Berlin-based infrastructure Fintech Upvest announced the closing of a $42 million Series B round – “one of the largest German Fintech funding rounds in 2022.”
Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the Series B “with Earlybird and ABN AMRO Ventures doubling down as previous investors and participation of Notion Capital, Partech, 10x Group, Speedinvest and Maximilian Tayenthal (N26).”
The raised capital will be used “to advance Upvest’s Investment-API, lay the ground for the internationalization, and gradually expand Upvest’s team.”
Since its Series A, Upvest is “backed by the venture capital firms Earlybird, HV Capital, Notion Capital, ABN AMRO Ventures, Speedinvest and Partech, as well as the fintech founders Maximilian Tayenthal (N26) and Felix Haas (IDnow).”
Upvest’s product offering is “fully up and running in the market and enables fintechs to offer their end customers products in the field of capital market investments, from ETFs and stocks to crypto assets.”
Upvest built “the first end-to-end cloud native core banking system for investments and is one of the few financial institutions in Europe owning all BaFin licenses for securities and crypto brokerage, and custody.”
Designed as a plug-and-play solution with fully-fledged process automation at its core, Upvest’s API and core banking system “help Neobanks- and brokers, as well as established banking players, to significantly save on the cost side since they do not need to develop their brokerage and custody infrastructure from scratch.”
Additionally, they also “save costs as Upvest’s platform is fully automated and thus cheaper to operate.”
The flexibility and openness of Upvest’s Investment-API “give fintechs maximum freedom to individually program the API tailored to their needs, help to reduce onboarding time for new customers, and make investing possible instantly.”
Martin Kassing, founder and CEO of Upvest, said:
“We appreciate our investors’ commitment, particularly in light of the current market environment. We see this together with the demand of leading international fintechs for our solution as a confirmation of our unique positioning and market offering”
Kassing added:
“Together with our investors who bring strength to the table in terms of industry expertise as well as internationalization strategies, we are now ready to open up a new chapter for our company. With Upvest, we want to establish Investment-as-a-Service as a new category and become the technical backbone for all fintechs, banks and asset managers that want to offer their end customers safe, affordable and simple access to the capital and crypto market. Since our recent go-live, our API is fully up and running – offering investment products across Europe has never been easier.”
Charles Birnbaum, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, noted:
“Upvest is ideally positioned with a market-leading product in one of the most exciting and underserved areas of fintech infrastructure. Just one of Upvest’s USPs: the Investment-API can be easily connected to existing backends and can be immediately deployed, enabling businesses to build great investment experiences for their end users – seamless, secure and across international borders.”
Birnbaum added:
“With Upvest, both fintech providers and legacy players can set full focus on their core business by developing new investment use cases for their end customers while at the same time exploring new growth opportunities for their own business – a game changer in the European market. We are looking forward to supporting Martin and the entire Upvest team on their ambitious growth journey.”
With Upvest’s Investment-API, any company that wants to offer investment products has access “to endless growth possibilities due to a variety of use cases ranging from crypto trading to fractional investing.”
Most recently, Upvest “entered into new partnerships with renowned banking players:”
For safekeeping the assets of Upvest’s B2B clients, Upvest “could win BNP Securities Services as Europe’s largest custodian.”
In the area of payment rails and transaction banking, Upvest “announced its cooperation with the Dutch banking group ABN AMRO, one of the leading banking groups in Europe.”