Yapily, which offers an API to let enterprises connect to 1,500+ banks across Europe with open banking services, raises $51M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Yapily's $13M Series A in April 2020 funded the build-out of an API that now reaches 1,500+ European banks; this $51M Sapphire-led Series B is the scale-up round on top of it. The raise lands in a category where Sweden's Tink had already set the pace with successive rounds — €56M to expand across European markets, then €85M at a €680M valuation for access to ~3,400 banks — making open-banking aggregation one of Europe's most consistently capitalized API plays.
First-order effects
- Yapily gains the capital to widen bank coverage and enterprise integrations, closing part of the reach gap with Tink's ~3,400-bank network.
- Sapphire Ventures adds Yapily to its late-stage portfolio, doubling down on the infrastructure layer of open banking rather than consumer-facing apps.
Second-order effects
- Tink and later entrants like Ivy — whose $20M 'network of networks' Series A targets global open-banking payments — face better-funded competition for enterprise customers deciding which aggregator to standardize on.
- Enterprises choosing between competing bank-connectivity APIs gain leverage as providers compete on coverage breadth and integration cost rather than availability alone.
Third-order effects
- If funding concentration continues, Europe's bank-connectivity market trends toward a few large API aggregators sitting between thousands of banks and enterprises — recomposing the moat around who holds the connections, not who holds the deposits.
The trend: Open banking is shifting value from banks to the API aggregators intermediating them, with venture capital consolidating behind a small set of pan-European connectivity platforms.