Carl Fritjofsson
2024-12-18
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Five years ago this summer, Creandum V led the Series A round in Trade Republic. Since then, it has skyrocketed to more than 4 million customers across 17 countries and more than €35bn assets under management. Christian Hecker and the team have totally smashed the plan they laid out in their pitch deck to us back in 2019.
In March 2019, we were approached to take a look at a ‘Robinhood of Germany’. My first response was: no. Online brokerage platforms have been around in Europe for 25 years. This had all been done before. And Germany? No one saves in Germany other than in their “mattresses”.
Thankfully I slept on it and we took the call with Christian and Thomas Pischke. Their pitch was world-class. They had spent years building the full product stack, thinking of every detail and had designed a beautiful, easy-to-use product. It was also clear that they were a very different business to Robinhood. With Europe facing a €trillion pension gap, Trade Republic’s focus was on building a long term savings platform to provide an easy and low cost way to save and invest, rather than a brokerage/trading product.
Our thesis, which you can read from the blog we posted at the time, was that although online investing had been around for a while, there had been very little innovation in the market and the customer experience was the same as 20 years ago. The experience they offered was vastly superior to anything else in the market. They had thousands of highly engaged customers and, crucially, a German banking license.
The Trade Republic founders
Then we discovered that Trade Republic had a broken cap table, having given away the majority of the business to an early angel investor. Most VCs would have walked away at that point. We had several discussions with the earlier investors and got to an agreement that a more founder-friendly cap table was in the best long term interests of the company. You can hear Christian and I talk about this in more detail with Harry Stebbings on the 20VC podcast.
Since our initial investment, Trade Republic has gone from strength-to-strength. They have incredible customer traction, largely driven by word of mouth. They have secured a full banking license from the ECB and launched in 17 countries, as well as expanding beyond brokerage services to include savings & current accounts and debit cards. And despite the challenges to the wider fintech sector over the past couple of years, they have demonstrated profitability.
Big congrats to Christian, Thomas and team for everything they’ve achieved over the past five years. We can’t wait to see what the next five years hold for them.