Startup Wise Guys is one of the most active early stage investors in the broader CEE region and Nordics, has been voted Top VC fund in the CEE in year 2019. To help techy startup founders become true entrepreneurs, we are running a world-class startup accelerator since 2012. We have accelerated more than 300 startups, focusing on Sustainability, B2B SaaS, Fintech, Cybersecurity, and XR. The portfolio has already had 11 major exits and the overall startup survival and success rate is above 80%. The intensive up to 5 months-long accelerator program is focused on validating, developing, and selling products to business customers. Over 200 international and local mentors help startups move through those stages much faster than they would on their own. Founders are also prepared to sell their vision to investors, and the program culminates in Demo Days & major tech event visits, where startups get to present to venture capitalists and angel investors. Post-program, startups join the alumni community of 300+ startups in more than 40 countries and become eligible for invite-only alumni events such as SWG Getaway focused on business development, fundraising, and experience sharing.

Startup Wise Guys

Speedinvest is one of Europe’s most active early-stage investors, with more than €1bn AUM, 40 investors, and offices in Berlin, London, Munich, Paris, Vienna and San Francisco.  Your success is our priority, so we don’t just send some money and ''check in'' at board meetings. Our mission is to empower you with game-changing support through every stage of your journey.  Our focused investment teams know your industry inside and out. Their Deep Tech, Fintech, Industrial Tech, Network Effects, Digital Health and Subscriptions experience, know-how and deep networks are yours from day one.  You also have full access to our in-house Platform+ team of operational experts who can provide tailored growth marketing, people (HR), US business development, and networking support throughout every stage of your journey.

Speedinvest

OTB Ventures is a leading European VC focused on DeepTech with an unfair advantage in accessing Central and Eastern European (CEE) deal flow, investing in early growth, real tech startups (late Seed, Series A and B) that develop unique technologies in 4 verticals: SpaceTech, AI & Automation, FinTech and Cybersecurity OTB Ventures was established in 2017 and is currently the largest VC originating from the CEE, managing over $300M. OTB Ventures has two offices: Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Warsaw (Poland).

OTB Ventures

OpenOcean is a thesis driven pan-European early-stage Venture Capital investor with offices in Helsinki and London. Our investment strategy focuses on leading or co-leading Series A investments in European companies driving the data economy with a focus on B2B platforms and Enterprise Software technology. Our investments are driven by three core theses: Automation, Data Infrastructure and Future of Software Development, with initial average investment sizes of €5m. ‍  Our founding team members include key persons behind MySQL AB (sold to Sun Microsystems Inc. for $1 Billion in 2008), after which the team jointly built category leader MariaDB Corporation Ab, as well as forming and managing OpenOcean. Our DNA is rooted in having a deep understanding of the underlying technology and software stacks, which drive the growth of innovative new digital platforms and services. Our strong technical background and expertise allows us to identify and invest in the next game-changing and category winning start-tups at the early-stages, whose unique solutions can be rapidly scaled and adopted globally.

OpenOcean

UNIQA Ventures GmbH is the Venture Capital arm of UNIQA Insurance Group AG, a leading insurance carrier in Central & Eastern Europe and a pioneer in Corporate-backed Venture Capital in Austria and CEE. Based in Vienna, Austria, the firm is investing in outstanding business models driven by strong teams and a clear vision to shape the future of key industries. Investment areas are the future of Health, Mobility, Intelligent Home and FinTech/InsurTech as well as enabling technologies such as IoT, Blockchain, ML/AI.

UNIQA Ventures

Joint FinTech Investment Vehicle of RBI's CVC Elevator Ventures GbmH and UNIQA Ventures GmbH

FinTech Growth Fund Europe GmbH & Co KG

Global PayTech Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on payment technology. The firm invests in ground-breaking PayTech solutions with massive market opportunities. It also focuses on early-stage PayTech companies and will invest in seed, Series A, and Series B rounds. The firm was founded by Javier Perez and his sons Daniel Perez and Kristofer Perez and is headquartered in Miami, Florida.

