berlin-fintech
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Marco Cancellieri and the Prototype That Became a Bank
He met two founders at a Munich hackathon and started coding their broker app the next day. A decade later, Marco Cancellieri’s quiet obsession with mobile design sits inside a bank used by 10 million Europeans.
Thomas Pischke Built the Part of Trade Republic You Never See
A quantum-computing physicist helped turn a three-day conversation about Europe's pension gap into a bank. His signature is not a slogan but the infrastructure underneath it.
Pliant
Pliant is a Berlin-based B2B fintech that turns corporate payments into programmable infrastructure. Its API-first platform lets companies issue physical and virtual credit cards, automate spend controls and receipt handling, and plug card data straight into accounting systems like DATEV and NetSuite. Through its cards-as-a-service model, banks and software platforms can launch their own branded card programs. Founded in 2020 by Malte Rau and Fabian Terner, Pliant runs on the Visa network across 30-plus countries, serves more than 3,500 businesses, and raised a $40M Series B in 2025 to expand into the United States.
Malte Rau
Malte Rau is the Berlin-based CEO and co-founder of Pliant, a B2B fintech that lets companies and banks issue physical and virtual credit cards and plug the resulting data straight into their finance stacks. A former risk manager and fintech investor, he founded Pliant in February 2020 with Fabian Terner and has grown it into a modular, API-first card-issuing platform serving thousands of European businesses. In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest to fund its expansion into the United States.