Malte Rau

Malte Rau runs Pliant, a Berlin fintech that does something deceptively simple: it lets a company issue a credit card - physical or virtual - and pipe every transaction straight into its accounting and finance systems. Behind that simplicity sits a modular, API-first platform handling card issuance, processing, foreign exchange, white-labeled interfaces, real-time data and embedded credit lines. As co-founder and chief executive, Rau has spent the last few years turning what banks used to treat as a slow, paperwork-heavy product into something developers can call like any other piece of software.

In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B, led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest with participation from PayPal Ventures and Motive Ventures. It pushed Pliant past $100 million in total equity raised and set the stage for the move Rau now talks about most: crossing the Atlantic. "With a strong foundation in Europe, we are ready to bring our solution to the U.S. market," he said when the round was announced. The company reports serving around 3,500 businesses across Europe with triple-digit revenue growth, and plans to grow its team beyond 200 people as it opens the American chapter.

What makes the pitch interesting is the bet underneath it. While much of the last decade of fintech chased consumers with glossy neobank apps, Rau went the other direction. His view is that businesses still trust their banks, and that the winning move is to arm those banks and partners with card infrastructure good enough to compete. Pliant, in his framing, is the software layer that makes that possible.

A background built on reading risk

Rau did not arrive at card issuing by accident. Before founding anything, he spent roughly 15 years in credit risk and financial services. He studied Management and Economics at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum from 2007 to 2010, then began his career at KPMG as a risk consultant analyzing banks in the wake of the financial crisis. From there he moved through the early German fintech scene - stints at the lending platforms auxmoney and Lendico, strategy work at zeb consulting, and a role as Head of Fintech Investments at Global Growth Cap.

He helped build a venture debt fund at Rocket Internet to refinance fintech lenders, served as interim Chief Risk Officer at FinCompare, and founded his first company, Geldspeicher, focused on open-banking risk data. It is an unusually thorough tour of where financial products tend to break - collections, underwriting, refinancing, compliance. That accumulated pattern recognition is what he later poured into Pliant.

Founded into a storm

Rau co-founded Pliant with Fabian Terner in February 2020. The timing was, in hindsight, almost comically bad. A month later, the first COVID lockdown arrived and a term sheet for the young company was pulled as investors retreated from anything that looked risky. Then, about three months after launch, Pliant's issuing partner collapsed in the Wirecard scandal - the biggest corporate fraud in German stock market history. A three-month-old startup suddenly had to restructure its entire foundation.

He kept going. Fundraising remained brutal - in one later round Rau has said he approached roughly 150 venture capitalists and faced a rejection rate close to 99% before closing. The company navigated multi-jurisdictional regulation, heavy legal costs and the ordinary chaos of building payment infrastructure, and came out the other side with a working platform and paying customers.

A "bunch of nerds," by his own description

Rau is not the romantic-visionary type of founder, and he does not pretend to be. He has described his team as "a bunch of nerds" who prefer data to inspiration - a group that makes decisions by looking at numbers rather than reaching for a narrative. It fits the product. Payment infrastructure rewards patience, precision and a tolerance for regulatory detail far more than it rewards showmanship.

That temperament shows up in the advice he says he would give his younger self: "This might take longer than you expected, and that's fine." For a company that survived a pandemic, a fraud scandal and 150 rejections on its way to Series B, it reads less like a platitude and more like a lesson earned.

Berlin roots, American ambitions

There is a symmetry to Rau's story. He was born in Berlin about a year before the Wall came down, lived there until his father's job moved the family when he was 10, and eventually returned to build his company in the same city. Berlin's fintech scene - which he has spoken about at length - became the launchpad. Now the next act points outward, toward a US market that is larger, more competitive and, for a European card platform, largely uncharted.

Pliant's model runs on interchange - roughly 2% per transaction in its European business segment - which means growth compounds with every card in a customer's wallet and every payment routed through the platform. Scaling that engine into the United States is the challenge Rau has set for himself. If the European foundation holds, the American expansion is where the thesis gets tested at full size. And on one small, human detail he has already been overruled: his American wife vetoed naming their son "Junior."