MaestroAi - The Number One Search Engine for Digital Assets

Welcome to NEXUS Startup Diaries, the number one place to discover the hottest and most inspiring startups and founders.

Today we're excited to meet Massimo Formby of MaestroAi

So Massimo, tell us more about MaestroAi

MaestroAi is a search engine for Digital Assets with its launched beachhead as the Counter Strike ‘Skins’ Market. We help 8000+ users navigate fragmented market place data across 55+ markets, and over 1 billion items to find the best deals in a market where trust is low and scamming and fraud high.

Discovery and Trust are broken, maestro is the trust layer that aggregates price, liquidity, and market information to find the best deals in seconds. We currently have registered users in 80+ countries but predominantly have a North American and European user base.

How did you come up with the business idea and what problem are you looking to solve?

As first-time founders, one still completing university and myself recently graduated with a master's, my two co-founders and I launched an MVP: an AI-powered B2B tool designed to address churn in the Gaming industry.

In our very first fundraising attempt, we successfully cleared 4 out of 5 rounds with a leading Southeast Asian household-name fund. We embraced their guidance wholeheartedly, leading us to pivot our MVP and expand our research into other markets facing similar challenges.

Josh, our CEO, who has traded skins for years, inspired a deep market dive. Over three weeks, I immersed myself in every available resource, purchasing skins from dmarket (a large marketplace), Trustpilot reviews, Twitter threads, Reddit forums, YouTube content, and a primary research sample of 30 skins holders/previous traders.

The research uncovered eight clear pain points or as I prefer to think, market failures limiting its de-facto growth, notably low trust, high information costs, and fragmented, often inaccurate data combined with poor UI/UX.

What drives me most in this project is working to address the critical mis-understanding most have had about gaming economies. Everyday gamers often overlooked by traditional finance. These casual traders deserve to be seen as legitimate participants in a market, not gamblers shadowed by a history of scandals and mistrust.

My goal is to embed financial empowerment naturally within the product experience, helping users build confidence and understanding through how they engage with the platform, rather than through direct lessons or jargon-heavy education.

When we looked at the landscape, we saw a true blue ocean opportunity reflected in our scaling roadmap. The market is crying out for solutions to three critical challenges: pervasive mistrust among users, the high effort and cost required to find reliable information, and widespread fragmentation of data combined with poor user experience.

Tackling these gaps is at the heart of everything we are building!

What made you want to start your own business?

After my Financial Technology Masters, and solo 3m research trip to El Salvador for my thesis on Bitcoin and its impact on the country, at the University of Liverpool I set up self-employed and began consulting on small and up to medium sized projects.

I then made a podcast to Support early BD, along with a published 19K research Journey on Bitcoin on the Isle of Man, and building from R&D to execution a food tech start up with a 10 year road map with 84 different scale products, to when I stopped full time 6,000 monthly active users on a small Island of 84k.

Maestro launched in Feb 2025 and after one Pre-seed raise ‘yes’ we turned down early in April, and making it to the last 10 from 5000 from another Tier 1 VC at the IC pitch in May, we got into Baltic ventures accelerator in July closing a small seed round with 3 other angels in September.

Baltic Ventures has been the most ideal outcome. I did my research on them and tracked their whole previous portfolio companies and reached out to a couple, and all validated the hypothesis that it was an incredible opportunity to grow and learn.

Genuinely, the value they have provided via their network and coaching sessions from it have been incredible. We’ve had at least three complete revelations in how my co founders and I thought about our product and our roles as entrepreneurs. Whilst we set about legitimising the skins market. They helped legitimise us in many different avenues.

What stage is your business currently at?

We have 8k Active Users and are about to launch our V2 and start to monetise the product via b2b & b2c channels. We are raising an open £500k Seed Round to Scale Data capabilities and hire key talent involved in the next phase of the roadmap.

What do you love most about being an entrepreneur?

The Chase to Solve a big Problem for a big number of People and freedom to run your own experiments in the pursuit of innovation.

What is the number one business tip you've learned that you'd like to share with fellow budding entrepreneurs?

My first time founder roadmap...

1. Don’t be too protective of the idea and who you share it with at the start when It’s just an idea.

2. You need to execute on your idea for it to mean anything.

3. The real test and where most trip is managing the feelings involved in growth and scale across all business activities as a founder.

Who are your Startup Heroes?

Purely from reading both Walter Isaacson's tweets and books, it would be Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. However Brian Armstrong is also a leader I look up to in how he’s built and scaled Coinbase.

A Favourite Book or Podcast?

The Musk/Jobs biographies I've mentioned above, plus...

Lateral thinking - Edward de Bono

The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson

Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoglu

5000years of Debt - David Graeber

The Lean Start Up, Eric Ries

Anything else you'd like to share with the world?

Check out my podcast to see when me and my co founder met and other interesting Fintech topics

Where can people find you online?

Give me a shout on LinkedIn - I look forward to connecting soon

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