European fintech funding declined by around 20% in the first half of 2025 — from €4.6 billion to roughly €3.7 billion — as investors shifted attention toward deeptech, healthtech, and B2B SaaS. The number of fintech deals also fell, signalling growing caution and a cooling investment climate across the sector. Despite this, payments and crypto-adjacent fintechs remain notable bright spots, continuing to attract meaningful capital.
Overall, the market is clearly maturing: investors now prioritize startups with strong fundamentals, regulatory readiness, and solid unit economics over rapid, scale-at-all-costs growth.
With this in mind, Vestbee reached out to some of the most active investors in Europe’s fintech landscape — including Speedinvest, Startup Wise Guys, Earlybird, Serena, and Eleven — to learn which startups they believe are pushing the sector forward. There was just one rule: they couldn’t name any companies from their own portfolios.
Paula Schumacher, investor at Speedinvest
- Afori, Germany
German insurtech startup that builds AI agents for insurance brokers, automating back-office workflows like document handling and task generation. The platform helps brokers focus on client advisory rather than admin, and recently launched with €4 million in initial funding.
- Paid, UK
Paid provides an automated payment and invoicing platform for freelancers and small businesses, simplifying contract creation, compliance, and payout flows for companies hiring independent talent. The firm has just raised €18.5 million.
- Kiln, Finland
is a leading enterprise-grade yield platform that enables institutional clients to earn returns on their digital assets or integrate yield-generating features directly into their own products. It raised $17 million in its latest Series A2 round to further develop products in the DeFi space.
- Midas, Germany
European fintech Midas recently raised an $8.8 million round and offers tokenized real-world assets and on-chain investment products, making institutional-grade financial products accessible via blockchain.
Alexandra Balkova, GP & Head of Portfolio at Startup Wise Guys
- Handwave, Latvia
Handwave is building a biometric platform that turns the human palm into a universal, secure ID and payment method. Their core competitive advantage is in combining palm geometry and subdermal vein structure to create a universally secure ID that cannot be spoofed, unlike existing facial or fingerprint authentication. Founded in 2021, the company has already secured $5 million in funding and a partnership with Visa.
- Creem, Estonia
It’s a next-gen Merchant of Record (MoR) infrastructure powering the new wave of AI-native and micro-SaaS founders. It enables creators, solo startups, and lean digital product builders to launch globally from Day 1 — no lawyers, no accountants, no Stripe Tax rabbit holes. Beyond payments, Creem handles the full compliance stack — tax, invoicing, legal, VAT/GST, KYC/AML — across 40+ markets. They’re building a global commerce-as-a-service, growing ~300% QoQ.
- Carmoola, UK-Ukraine
A British-Ukrainian scaleup, founded in 2021. Since then, they’ve raised more than 40m in venture/equity funding and much more in debt facilities. According to the latest public news, they’re showing 140% in revenue growth and a 155% increase in active customers. It seems they are currently on the right track, executing a shift in the $200 billion car finance market by aligning incentives with the end consumer and bypassing the legacy system's complexities.
- SparkReceipt, Finland
A Finnish startup building an AI-powered receipt and expense management tool for individuals, freelancers, and small businesses. SparkReceipt addresses a universal pain point with a clean, reliable product built by a team with experience in fintech and automation. It brings real structure to a messy, persistent workflow and has earned early traction (supporting over 150 currencies and serving customers from almost 100 countries) for that very reason.
- Frankly Insure, Denmark
Frankly Insure is building a next-generation consumer insurance platform by embedding simple, fair protection directly at checkout with leading electronics and mobility retailers. They’re gaining strong momentum across the Nordics, with 24–33% attach rates and fast growth: 20,500+ active policies, 29% MoM expansion, and €925,000 ARR, boosted by enterprise deals that add thousands of prepaid policies at a time.
The economics are solid — ~50% GWP retention and CAC payback trending below four months. As customers later upgrade into renters, auto, liability, and health insurance, ARPU rises from ~€80 to €800–1,100, positioning Frankly Insure as a capital-efficient, multi-line insurtech on a clear path to profitability.
Margaux Gregoir, Partner at Serena
- Spiko, France
Spiko is revolutionizing European cash management by offering tokenized money market funds with daily interest, zero lock-ups, and full liquidity, all accessible via a blockchain-based API-first platform. With rapid organic growth to over $400 million in assets under management within its first year and recent $22 million Series A funding led by Index Ventures, Spiko is poised to transform treasury management for businesses of all sizes across Europe.
- Xaver, Germany
Xaver provides an AI-powered omnichannel sales platform engineered explicitly for financial advisory. It integrates highly accurate, compliant AI agents with a fully regulated asset management infrastructure. Led by a seasoned and expert founding team, Xaver’s AI drives scalable, cost-efficient, and compliant financial sales operations. Additionally, its asset management capabilities can automate the entire distribution and management process at an unprecedentedly low cost to serve.
