The three German entrepreneurs who sold their last payments company to Paysafe for an estimated $100 million have secured fresh capital for their next act: turning Europe's sprawling prepaid market into something that actually works.
Finperks, a Berlin-based startup barely a year old, closed a €3.3 million pre-seed round in February, co-led by Motive Partners and seed+speed Ventures. The company announced the funding between March 11-12, 2026, alongside a pitch that might sound oddly mundane at first—aggregating gift cards and cashback offers through a single API. But the founders, veterans of navigating Europe's notoriously fractured financial infrastructure, see something bigger: a chaotic market ripe for the kind of consolidation that made Stripe indispensable for online payments.
"Banks need cashback to retain and engage users," Sebastian Seifert, one of three co-founders, told Tech.eu in a recent interview. "None of them want to build prepaid infrastructure. They want to plug into it."
It's a bet that Motive Partners—a private equity firm known for backing financial technology infrastructure plays—apparently shares. The firm's portfolio page lists Finperks as a February 2026 addition. Carsten Maschmeyer, a German entrepreneur with stakes across media and finance, participated through seed+speed. Some reports pegged the round at $4 million, a discrepancy that reflects currency conversion timing more than anything else.
A Familiar Playbook
Seifert and his co-founders, Achim Bönsch and Andreas Veller, are no strangers to building unglamorous but lucrative infrastructure. The trio previously ran viafintech, the parent company behind Barzahlen and viacash—a suite of tools that let Germans pay bills at corner stores and handle cash transactions digitally. Paysafe, a global payments processor, acquired the company in 2021 for what sources familiar with the deal estimated at around $100 million.
After a stint inside Paysafe's eCash and open banking division—presumably wrestling with the kind of corporate integration that often follows acquisitions—the three left to start Finperks in 2025. The new venture tackles a different but adjacent problem: Europe's prepaid ecosystem is a mess.
Gift cards, branded cashback programs, and tax-advantaged employee perks (like Germany's €50-per-month Sachbezug allowance) exist in isolated silos. A bank wanting to offer users cashback at 1,000 retailers might need to negotiate and integrate with dozens of providers. Finperks offers a shortcut: one API connection, access to what the company claims is more than 1,000 brands across Europe.
It's infrastructure arbitrage, essentially. And if the model sounds familiar, that's intentional. Finperks positions itself as the "Stripe for prepaid"—handling compliance, settlement, and backend plumbing so clients can focus on user experience.
Early Traction, Big Projections
As of March 2026, Finperks counts FLIZpay—a payments app that uses brand-funded cashback as a hook—among its customers, along with Recardy and Paylo, both HR platforms leaning on Germany's tax-free benefits structure. Whether that constitutes genuine product-market fit or just early adopter curiosity is, perhaps, still an open question.
Motive Partners, for its part, published a thesis in March explaining the bet. The firm pointed to industry projections suggesting gift cards alone could balloon to $5.3 trillion globally by 2034. More importantly, digital prepaid already accounts for more than half of European prepaid volumes, a shift that transforms what was once a niche retail product into something resembling a legitimate payment rail.
The logic follows that as prepaid matures, companies will prefer unified orchestration over juggling fragmented supplier relationships—the same evolution that turned card processing from a technical nightmare into a plug-and-play commodity.
The Fragmentation Problem
Europe remains a patchwork of payment habits, regulatory regimes, and consumer preferences. What works in Germany often doesn't translate to France or Italy. Finperks is gambling that prepaid is one area where aggregation can overcome that fragmentation, particularly as cashback and loyalty programs become table stakes for neobanks and fintechs competing on thin margins.
The €3.3 million will fund engineering hires, brand partnerships, and a push into additional European markets—though the company hasn't specified which ones. Given the founders' history with Barzahlen, Germany will likely remain the anchor, but the broader European opportunity is what justifies venture-scale ambitions.
Whether Finperks can execute on that vision, or whether prepaid remains too fragmented and low-margin to support a venture-backed infrastructure play, will take more than a pre-seed round to answer. But the founders have done this before. And in fintech, that track record counts for something.
