Bolted on vs baked in: Why Klara chose Seapoint to scale

Annie Gilchrist has spent her career at the intersection of compliance and fintech. As a former product leader at Currencycloud - a fast-growing embedded payments business acquired by Visa - she brings firsthand experience of what it takes to scale a regulated financial product. That experience informs everything about how she and co-founder Esther Olatunde - a Y Combinator alumna and former senior engineer at Intercom - are building Klara: an AI layer that helps B2B financial institutions activate customers faster and increase conversion, whilst maintaining compliance rigour.

When it comes to their own stack, Annie is just as deliberate as she is when building the Klara product. "I'm very interested in selecting and integrating tools that will scale with us," she says. "What a force multiplier the right tools can be."

Building on the right foundations

Annie first connected with Seapoint founder Sean Mullaney through Baseline, a founder community in Dublin and one of Klara's investors. "Fintech people are all weirdly obsessed with fintech," she laughs. "When you meet somebody else who has that experience you end up really going deep."

That conversation got her thinking about Seapoint. As a first-time founder building Klara from the ground up, she thinks carefully about every tool in her stack - not just what works today, but what will scale.

Why AI-native matters

What sets Seapoint apart for Annie isn't any single feature. It's the foundation everything is built on - and the team behind it.

"When you know people have spent collectively that many years at Stripe, it comes with a certain level of trust - that they understand how to build great products, secure products, and products for the enterprise."

As someone building an AI-powered product herself, Annie understands better than most what it means to have AI baked in from the start rather than bolted on later.

"Seapoint has an AI-native stack in a way that many others in this space who've been around four, five, six more years do not have. And even as they try to retrofit those things, it's always going to be bolted on rather than baked in from the very beginning."

She expects that advantage to compound. "AI engineers are hard to come by. If you have a team that already has that skill set, that gives you an advantage over somebody who's trying to train up from zero." It's the same logic she applies to Klara - get the foundations right from the start, and the benefits multiply.

Making capital work harder

With a significant angel round raised, Annie isn't prepared to let capital sit idle. She was previously using Wise's treasury product, but the decision to move to Seapoint was straightforward.

"You guys offer more interest. It was kind of a no-brainer."

Treasury isn't something Annie interacts with every day. It doesn't need to be. "It's doing the job I expect of it. The rates are really good. I trust Seapoint to handle that money."

Bookkeeping that actually keeps up

Another Seapoint feature Annie uses regularly is bookkeeping - and she's impressed by how quickly it's evolving. As an early design partner, she watches the team respond to feedback and ship improvements in real time.

"It's been really nice to see the pace of change and how quickly the product is evolving. Being an early user and getting to see that process of change up close - as a product person, it's what I love to do."

Her accountant noticed too. When she mentioned the AI scanning of inboxes to automatically pull in invoices, his response stood out. "He said he hadn't really seen anyone else doing that same level of AI inbox scanning. That sort of stuff saves quite a lot of time and he hasn't really seen it elsewhere."

Part of something early

For Annie, being a design partner isn't just about the product. It's about the experience of building alongside a team that's moving fast and listening carefully.

"That collaboration early on is so fun and so exciting. It's actually such a lovely thing to see products blossoming from a very early stage and seeing how they build and grow and solve problems. I've loved being part of that."

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