Democratizing Finance with Werin
Launched in June 2026, Werin is a digital platform that enables inexperienced users to build personalized stock portfolios using an innovative algorithm developed at the University of Montpellier. The platform’s development and market launch were supported by the Montpellier University Innovation Hub (PUI) ecosystem.
Planning and managing a stock market investment is complex and requires certain skills and time, which is why it is often reserved for those in the know. That is why Patrick Sentis, a professor of finance at theUM and a researcher at the Montpellier Research in Management (MRM) laboratory, devised a solution to “democratize market finance” and make portfolio selection and analysis methods more accessible: the Werin platform.
He explains: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, I realized—through my research and experience in the financial markets—that there was no simple solution allowing someone who wanted to invest on their own to select securities based on quantifiable criteria. So I created Werin.”
The Origins of an Innovative Platform
In 2020, Patrick Sentis began modeling an initial version of his program in an Excel spreadsheet. The program allows users to build a portfolio of financial securities based on several criteria, such as whether a company pays dividends or meets certain environmental standards. Most importantly, these criteria can be weighted—that is, ranked according to their importance to the investor. “I included this issue of the specificity of criteria in my research topics,” explains the specialist. “Orthodox financial theory suggests that investors are homogeneous. Yet, in reality, everyone chooses their portfolios based on specific strategies.”
The first query run on this alpha version of the program still took more than two hours. The finance professor therefore decided to teach himself programming and, through hard work, achieved a more than satisfactory result: it then took only a few seconds to generate a personalized portfolio. “It was important to me to combine my academic work with this new business venture, to turn it into a kind of living laboratory. So I reached out to the SATT AxLRto facilitate the transfer from the public to the private sector.”
PUI Support
In 2023, SATT AxLR supported Patrick Sentis’s project—which he calls Werin—and, in particular, helped him conduct an initial market study. Since 2024, the entrepreneur has also benefited from the support ofthe INITIUM incubator. “This has allowed me to receive guidance from fantastic advisors, who have taught me a great deal,” he says.
Werin was officially founded at the end of 2025 and secured a contract granting it access to data provided directly by the international leader LSEG-Refinitiv. That same year, the startup won the Booster Innovation Montpellier (BIM) award: a real “boost” for the entrepreneur, providing him with an additional 36,000 euros. “We launched the platform in June 2026, after a fundraising round that allowed us to raise 250,000 euros,” says Patrick Sentis. “This enabled us to test it under real-world conditions in July and August. That’s how the proof of concept evolved into a commercially viable version.”
Toward Large-Scale Commercialization
The Werin platform doesn’t just build personalized portfolios—it also lets you “backtest” them. “This means that an individual can get an idea of what the portfolio would have earned if they had held it for five or ten years,” explains the entrepreneur. “Werin also lets you choose your own securities, while still benefiting from backtesting, twelve different metrics, and a text summary generated by artificial intelligence.”
Since its launch, Werin’s testing phase has allowed the company to fix bugs in its beta version. For Patrick Sentis, it is now time to move into the actual commercialization phase, starting with a marketing campaign. “Among other things, I’m targeting the Chinese market,” he says. “My goal is to promote long-term investment to finance the real economy.”