Veriff.
Portfolio story • 2024
Joonatan Samuel: an exit from Veriff helped kickstart his own startup Reiterate.
Joonatan’s entrepreneurial journey is the “paper boy who became a billionaire” equivalent of the startup world. Starting his career at “the ripe age of 16”, he became a machine learning engineer long before machine learning was much of a ‘thing’. After taking on several roles, including time at Starship, he co-founded a consultancy with Taivo Pungas.
Although profitable, they found it lacked personal growth. So the dynamic duo applied for the machine learning lead position at Veriff, a leading identity verification platform from Estonia. Funnily, Joonatan and Taivo passed all the interview rounds in a pair and finally got the job in tandem as well – Joonatan as the technical lead and Taivo on the product side.
Photo: Mart Vares | Reiterate
A career with maximum impact in mind
After about a year and a half, Joonatan felt he had accomplished the 20/80 that he set out to do. He was ready for a new challenge and transitioned to the sales team. “Later, I was given the title head of revenue ops, but essentially I was a diplomat between the product and the sales team, and Veriff’s diplomat for the customer,” says Joonatan.
This experience was invaluable. Working in untraditional roles with world-class professionals in a sales-driven organization – something relatively rare in Estonia – gave him a skill set that extended beyond product development. “Before, I could build and make products, but I didn’t understand how to be useful to people. I couldn’t do what I do today without that experience,” says Joonatan.
After more than three years at Veriff, Joonatan felt it was time to move on and build something of his own – Reiterate.
How Reiterate
was born
As it happened, about six months later, Veriff raised another successful funding round, and Joonatan saw an opportunity. “It was the perfect moment to sell a small portion of my shares,” he recalls. Siena played an instrumental role in Joonatan’s journey: “Working with Siena was a pleasure. They were incredibly supportive and transparent and a pleasure to work with.” The collaboration lasted months, with Siena making sure that he understood every step of the process.
This secondary deal wasn’t life-changing, but it provided enough of a buffer to buy a home and, more importantly, peace of mind. “That security gave me the confidence to focus fully on building Reiterate.”
Reiterate, now with 21 employees and having raised €1.25 million in 2022, is thriving. The company focuses on financial control, ensuring that payments are processed correctly and fees are accurate. Each month, Reiterate processes over €200 million, €2.4 billion annually. “In the long run, we’re building a virtual financial employee. If you can write down a process, you can also automate it. At the moment, we are creating an architecture where people could build and automate their own financial control processes, which would happen automatically,” explains Joonatan.
What’s your risk tolerance?
Joonatan has a word of advice for fellow founders and investors: “Ask yourself – if you had a portfolio worth a million euros in one startup, would you prefer to own that portfolio or spread the risk across 20 companies?” He believes most people can’t stomach the risk of having all their eggs in one basket.
“I, personally, would much rather keep 5% or 25% of the portfolio in a startup. Not 90% of the net worth, like many people do today. Siena helps (ex)employees like me to mitigate those risks,” he explains.