Upvest, a Berlin-based fintech company, announced on Thursday that it has closed $42M (approximately €40.3M) in a Series B round of funding, making it one of Germany’s largest fintech funding rounds in 2022.
The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Earlybird, ABN AMRO Ventures, Notion Capital, Partech, 10x Group, Speedinvest, and Maximilian Tayenthal (N26).
Upvest says it will use the funds to advance its Investment-API, lay the ground for internationalisation, and gradually expand its workforce.
“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,” says Martin Kassing, founder and CEO of Upvest.
“Together with our investors who bring strength to the table in terms of industry expertise as well as internationalisation 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,” he adds.
Upvest: What you need to know
Founded by Martin Kassin, Upvest is a fintech company that has developed an Investment-API, enabling its clients to offer their end customers products in the field of capital market investments, ETFs and stocks to crypto assets.
The company’s API is designed as a plug-and-play solution with fully-fledged process automation at its core. It helps Neobanks, brokers, and established banking players significantly save on the cost since they do not need to develop their brokerage and custody infrastructure from scratch.
The German company’s Investment-API gives fintechs flexibility to individually programme the API tailored to their needs, help reduce onboarding time for new customers, and make investing possible instantly.
Upvest announced its cooperation with the Dutch banking group ABN AMRO in payment rails and transaction banking. Since March 2022, Upvest holds all BaFin licences for securities, and crypto brokerage and custody. The company currently employs 90 people at its main hub in Berlin.
Investors
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 135 IPOs and 200 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer, and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. The VC has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Boston, Beijing, and Bangalore.
“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”, says Charles Birnbaum, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
“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,” he adds.