Global PayTech Ventures

Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that powers a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a business.  Accel’s vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel-backed companies include Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Lookout Security, MoPub, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Vox Media, and others.

Accel

Eurazeo is a private equity and venture capital firm that invests in SMEs and manages a diversified portfolio of assets. With its expertise in private equity, real estate, and private debt, the group supports companies of all sizes in their development commitment through the commitment of its 235 professionals. It provides companies with the necessary investments needed to realize their growth potential. The firm was founded in 1969 and is based in Paris, Ile-de-France, France.

Eurazeo

Illusian is the Founder Office of people who have founded and scaled companies like Supercell, Zalando, Wolt, Aiven, Pigment, and Smartly. While the group is still busy running their businesses, they've aligned their networks, capital, and expertise to simultaneously support the next generation of builders.

Illusian Founder Office

kevin.

Kevin. is a fintech company that provides an advanced account-to-account payment infrastructure to replace card transactions. It aims to evolve traditional cards, pay by link, POS, direct debit, and online payments. Offering fully customizable solutions which scale to the size of any business, kevin. helps improve customer experience and thereby conversion, while also saving money on the cost of payment acquiring services for the merchants.

Kevin. is a Lithuanian company providing infrastructure for merchants to accept payments directly through bank accounts instead of through payment cards for online, mobile, and physical sales. The company develops its own connections with banks; therefore, no third-party aggregators are involved in transaction processing. Its platform can be used by businesses of any size, across several industries, including retail, parking, fashion, deliveries, and so on.

Democratizing financial technology with a suite of API-based solutions

FinTech Infrastructure

Kevin.

kevin. partners with Switchio by Monet+

Kevin. is a Lithuanian company providing infrastructure for merchants to accept payments directly through bank accounts instead of through payment cards for online, mobile, and physical sales. The company develops its own connections with banks; therefore, no third-party aggregators are involved in transaction processing. Its platform can be used by businesses of any size, across several industries, including retail, parking, fashion, deliveries, and so on. Given its infrastructure is based on open banking, the company benefits from the European PSD2 regulation that requires European banks and financial institutions to open their API for licensed third-party providers. Kevin. also offers open banking-based point-of-sale (POS) solutions for physical payments, which enables customers to pay from their bank accounts using existing near-field communication (NFC) payment terminals (contactless payment terminals). Kevin. charges its users a subscription fee between EUR 5 and EUR 40 (based on the payment methods handled), which includes a given number of transactions, and charges EUR 0.05 per transaction when that limit is exceeded. However, the platform also offers custom packages for merchants. The company says that merchants can benefit from lower fees when accepting payments directly from bank accounts and claims that switching from card payments can reduce payment processing fees by up to 90%. Key customers and partnerships The Kevin. plug-in is available for merchants on several ecommerce platforms including WooCommerce, Magento, and PrestaShop. By June 2022, the platform supported more than 6,000 merchants, and enabled receipts from bank accounts in 27 European countries. The company partnered with European transaction monitoring platform Sentinels, in June 2022, to enable merchants to detect suspicious transactions and comply with local anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. Funding and financialsKevin.raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/10099?industryIds=53">USD 65 million in Series A funding </a>in May 2022, led by Accel, a little over six months after <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/6196">raising USD 10 million in seed funding </a>. The funds were earmarked for investment in expanding its operations and business reach. Kevin. Also plans to almost double its workforce by 2023, from 170 employees.

