By late 2018, Peter Beckman, a Swedish founder and extreme sports enthusiast, had already enjoyed an exceptionally high-octane career. He’d spent a couple of years in the military, working in long range reconnaissance “special forces, rangers, yada yada” – before diving into business school on a whim. From there, a PhD at St Gallen, in Switzerland, one of the best business schools on the continent, which swiftly led to a job at a boutique company that consulted on geopolitical issues for complex international industries. Even then, it wasn’t enough to keep him stimulated. “It was all so interesting,” says Peter, “that I started to build companies in parallel to that.” 

The first was going to “save the world”, using satellite data to help manage forests in a way that would compensate for human emissions. “But that company didn’t work out – it was a bit premature.” Then Peter connected with a fellow data scientist in the US to build a system that could combine satellite data and live news to analyse and rank countries across numerous indices and risk factors in real time. “We actually got this machine to work,” he says. “But then I had these hobbies, not exactly your average weekend activities.”

“Mistakes are expensive when you’re speed flying”

Which is why, in late 2018, life forced him to slow down.  The founder was in Norway on a speed flying road trip (think a faster, more dangerous version of paragliding), when he made a mistake – and “mistakes are expensive when you’re speed flying.” Peter crashed into a mountain, crushing his feet badly. Relatively speaking, he was lucky – over the years he has attended numerous funerals of fellow extreme sports enthusiasts – but suddenly he was wheelchair bound, facing months of rehabilitation. “I had to call my colleagues and say, ‘please do something better with your time because I am quite unlikely to be able to raise money for this venture now…” Peter was back to square one. Then, just as he was starting to walk again, Antler called. 

Today, Peter is the co-founder of Treyd. Based in Stockholm, co-founded with Sameh El-Ansary, who Peter met through Antler, the startup provides upfront supplier payments to enable SMEs to grow their business without constraint. Today the company has a team of 50, has over 1300 customers across the UK, Ireland and the Nordics and has financed over $530 million in supplier payments. To date it has pulled in $32 million in funding and in May it appointed Knut Frängsmyr, previously deputy CEO at Klarna, as chairman of the board. 

Another roll of the dice

The start-up was born during Peter’s time at Antler, which he joined in August 2019. Though the first two companies didn’t go quite as planned, he’d caught the founder bug. “I thought, no, it’s time to go all in again, roll the dice for the third time,” he says. “Antler sounded like the perfect opportunity to actually get going pretty fast because it can take a while to find the right co-founder and get the resources.” 

At first, Peter wanted to do a continuation of the geographic risk project, pitching it to banks and institutions that have cross-border risk exposure, but he concluded that it could take far too long to build a customer base with that profile. So he started talking to SMEs that trade internationally, soft-pitching a form of export credit insurance. “Company after company that we spoke to were saying, yeah, the export side of things suck, but it's solvable. It's just messy. But if you can solve our import problem, we'll be your customer. Solve that, and we’ll do anything.” 

Solving for underserved SMEs

Whether it is fashion, electronics, furniture, says Peter, a vast number of SMEs, that account for a huge slice of the global economy, are limited by working capital. They have to pay suppliers in advance then potentially wait months to get payment from sales. “They have this crazy situation where they constantly have to say no to customers because they can’t buy enough,” says Peter. “We realized this segment is massively underserved, so we set out to solve their cash flow constraints.”

In early 2020, together with co-founder and CTO Sameh El-Ansary, Treyd was ready to launch. It took off, fast. In Spring 2021, following a seed round, the startup began to grow at a rate of 50-60% a month. “We realized that if this idea flies, and it seems to fly, it's going to be a new niche category in the world,” says Peter. “There's gonna be a few winners who do this on an international scale, and we need to get into a big market as soon as we can.” After closing Series A, Treyd continued to grow, expanding equally fast into the UK.

It was all highs – but the lows were due to come. In Spring 2023, consumer confidence in the UK plummeted to the lowest level ever recorded and Treyd hit credit problems. “Same thing in Sweden,” says Peter. “These two countries were standout countries in the Western world of terrible markets, which meant our customers started to have problems paying us back.”

Adapt or die

What followed was a series of cutbacks. To customers, revenue and staff. “It was a painful experience,” says Peter, but he lent on the experience of his co-founder, El-Ansary, who advised that when you’re in the trenches the thing that matters most is not someone's CV, but their personality – who you can trust in your gut to stick with you. “You want the warriors,” says Peter. Crucially, the experience enabled Treyd to develop its models to provide far more accurate assessments of its customers. When everyone is paying on time, the model is basic, Peter explains. “All of a sudden we could train models on who is gonna pay and who isn’t.” The new model laid it out starkly, says Peter: “If you don’t adapt you’re going to die.”

Pushing for profitability

Since then, Treyd has been growing fast – this time with more resilience. Despite the crisis in the markets, within a year it was back to where it was previously. Over the past year revenue has doubled again. “We have had extremely good credit performance, despite the macro environment being terrible. We’ve been able to launch new products during this time and we've had a really, really fun journey. We're now at north of $15 million, just at break-even now, so I think in the next few weeks we'll get into profitable territory.” Now Treyd is jostling to stay ahead of the pack as it sets its sights on global expansion. It has built a strong tech layer and is building the next iteration that will include developments around AI, forecasting and the user experience. “Ultimately, we’re building a working capital automation platform.

Having experienced dramatic ups and downs throughout his career, Peter is now focused on growth that is sustainable. That means no more crashing out – and not just in business. When he secured the first seed round for Treyd he was made to sign a contract with special terms that stipulated no more speed flying. Since then he’s done a couple of skydives (it wasn’t in the contract not to, he points out), but is itching to get back to it. “I haven't brought it up for negotiation yet,” he says. “I guess they're going to push for exit…I might push for profitability and see if we can meet somewhere in between.”