- Stacks, UK
Stacks has introduced an agentic AI platform designed to transform month-end close processes by automating intricate accounting tasks beyond traditional rule-based systems. By learning directly from accountants’ actions, Stacks significantly reduces transactional workloads while enhancing strategic finance functions, making it a strong contender in the growing finance automation sector. Backed since inception by leading VCs such as EQT and GC, Stacks is well-positioned to fulfill its ambitious vision.
- Emblematic, Germany
Emblematic harnesses agentic AI to automate key accounting functions, including accounts payable and receivable, for mid-market and enterprise finance teams. This approach tackles operational complexity and rising transaction volumes without increasing headcount. Supported by $2 million in pre-seed funding and led by experienced serial entrepreneurs with deep expertise in applied AI for finance, Emblematic is well-positioned to become a trusted partner to enterprise clients.
Dan Lupu, Venture Partner at Earlybird
Compute Index bridges capital markets trading mechanics with real compute systems to build the first neutral transaction rails and price-discovery layer for GPUs. Unlike aggregators selling compute downstream, they sit upstream as market infrastructure, enabling a regulated, transactable Compute Index that others can settle on. With AI demand turning GPUs into a global commodity and institutions/regulators warming to standardized benchmarks and yield products, the timing for a compute financial market is finally right.
- JustSolve, Italy
This startup is interesting for its “agentic debt collection” approach: an AI platform that automates omnichannel outreach, negotiates repayment, and escalates cases with legal-grade precision. Instead of operating as a traditional collections vendor, they’re productizing recovery as software, lowering cost-to-collect and improving outcomes through continuous, data-driven optimization. It reflects a broader fintech ops shift from manual back-office work to autonomous, agent-led systems that scale decisioning and execution.
- Zeed, UK
Zeed is a personalization and distribution engine for wealth: it plugs into portfolio and client systems and turns that data into tailored research, reports, and campaigns that feel bespoke at scale. The wedge is a new intelligence layer that helps institutions segment, engage, and guide investors with measurable results. It maps to a broader shift in wealth management toward a data-native client experience and mass personalization, positioning it as the next battleground for retention and AUM growth.
- Rekord, Ireland
Rekord is building AI-native credit decisioning that can shrink underwriting from weeks to minutes, with a POC already cutting processing time from 20 hours to 1.5 minutes. They’re using document processing as a focused entry point into mortgages, then expanding across credit products where integration depth and compliance create high switching costs. The upside is a potential data and regulatory moat in a market under heavy efficiency pressure — if they can maintain fast integrations while scaling.
Veselina Markova, Investment Principal and Fintech Lead at Eleven
- Orchestr, UK
Orchestr is a global payment orchestration platform built as a single API to manage and optimize payments across multiple providers, currencies, and methods. Their stack includes smart routing, reconciliation, fraud monitoring, and real-time insights. As merchants scale globally, payment complexity becomes a bottleneck; Orchestr’s unified, modular architecture and real-time routing offer higher conversion, lower cost, and a single-pane view for reconciliation and fraud — especially valuable for cross-border, high-volume merchants. Their partnership with Trust Payments underscores their traction and credibility.
- Malloc, Cyprus
Malloc is an AI-driven cybersecurity company that provides on-device protection against spyware, surveillance, and data theft — without sending sensitive data off the device. With rising surveillance and privacy risks, Malloc’s privacy-first, on-device approach is both differentiated and mission-critical. It addresses a real consumer and enterprise pain point while aligning with strict European regulations. Backing from Google for Startups, Y Combinator, and partners like NVIDIA and Visa further reinforces strong credibility.
- ShareID, France
ShareID provides strong identity verification through AI-powered ID checks and real-time liveness detection. Its “MFA 3.0” lets users authenticate with a government ID plus a smile — without storing biometric data. Digital identity is essential for regulated fintechs. ShareID’s reusable KYC/KYB model (used by RollingFunds) improves efficiency and cuts costs. At the same time, its privacy-first approach — verifying identity without holding PII or biometrics — offers a strong compliance and trust edge for financial services, neobanks, and embedded finance platforms.
- Complytek.ai, Cyprus
Complytek offers a unified KYC/AML compliance platform that brings onboarding, transaction monitoring, and case management into a single SaaS (or on-prem) solution, using machine learning for risk scoring and anomaly detection. Compliance is a major friction point for fintechs. Complytek turns it into an advantage by providing a scalable, high-fidelity system that reduces manual workload and risk, enabling faster growth. For VCs, it’s a mission-critical, sticky product — once integrated, clients rely on it deeply.