Cross River Bank provides a white-label banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform for enterprises, combining banking services, payments, and marketplace lending infrastructure to build fintechs. Its solutions comprise demand deposits, savings accounts, credit and debit cards, and payment clearing services, including automated clearing house (ACH) and real-time payments. The company also provides banking and payment infrastructure for the crypto industry, including risk management services for its crypto clients. Key customers and partnerships As of December 2020, the company had over 400 employees, and had entered into more than 30 partnerships. Moreover, as of March 2021, the platform had been used to support over 375,000 small businesses through the paycheck protection program (PPP).Cross River Bank teamed up with UK-based BaaS provider <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/421515">Railsr </a>in January 2019 to launch a common API for their platforms to be used globally. As of April 2022, Cross River had over 80 clients including lenders such as Affirm, Best Egg, and Upstart, neobanks such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/220119">Revolut </a>, and blockchain-based payment processing platform GreenBox. The platform reportedly originated over USD 24 billion in loans per annum, around 10x the value of loans it originated in 2015. Cross River Bank has expanded its operations by acquiring Betterfin, a platform offering lending-as-a-service (LaaS) solutions, in November 2021. Through the acquisition, Cross River Bank leveraged Betterfin’s software to digitize parts of the small-business lending process (such as origination and underwriting).The company partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/1643">American Express </a>(Amex) to enable FinTechs to issue credit cards through Cross River Bank, on the Amex network, while also providing select Amex benefits to the FinTechs.Funding and financials The company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9458">raised USD 620 million in funding </a>co-led by Eldridge and a16z, at a valuation of over USD 3 billion, to invest in product developments, recruitment, international expansion, and boosting strategic partnerships.

Cross River Bank

Synctera was co-founded in 2020 by Peter Hazlehurst, the former head of Uber Money, who previously led the development of Google Wallet. The company offers an API-based infrastructure platform for community and regional banks to find and partner with FinTechs. This enables FinTechs to leverage the former’s licenses to embed FDIC-insured mobile checking, debit cards, savings accounts, and payment innovations, among other features. The API platform offered to the banks will then be sold to the FinTechs to code on. Although the end customers interact with the FinTechs, they legally belong to the bank.<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8117">Synctera mainly charges the banks </a>based on the interchange fees they earn (half of the interchange fees, as of January 2022) from the services provided. It does not charge them an initial amount to use the platform. Moreover, the platform also embeds fraud-as-a-service and charges FinTechs on a per transaction basis (4 cents per transaction) should they choose to use it. It subsequently shares that revenue 50/50 with the banks.The company launched the “t-minus10” project in January 2022, which offers a live sandbox for FinTechs to build apps, test, and go to market, enhancing their access to banking partners. It subsequently launched a “Smart Charge Card” (APIs to build, launch, and issue charge cards) and “White-label Banking App” (a codebase for developers to build embedded banking products or neobank apps) infrastructure in October 2022.Key customers and partnershipsIn February 2022, Lineage Bank (a community bank in Tennessee) and GoGetr (FinTech aiming to promote health and wealth management) became the first companies to launch a banking solution using the Synctera platform. As of March 2023, the platform was working with around 50 fintechs, of which 14 were live (including Wayapay and Float). Synctera reportedly had over 20 implementations set for launch in the following two months.Synctera announced a new card issuing and management infrastructure offering (Card-as-a-Service), in July 2021, which it developed in partnership with Mastercard and leading card issuing infrastructure disruptor, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/64287">Marqeta</a>.Funding and financialsIn March 2024, Synctera raised USD 18.6 million in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27244">Series A1 extension</a> co-led by Lightspeed and Fin Capital. The company earmarked the funds to support business growth by facilitating more complex use cases across the US and international markets. The company also <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16980?industryIds=53">raised USD 15 million</a> in funding led by NAventures in March 2023, to invest in expanding the platform’s use cases and broadening its geographic footprint beyond the US (including expanding to Canada). Meanwhile, Synctera has also partnered with the National Bank of Canada to enable companies to launch FinTech apps and embedded banking products in Canada.

Synctera

Based in the UK, Weavr, formerly known as Open Payments Cloud, was spun out of payment provider Ixaris in 2019. Weavr offers the infrastructure for enterprises to embed banking services across various industries, including education, fitness, logistics, etc. Weavr’s “Meta” platform combines multiple banking and payments partners in one platform through application programming interfaces (APIs). Using the APIs, enterprises can embed virtual banking services such as card payments, fund transfers, and international banking accounts.Weavr expanded its operations to Singapore in November 2022, as part of its global expansion plans.Key customers and partnershipsAs of July 2021, Weavr’s customers included Finway, Thanks Ben, and MySkillCamp, among others.In October 2019, Weavr partnered with payment service providers Global Processing Services (GPS), Paynetics, and iDenfy to enable developers to create and run sophisticated and streamlined payment experiences for their European customers through Weavr.Funding and financialsWeavr <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8647?industryIds=53">raised USD 40 million </a>in Series A funding in February 2022, led by Tiger Global, less than a year after <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4166">raising GBP 4 million (USD 5.5 million) </a>in seed funding in July. The funds were earmarked for business development and recruitment to support Weavr’s expansion to the US market, while also supporting its continued expansion in the UK and Europe.

