Berlin-based banking platform solarisBank raises €56.6M Series B from BBVA, Visa, Lakestar, and others
SolarisBank, the Berlin-based “banking platform” co-founded by fintech company builder Finleap, appears to be on quite a roll. — The company, which now claims nearly 60 corporate clients …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2018, solarisBank was still proving out the model Finleap incubated it for: a fully licensed German bank whose balance sheet and compliance stack other fintechs rent through APIs, then serving nearly 60 corporate clients. The €56.6M Series B matters less for its size than for who wrote the checks — BBVA and Visa took minority stakes alongside Lakestar, giving a European incumbent and a global card network direct equity exposure to banking-as-a-service rather than building it themselves.
The bet aged well by the corpus's own record: solarisBank went on to raise a $67.5M Series C at a $360M valuation in 2020, then a $224M round at $1.65B in 2021 to fund the Contis acquisition, and by 2024 had cleared €450M in total funding with a €96M Series F led by SBI Group. This Series B is the inflection where strategic money arrived and the Berlin company became the reference point for a category.
First-order effects
- BBVA and Visa convert from observers of embedded finance into shareholders of its leading European rail, gaining deal flow and insight into which fintechs are building on solarisBank's APIs without an acquisition.
- The fresh capital lets solarisBank scale past its ~60 corporate clients while staying independent of any single bank partner — the licensing moat Finleap designed it around gets deeper just as demand for API-delivered financial services accelerates.
Second-order effects
- Visa's equity position foreshadows the network's broader pattern visible in the relationships data — later moving to acquire fraud-detection firm BioCatch for $2.4B — where the card giant buys capability in adjacent financial infrastructure rather than only partnering.
- Rival SaaS banking platforms feel the validation: Mambu raised a €30M Series C within a year for its own banking engine serving N26 and OakNorth, and Berlin's Airbank and finmid later raised on the same embedded-fintech thesis, confirming the category this round de-risked.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, regulated banking splits into two tiers — licensed infrastructure providers renting out rails via APIs, and brands layering financial products on top — with incumbents like BBVA and Visa participating through stakes and acquisitions instead of competing head-on.
- Consolidation becomes the endgame for the tier-one players: solarisBank's own $224M acquisition of rival Contis shows that once capital concentrates in a few licensed platforms, they buy rivals for licenses and geography rather than new categories.
The trend: Banking-as-a-service is consolidating from a Berlin experiment into core financial infrastructure, with strategic investors like Visa and BBVA taking equity positions years before the sector's roll-up phase.