Filip Balenko

I started Devola the year I turned 19. I wanted to learn how a company actually works by running one, not by reading about it in a finance class. So I took the part nobody else wanted, the money, and made it mine.

For three years I owned the finance function. The model, the monthly close, the cash forecasts, the budget that every hiring and pricing call had to argue with. I sat in the commercial negotiations too. The person who knows the numbers should be the one defending them.

We grew. From an idea to a 30-person shop working across the US and Europe. 55 projects shipped, from scrappy startups to Auchan, the European retail group. The terms I negotiated and the pricing I set pushed revenue up 225% year over year.

I learned the thing you cannot pick up secondhand. A company is a stack of bets, and finance is how you keep score honestly enough to know which ones are paying off.

After Devola I wanted the other side of the table. I had watched small businesses take bad money from non-bank lenders, mostly because the good lenders would not look at them fast enough. I thought I could fix the speed and the judgment at the same time.

So I started Extra and raised the capital myself. Two million and change, every dollar from a conversation I ran from the first cold email to the signed term sheet. One of those checks came from Express Trade Capital, where I had worked as an analyst. A summer spent earning their trust turned into a capital partner.

Then I did the real work. I built the underwriting from nothing. Who we would fund, on what terms, and what it would cost us when I got it wrong. I trained an AI model to score each deal against everything we had seen before, and it got sharper every cycle. A review that used to take me four hours took twenty-five minutes.

The book returned 38% annualized. The industry runs closer to 18. Thirty-five deals in six months, and I answered for every one of them, the clean ones and the ugly ones both.