FinTech news in Germany category

Redstone and EnjoyVenture have combined forces to create Human Impact Capital (HIC), Germany first dedicated scial impact VC fund. I spoke with the fund’s manager, Lucas Paul, to find out what drove the creation of the fund and its investment thesis. The fund aims to invest in digital business models that tackle society’s biggest challenges, typically investing between €500,000 and €1.5 million. Among others, the Bank für Sozialwirtschaft, Germany’s leading bank for the social sector, committed substantially to HIC, fund reps told me.

Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. Wense, who founded the startup in 2020 together with Philipp Petrescu, added that MVP Match acts as an Employer of Record, which enables it to manage the whole recruiting process including the establishment of local office spaces and talent onboarding. MVP Match said it uses product and technology executives like CTOs and experienced domain experts to vet talent before recommending them to companies. The plan to grow its reach follows the launch of a new hub in Egypt that MVP Match will use to tap talent in Africa — with the aim of creating more networks in the region.

Although it’s currently not making any money in its Russian operation, Viber, which is end-to-end encrypted, has kept the service live where it hasn’t been blocked by Russian authorities, since a lot of communication happens between Ukrainians and Russians (there remain a lot of links between the people, despite the actions and rhetoric of the Russian government), and it’s continuing to operate its service in Ukraine where it can — the occupied territories where Russia has taken control of communications being the exception. The company is not quick to disclose exact monthly active user figures, but in 2016, Viber was widely reported to have 823 million users (note: not active users — one citation of this number from its PR firm here); in that same year, an exec told journalist that it had 266 million monthly active users. Now it is making a move to double down on that strategy: it launching Payments on Viber — a new service that will let users set up digital wallets tied to their Viber accounts. Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries over the years.

Tel Aviv-based Classiq, a startup that wants to make it easier for developers to build quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised additional funding for its service.

The previous share purchases refers to an existing relationship between the two: Nets already had a stake in Orderbird as a result of an acquisition it had made of payments company Concardis, and it increased that stake to 40% in a secondary transaction in September 2021.

Taxfix as you might suspect prefers to talk about the good news stories around tax filing — it’s easy! and it’s often free money owed to you! — so Ott wasn’t keen to talk about how much money it calculated people owed to the state, but there is an opportunity there too to provide financing and longer-term managing of that financing as a different kind of product.

Grover has been on a steady pace of growth in the last several years — CEO and founder Michael Cassau said that across its footprint of Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and most recently the U.S., Grover doubled subscriptions and business in the last year, and it currently has half a million items in its catalog available for subscription, 2 million registered users and 250,000 active customers.

The e-commerce boom that started with the Covid-19 pandemic shows little sign of slowing down, and today a company called Shopware, which provides a set of open source tools to power online shopping experiences for some 100,000 mid-sized and larger brands, is announcing $100 million in funding to capture the opportunity.

French startup Sunday, which didn’t even exist in 2020, has raised large sums to allow people to easily pay and share the bill, freeing up wait staff and increasing turnover in restaurants. The payment solution for consumers in restaurants has now raised $17 million in seed financing in a round co-led by Berlin Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital of Germany. The benefits for restaurants include a higher potential turnover of tables, more possibility of tips for wait staff and returning customers who enjoy the simple experience. The founding team of Qlub consists of Arun Sharma, Eyad Alkassar, Filiberto Pavan, Gizem Bodur, Jeff Matsuda, Jianggan Li, John Mady, Mahmoud Fouz, Oscar Bedoya and Ramy Omar.

What sets Moss apart from its competitors is that it offers credit cards, not debit cards. And if a restaurant doesn’t accept card payments, Moss also handles cash expenses and reimbursements.