Finperks raises $4M to become the API layer for prepaid payments in Europe

The Berlin startup, founded by the team behind viafintech, is building a single integration that lets banks, fintechs, and HR platforms offer gift cards, cashback, and tax-free employee benefits, without touching the underlying infrastructure themselves.

The founders of viafintech, the prepaid payments company acquired by Paysafe in 2021, have returned with a new venture, and this time they are building on the supply side of the market rather than within it.

Finperks, the Berlin-based startup they have founded since leaving Paysafe, has raised $4 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Motive Partners, the fintech-specialist investment firm, and seed+speed Ventures, the Berlin-based B2B software fund that closed a €90 million third vehicle in January this year.

The company is building API infrastructure that lets banks, fintech companies, and HR platforms offer prepaid products, gift cards, eCash, and cashback, through a single integration, rather than requiring each partner to stitch together a web of issuers, brand networks, settlement providers, and compliance layers on their own.

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The problem Finperks is solving is structural. The prepaid market is large and growing but operationally fragmented: a bank that wants to offer brand-funded cashback to retain customers, or an HR platform looking to distribute Germany’s €50-per-month tax-free employee benefit known as the Sachbezug, currently has to navigate multiple providers across multiple functions.

Finperks collapses that into a single API giving partners access to more than 1,000 brands across Europe.

“Banks need cashback to retain and engage users,” said Sebastian Seifert, co-founder and co-CEO. “HR platforms need benefits as a logical extension to upsell clients. None of them want to build prepaid infrastructure. They want to plug into it.”

Seifert is not a newcomer to the space. He co-founded viafintech, the barcode-based eCash platform known in Germany and Austria as Barzahlen/viacash, at the age of 20. By the time Paysafe acquired it in November 2021 in a deal valued at over $100 million, viafintech had grown to more than 100 employees operating across 17 markets in Europe and the US.

Seifert was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in DACH in 2019 and Europe Finance in 2020. Finperks, founded in the summer of 2025 and based in Berlin-Charlottenburg, is his next act, and he is building it with the same core team.

Six months in, the company says it has already onboarded more than 1,000 brands and signed its first customers. Payment app Flizpay uses Finperks to offer brand-funded cashback deposited directly into users’ bank accounts at the point of purchase a product Seifert was previously an angel investor in.

HR platforms Recardy and Paylo use Finperks to distribute the Sachbezug without building any additional infrastructure. The new funding will be used to grow the engineering team, deepen brand partnerships, and expand into additional European markets.

For Motive Partners, the bet is squarely on the infrastructure layer. The firm, which focuses exclusively on technology-enabled financial services businesses, has been steadily expanding its early-stage portfolio alongside its larger growth and buyout activity.

seed+speed Ventures’ third fund, meanwhile, is explicitly oriented toward European B2B and enterprise software companies developing AI or providing tools to deploy it in corporate operations, Finperks fits neatly within its thesis on enterprise workflow infrastructure.

Finperks is a team of eight people. The company’s job listings describe a founding team of serial entrepreneurs and fintech veterans with a “proven track record,” building outward from the viafintech playbook into a market the founders know intimately from both the product and distribution side.