Cristina Vila Vives is founder and chief executive of Cledara, the London, England, software spend management company. She founded it in 2018, and it now has more than 1,000 customers in 32 countries. Read our review of Cledara.
Operations in Banking
She spent more than ten years leading operations teams in financial services, much of it at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where she worked on a programme to change the bank's processes and technology. Along the way she completed postgraduate studies in HR, psychology, business and finance.
Cairo and the Idea for Cledara
After leaving banking she went to the Cairo, Egypt, office of the payroll start-up dopay for what was meant to be a two-week project. It turned into 18 months running dopay's middle and back office. Her team used Trello, Pipefy, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Slack, Jira and more, and nobody could easily say who paid for each tool or whether it was still used. That problem became Cledara. "Cledara is my second attempt at it," she wrote in 2019, describing how hard starting a company still is.
The company raised a $20M Series A led by CommerzVentures in 2022 to grow in the US.
