Vivid Money, a challenger bank out of Berlin with 500,000 customers, has made a name for itself with a financial one-stop shop “super app” that, in addition to basic checking and money management services, also includes stock and cryptocurrency investing. Now, as it gears up to add more services to its platform and expand across all of Europe, the startup has raised €100 million ($114 million), in a round of funding led by Greenoaks Capital, with Ribbit Capital and new backer SoftBank Vision Fund 2 also participating. The funding values Vivd at €775 million. For some context, this is more than double the company’s valuation (€360 million) when it last raised money, a €60 million round in April 2021. Its user base also increased five-fold in that period, and its revenues grew 25x, the company said. Vivid doesn’t share the total amount deposited on its platform, or any details about transaction volumes. As with several other neo-banks, Vivid’s basic free banking is built on top of another provider’s infrastructure in its case, Solarisbank, one of the big, embedded finance players in the region. It augments this with more customized money management services that it has built itself — for example, customers can split their money into up to 15 “pockets” based on specific purposes; money can be moved between pockets very easily and other personalization services.
Vivid’s solution has been to create a set of services for users to easily learn about and subsequently invest in stocks and currencies using their existing fiat accounts. It does this by way of a portal that gives a wide range of options for example it currently has 50 cryptocurrencies from which to choose, along with 3,000 stocks and ETFs designed to appeal to users who are likely new to the field of decentralized finance and might be trying different things out.