Achim Bönsch, Sebastian Seifert, and Andreas Veller know something about turning fragmented payment systems into valuable infrastructure. The trio spent years building Barzahlen/viafintech, a barcode-based cash payment network, before selling it to Paysafe in 2021 for what industry watchers pegged north of $100 million.
Now they're applying the same playbook to Europe's messy prepaid market. Their new venture, Finperks, just raised €3.4 million in pre-seed funding—a round co-led by Motive Partners and seed+speed Ventures, with backing from German investor Carsten Maschmeyer. The March 11 announcement signals growing investor appetite for infrastructure plays in payments, particularly those that promise to consolidate what's currently a patchwork of regional providers and bilateral contracts.
The pitch? Think Stripe, but for gift cards, vouchers, cashback, and employee benefits. One API, more than 1,000 brands, more than 30 countries.
What's Actually Being Solved Here
Talk to anyone managing partnerships across Europe's prepaid ecosystem and you'll hear the same complaints. Different contracts for different countries. Separate integrations for every supplier. Settlement headaches that multiply as you scale.
Finperks is betting that aggregation is the answer. The Berlin-based startup offers a single integration point that handles everything from catalog access to order fulfillment to financial settlement. Whether a company wants to offer gift cards to customers in Spain, vouchers to employees in Germany, or cashback rewards across multiple markets, the theory goes, there should be one contract instead of dozens.
Early traction suggests the model resonates. FLIZpay, a Berlin payments app that closed a $1 million pre-seed round in September 2025 (with viafintech founders participating as angels), uses Finperks to pipe brand-funded cashback directly into users' bank accounts—a technically fiddly process when you're dealing with multiple brands across borders. HR platforms Recardy and Paylo have also signed on, leveraging the API to navigate Germany's Sachbezug regulations, which let employers provide up to €50 monthly in tax-free vouchers as a supplement to salary. That's a narrow but surprisingly lucrative use case in the German market.
The Infrastructure Thesis
Motive Partners, which manages over $8 billion focused on financial technology and services, framed its investment around a broader vision of prepaid evolving beyond its current use cases. In a March insight post, the firm pointed to what it sees as structural drivers: agentic commerce (AI-powered purchasing), peer-to-peer remittances, microtransactions, tokenized value.
Whether all those trends actually materialize in ways that benefit prepaid infrastructure remains an open question. But the bet reflects a conviction among some investors that payments rails—particularly in Europe, where fragmentation is both a challenge and an opportunity—are due for consolidation.
seed+speed Ventures, which closed a €90 million Fund III in January, participated alongside Maschmeyer. Ramin Niroumand, who leads Motive's venture platform, will work closely with the Finperks team as they scale.
What Comes Next
Finperks incorporated on June 20, 2025 and has been live for roughly half a year. The team has grown rapidly since launch, operating out of shared office space on Uhlandstraße in Berlin's Charlottenburg district—a neighborhood better known for its cafés than its startup scene, though that's been changing.
The €3.4 million will fund expanding the engineering team, strengthening brand partnerships, and scaling to additional European markets. The company's API documentation, publicly available, shows fairly standard endpoints for product catalogs, order processing, and webhooks, secured via HMAC-SHA256 authentication.
For now, Finperks remains a small operation with an outsized ambition: turning Europe's prepaid chaos into a single, programmable layer. Whether that vision attracts the kind of distribution needed to justify infrastructure-scale investment is the question the next 18 months will likely answer.
The founders, at least, have done this before. Just perhaps not at quite this level of complexity.
