Andrea Baronchelli: How to Build a $3.5B Company (And Do It Again) | The Further, Faster Podcast

Andrea Baronchelli (0:00)

Again, I mentioned before speed. It's something that I would irrespectively note down as something that every entrepreneur should keep in mind.

The fact that you have the opportunity to build something from scratch gives you a great advantage, which is a small, nimble organization and team that allows you to go fast. So don't lose that opportunity.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

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Magnus Grimeland (0:51)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Further, Faster Podcast. I'm Magnus Grimeland, the founder and CEO of Antler. And with me today, I'm very lucky to have Andrea Baronchelli from Italy.

He's joining us here. He's built one of the most exciting fintech companies in the world. More than 50,000 companies globally are the customer across more than 30 markets, and they're processing more than $25 billion worth of volume. So we can learn a lot from Andrea. Prior to that, he built another incredible company called Lazada, which sold to Alibaba for more than $3.5 billion. So this will be a very exciting conversation. Tell us a bit about Aspire, right? Where are you now and where are you going?

Andrea Baronchelli (1:35)

So Aspire is a company that is trying to put together two industries that used to be, I mean, or they're still very much distinct, right? So the corporate banking side of things and the agentic ERP software side of things. And the vision that we have for the company is to build them together in a single integrated suite and offer them to entrepreneurs and finance leaders all over the world.

The analogy that I used to use is, you remember when you used to go around with a camera on one side and a phone on the other side, and now you use a smartphone with the two things combined, and how much you wouldn't probably go back, right? And so we are basically integrating these two components and offering it out there. We are, as you mentioned, serving 50,000 businesses, so it's a great achievement so far, and we want to bring it further, right? We are just starting in FinTech because we run financial services and requires trust, so you have basically a long way to go, right? Before you can penetrate deeply all the market, and we are just at the beginning of our journey.

Magnus Grimeland (2:51)

Awesome. That's exciting.

And tell us a bit about the journey of building Aspire. Like, how did you get started? How did I become?

How do you get the founders in place?

Andrea Baronchelli (3:03)

So you probably are familiar with my previous chapter as well. Yes.

Magnus Grimeland (3:09)

So, Andrea, by the way, previous to building Aspire was part of building one of the biggest e-commerce companies in Asia called Lazada. We sold to Alibaba for more than 3.5 billion, right?

So yeah, you had some experience building from before.

Andrea Baronchelli (3:25)

Yeah. So that's exactly where I sort of got previously.

And I was thinking after the acquisition, after the exit to Alibaba Group, what to do. I've always been a bit of a builder. I think I have probably a private Google folder with all my projects back in the days. I think there are probably 15, 20 stuff in there. We also raised some money in the past. So it's always been like, okay, I mean, let's build stuff. Let's brainstorm. So I always had a bunch of things going on. And that was a good timing because the chapter was somehow and successfully closing. And so we were discussing what to do next. And one thing that was very obvious was that in Lazada, we learned everything was digital, right? So digital marketing, digital commerce.

And we realized that banking was very outdated, very physical, queues, paperwork. And we thought, okay, if you put these two things together very simply, there are going to be potentially an opportunities to serve a new generation of businesses, entrepreneurs, finance leader that are a bit fed up, right? With the old way of doing things. And we create a brand that talks about the new way of doing things. And so that's how Aspire started.

Magnus Grimeland (4:47)

That's awesome. And from having that idea of this problem to solve, to then get going on actually building the business, tell us about those kind of first few days, like getting the team together and getting started.

Andrea Baronchelli (5:02)

Yes, obviously, it took a bit longer than a couple of days, but you start basically brainstorming on, okay, what are the first steps, right? In our case, it was we put together a small MVP demo product and a bunch of slides of presentations to talk and communicate with people, right? Both candidates, but also investors.