This morning the startup I work for announced that we'd raised $107 million in funding from over 40 different banks, financial firms and Intel. At the start of 2016 we didn't have a codebase, Kotlin had not reached v1.0 yet, and we had (and still have) competitors that had all been in development much longer. We have since been able to catch up and become a primary player in the market despite having a far smaller team and far less money to spend until now than those competitors. We are winning conservative bank developers to our platform and although Java is a first class language for us they often choose to use Kotlin too, despite it being optional. I am convinced that a big part of the reason we were able to do that is that we built on Kotlin and the JVM, whereas other platforms did not, and this extra productivity and developer enjoyment has turned directly into success for us.

mikehearn: You don't have the startup name in your profile, can you share? And, of course, huge congrats!

It's called R3 - r3.com

Wow, this is very interesting. I also work in fintech. Will investigate the platform. Haven't had experience with blockchain before, so might take some time to make sense of it. If you can suggest any specific resources I'll be very grateful. Also, are planning any events in continental EU? Like workshops, conferences, etc.?

Check out corda.net, that's the project home page (it's open source). There are meetups and conferences yes but we just did some last week in New York, so it'll be a bit of time until the next set

Ok, thanks, will keep an eye on it 🙂