Weavr

MX offers an open finance portal, data connectivity application programming interface (API), and MX platform API for banks, credit unions, and other financial service providers. The company’s solutions allow its clients to utilize financial data to reduce fraud, approve loans faster, and improve their customer experiences. In addition to APIs and connections, MX also offers a range of capabilities, including data aggregation, analytics, financial feed insights, wealth and investment services, and verification services. MX looks to enable banks and financial institutions to launch next-generation services and apps that automate and personalize financial experiences. As of January 2021, the company noted that it worked with more than 2,000 banks, credit unions, and FinTech companies, and its platform reached over 200 million end-users. Moreover, it also powered 43 of the top 50 digital banks as of the same period. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8753?industryIds=53">February 2022, MX partnered </a>with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/361160">Rize </a>, to enable users to access Rize’s banking infrastructure to build, launch, and scale financial products through a single API, thereby reducing the development time and cost. In January 2021, MX raised USD 300 million in a Series C funding round led by TPG Capital, at a valuation of USD 1.9 billion. The newly raised funds are to be invested in improving MX’s capabilities, expanding its global presence, and increasing its workforce. In January 2021, MX noted that its headcount tripled over the past two years, reaching 550 staff members. The company appointed Shane Evans as interim chief executive officer (CEO) in January 2022, to prepare the company for an IPO or sale (at a valuation of over USD 5 billion) and oversee its growth.

Bankable is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) infrastructure provider allowing financial institutions and corporations to utilize its API to integrate banking services. It provides a platform for its enterprise customers to offer modular banking services, including ledger management (process data from multiple banks to support cash management for global corporate affairs), digital banking, payment cards, and e-wallets. The company expanded its platform by <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19662">acquiring Arex Markets </a>in June 2023, to embed working capital solutions (such as flexible invoice financing, corporate credit cards, lodged cars, and revolving credit). The company has a global presence, with operations spanning from the US to the Middle East as of January 2021. Bankable noted that the expansion of its global footprint also helps its European and US FinTech clients expand their operations internationally. Key customers and partnerships In January 2020, the company partnered with the diversified FinTech infrastructure provider <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/85350">Plaid </a>, which enabled Bankable’s customers to use Plaid’s tech to connect to more than 15,000 banks in the US and Europe. Funding and financialsIn April 2019, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/13061">Visa </a>invested an undisclosed sum in Bankable and entered a partnership with the startup. Through the partnership, Visa members obtained access to Bankable’s platform, while Bankable used VisaNet (Visa’s electronic global payments network) to extend its international payment and banking solutions.

Bankable

Platforms that allow FinTechs to integrate banking services such as opening and maintaining accounts, facilitating card payments, etc.


Platforms that enable FinTechs to integrate a range of payment-related services such as one-time payments, subscriptions, and receipt management for domestic and cross-border transactions.


Companies that enable organizations to embed anti-money laundering (AML), identity verification, and know-your-customer (KYC) solutions.


Platforms that allow FinTechs to integrate lending services,  by typically applying AI/ML technology to a spending analysis to analyze creditworthiness.

Companies providing APIs and integrations for FinTechs to access securities markets, facilitate transactions and clearing, and provide insights to help end-users manage their finances.

May specialize in promoting inclusiveness in financial services, primarily in the investment and lending spaces

AI/ML can improve the quality of their offerings, such as using AI/ML to reduce biases

Used for payment completions, accessing banking and transaction data, and providing financial insights, among others

Kevin.

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