As many entrepreneurs will tell you, it’s not just one startup for life. Most entrepreneurs try their hand at a number of startups throughout the years. And that was just the case for André Hauptfleisch, chief executive officer (CEO) of Causal Nexus.
A South African software engineer by trade, data processing software startup Causal Nexus is Hauptfleisch’s third foray into entrepreneurship.
“The first was a property venture. The company was profitable, but luckily we saw the 2008 collapse in the property market coming, so we closed it just in time in 2007,” Hauptfleisch recalls.
“The second company provided energy monitoring software to the renewables industry. It never really got off the ground, but valuable lessons were learnt.”
In 2012, Hauptfleisch co-founded Causal Nexus, a software developing startup specialising in real-time processing and analytical systems for banks, payment processors and retailers.
Causal Nexus helps clients bring together all of the data they are interested in monitoring and analysing in an easy-to-navigate dashboard.
According to Hauptfleisch, Causal Nexus is “Twitter for your data”.
“All of us have information we care about. It provides support for the daily decisions we make in a company. Now just take a second and think about where you are currently getting that information from. It is scattered all over the place, right? Sales has stuff in Salesforce, accounts in Sage, marketing in Google Analytics, project management in Dropbox, and so on,” Hauptfleisch says.
“How do you get hold of your data? Well you go scouring, right? It is a very painful endeavour involving long email chains, attachments, exports, ETLs, and other acronyms,” he says.
“This digital hunter-gatherer model is fundamentally broken! I can’t believe the entire world works like this. Causal Nexus is changing all of that. We want your data to come to you, at an instant, wherever you are.”
With the importance of data security in mind, Hauptfleisch says the startup has spent “an enormous amount of time” ensuring data stored on the online platform – which can be accessed remotely from any location – is entirely safe.
“We have spent an enormous amount of time and resources to ensure your information is safe. Coming from a transactional banking background, we have a great deal of experience in securing systems according to PCI DSS. We follow the same protocols and best practices to secure our systems. So if you feel safe using your credit card, you can feel safe using our system,” he says.
The startup currently has three corporate clients, each with several users; and makes money through a software as a service (SaaS) model, as well as licensing.
While Causal Nexus at the moment focuses on the banking environment, Hauptfleisch says he would like to expand the offering to a wider audience, and he believes the demand for such a simply-formatted system is there.
“At the moment we are focusing on the transactional banking environment, where there is a need for real-time critical information. Naturally this market is quite niche, so we would like to extend our offering to appeal to a wider audience in other markets too,” he says.
“Apart from Domo, we haven’t seen a system like this. Very few systems can find your fragmented data and bring it together in an easy to understand format.”
