Berlin-based Upvest, which offers banking-as-a-service APIs, announces a $42M Series B led by Bessemer and says it has secured securities and crypto licenses
Amy O'Brien / Sifted :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 round is the early chapter of what became one of Berlin's most consistently funded fintech infrastructure stories: Upvest's €100M Series C led by Hedosophia followed in late 2024, and by March 2026 it had raised another $90M reportedly at a $735M valuation, up from about $413M in 2024. The through-line is that each raise has compounded the same asset — trading APIs sold to neobanks like Revolut and retail lenders.
What made this Series B distinct at the time was the license stack: pairing Bessemer's capital with secured securities and crypto licenses positioned Upvest not just as software but as regulated infrastructure. It sits in a dense Berlin API-finance cluster alongside Mambu's €235M Series E in banking APIs, Ivy's open-banking payments network, and Airbank's payments data service.
First-order effects
- Neobanks and retail lenders using Upvest's APIs can offer stock trading and crypto products under its licenses rather than pursuing their own regulatory approvals, shortening their time to market for brokerage features.
- Bessemer's lead gives Upvest capital to scale the licensed brokerage stack while rivals in the Berlin API cohort — Mambu, Ivy, Airbank — remain focused on adjacent layers like core banking, payments, and open-banking rails.
Second-order effects
- Neobanks weighing build-versus-buy on trading now face an incumbent licensed supplier, raising the bar for any competitor that wants to sell brokerage APIs without its own securities and crypto authorizations.
- As Upvest converts licenses into distribution across neobanks like Revolut, pricing power in embedded investing shifts toward whoever holds the regulatory perimeter, pressuring unlicensed API providers to partner with or become regulated entities themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, European embedded finance consolidates around a small set of licensed API platforms that rent out regulatory approval alongside technology — making licenses, not code, the scarce asset that successive funding rounds price upward, as Upvest's trajectory toward a reported $735M valuation illustrates.
The trend: European fintech infrastructure is consolidating around licensed API providers whose regulatory authorizations, compounded by repeated funding rounds, become the primary moat in embedded finance.