NEKOD Joins Techstars + ABN AMRO Future of Finance
NEKOD is part of the ABN AMRO and Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator 2024. Ten European fintechs, twelve nationalities, three months in Amsterdam.
NEKOD is part of the 2024 class of the ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator. We were one of ten early-stage fintech and fintech-adjacent companies selected from hundreds of European applicants. The class kicked off at ABN AMRO HQ in Amsterdam on September 19, 2024.
What this is
The ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator is a three-month programme that brings a small cohort of early-stage companies into the ABN AMRO innovation stack. Mentorship from international operators and investors. Access to the bank's operations. The option to run commercial pilots inside a real financial institution.
The 2024 class was the 4th edition. Ten companies. Twelve nationalities. Founders from the Netherlands, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium. Focus areas spanning green finance, digital assets, and generative AI. You can read the full announcement on the Techstars blog and the ABN AMRO news post.
Why it matters for NEKOD
NEKOD is a governance platform for AI-generated apps. Fintech is one of the clearest use cases. When a bank employee builds an internal tool with Lovable, Replit, or V0, the stakes are real. Session tokens, payment data, customer records, audit trails. "It works" is not the same as "it's safe to put in front of a customer."
Getting into the accelerator was a signal that the problem NEKOD is solving matters to one of the largest financial institutions in Europe. It gives us access to how a regulated enterprise actually thinks about AI app governance, and it gives us commercial runway to prove the product in the most demanding environment software lives in.
Antigoni applied with an idea and a PowerPoint deck. The accelerator invested €120K at the idea stage. That's the bet: find the founders early, give them runway and access, and let them build.
What came out of it
Over the three months, we worked with Techstars mentors, ran pilots inside ABN AMRO's operational environment, and sharpened the 360° assessment that sits at the heart of NEKOD. The experience directly shaped how the product handles compliance-heavy environments: DORA, GDPR, EU AI Act, and the internal controls that actually matter inside a bank.
If you're a financial services innovation lead reading this and thinking about how your organisation will govern AI-generated apps as adoption grows, this is exactly the conversation we're built for. Read the wider backer story in Backed by Techstars and Plug and Play, or the origin piece in NEKOD Founded in Amsterdam.