A startup landed a European bank as its first customer by hosting 500-person hackathons sponsored by AWS, IBM, and Google, then spending years on security work and proofs of value. The bank signed in 2019. Trust came from showing up consistently, not from pitching.
You had this shocking story about how you got a bank to buy from you. Banks are one of the most regulated industries, especially in Europe. When we first started, I was like, I want to have this bank as a customer, but you don't get them as a customer like this, right? They don't typically buy from startups. They are very risk aware. Their first principle is do it securely. We are a bank, so we approach them. We started to do community hackathons. We anonymized the data and together we did the hackathon for over 500 people. AWS was sponsoring, IBM was there, Google was there. 3 new companies were started out of that hackathon. It was just amazing. So we established the relationship and then we worked with them for a couple of more years to do proof of value. And we did a lot of security. And finally in 2019, they signed the first deal.
