 2018 after we got admitted in the Innovation Labs pre-accelerator program. We were what you’d call a fintech start-up and during our 2 year collaboration we worked on building a Machine Learning based service focused on improving the analysis of corporate credit applications.

Inception

Credxp started out as Liana’s bachelor degreee thesis. She would start working with her thesis supervisor Daniel Rosner in late 2017 under one condition: next spring, she would take the idea of building an advanced credit scoring system and run it through the Innovation Labs Hackathon.

By then, ML was already becoming a hot topic. While there were other research groups at our university working on ML focused projects, none of them were too appealing and - frankly - most of them lacked any real-life applications. Keeping that in mind, the opportunity to actually work on something that was both state of the art and highly applicable in real life was too good to pass.

I offerred to help with whatever work was necessary to make the ML core usable as part of an actual deployable service. I was also keen to give Innovation Labs another try since back in 2016 I signed up for the hackahton with the app I was building for my own bachelor thesis, but sadly I was not accepted into the program.

By the time March 2018 came around, we had also recruited Robert into our team and another fourth member which resigned shortly after the hackathon. We had a name, an idea, some working code and a lot of excitement 🚀

We did good at the hackathon, we passed the pitching contest and we actually managed to showcase a PoC that would run some basic predictions on some anonimyzed real data and that could actually be consumed as a regular HTTP API by some SPA. However, we won more than an admission ticket into the program - we won some great people and mentors on our side that helped us a lot for the entire lifetime of Credxp.

By the end of the night, we had already decided to start a collaboration relationship with BRD who, through the amazing Horia Velicu, decided to allow us to pilot our service with their corporate credit analysis team when ready.

The Journey

What followed were 2 years filled with many hours of coding, analyzing spreadsheets, talking to the risk analysts, meeting with possible investors, compiling requirements, reading ML papers, aligning pixels, learning new frameworks and drinking insane amounts of coffee. Balancing uni, with our full time or part time jobs and the start-up life was especially difficult and I personally decided to both quit my job for a few months and deffer my diseratation to 2019.

Many thousands of Python, Java & JS LoCs later, we had built what we set out to build and I might say our architecture and deployment strategy was quite ahead of its time. Now, there’s an entire practice dedicated to solving the kind of problems we anticipated back. You might know it as MLOps.

Sadly, by the time we got closer to shipping a usable alpha version, I think we got caught up in building lots of boilerplate UIs and tangent services. This was really time consuming and as the requirements kept on changing, our energy kept on diminishing. By the time the global pandemic started, we have decided to cut our loses and leave Credxp behind.

Personal Highlights

When I decided to join the project, I never really thought I’d be doing more than writing code and participate in product related brainstorming sessions. However, as time went by, I found myself more and more interested in the product presentations and product design. I also found my experience of working in consulting to be extremely helpful in our interactions with the various stakeholders.

Innovation Labs Demo Day Pitch

By the end of the program, due to various circumstances, I stepped up and took on the challenge of pitching Credxp whenever necessary. Without a doubt, the final two pitches on Demo Day where - and still are - some of the most nerve-wrecking experiences I ever had to endure. I somehow managed to keep my composure and deliver the same pitch twice in front of a few hundred guests on the stage at the Bucharest National Theater.

You can watch one of my pitching attempts from that day bellow. Let me know how it went. Till this day, I still haven’t watched it.

Credxp on I Like IT

Although I did not have a TV cable subscription at the time (still don’t) and I would have rather used the time and energy required to prepare for this interview to continue working on the product, I must admit it was a sureal moment to appear on what was the most popular Romanian TV tech show at the time. If nothing else, at least our parents could see us on the small screen.

Media Appearances

During our time as Credxp, we had the opportunity to talk with some leading voices in the local tech media and use their platforms to share our ideas about the state of technology, education, entreprenuership and the product we were building.

StartUp.ro article from the early stages

Our first ever interview as a team was definitely an experience to remember. It’s interesting to see how our understanding of the product and tech eveovled over time. You can find the full article written by Vlad Andriescu here.

Innovation Labs Demo Day interview

I thought it would be fitting to follow our first interview with the one we gave at the end of the Innovation Labs program on Demo Day in which we discuss where we got and what we built after a few months fileed with lots of pizza 🍕 coffee ☕️ and code ⌨️

Interview for Radio Romania 3 Net

In late 2018 we were lucky enough to share our ideas around the educational process in Romania, local perspectives for students and technology enthusiasts and the changes generated by ML with Radio3Net.

Interview for RFI Romania

In April 2019 we had the opportunity to chat with Mirel Bran, adding a new entry in the “We come from the future” series. Our discussion was focused on the future of technology in the context of the ML emergence and the startup ecosystem in Bucharest. You can listen to our conversation here.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks the people who offered us guidance, support, trust and beared with us while trying to build and deliver this thing: Daniel Rosner, Horia Velicu, Mircea Bardac, Bogdan Bocse & many others 🙏🏻

Lessons Learned

Although some time has passed, I still have a todo item somewhere specifically for extracting these lessons and posting them somewhere. I never did write the list, but I often thought about what the intro should be. I’m not sure who the quote is actually attributed to, but it goes something like this:

The only people who never fail are those who never try.