Konstantin Kotulla
Co-Founder at Porters
20 Feb 2026Europe $1B Seed Round, Perplexity Kills Ads, Toyo's OpenClaw for Enterprise
Porters Co-Founder Constantine Kutula on AI for Bank Back Offices
Porters co-founder Constantine Kutula describes bank back offices as a "dirty little secret" stuck in spreadsheets and error-prone manual work, a problem he saw firsthand as an early employee building trading and custody infrastructure at Upvest, which powers clients like Revolut and N26. Porters deploys AI-native "digital workers" for sensitive banking operations, integrating one database at a time and starting with a small slice of workflows so banks can go live quickly and de-risk adoption. He discusses winning trust in a "nobody gets fired for buying SAP" industry, targeting digital scale-ups before traditional institutions with sales cycles that can run 24 months, and says the €2.7 million round led by Earlybird with Seedcamp participation will go mainly toward engineering hires.
Neil Tiwari on Converge: A Modern Marketo Replacement
Converge co-founder and CEO Neil Tiwari recounts dropping out of UC Berkeley at 19 during COVID, first running in-game ad experiments — including work on Mariah Carey's Roblox concert — before realizing they lacked a real pain point. He and co-founder James then interviewed 160 VPs of marketing, offering $50 gift cards for meetings, until their learnings plateaued and they identified the problem behind Converge: a modern marketing automation platform managing forms, ads, landing pages and messaging for large enterprises as a Marketo replacement. He explains why enterprise sales stay trust-based and increasingly in-person, why simple written content still gives teams an edge, and how they run first-principles ABM with custom landing pages for each stakeholder.