By Will McCurdy on Thursday 25 August 2022
The start-up’s digital wealth platform is explicitly sustainability-focused and aimed squarely at the Millenial and Gen Z demographics.
Berlin-based start-up SageWealth has closed a pre-seed funding round worth €500,000.
Founded in 2020, the start-up offers a mixture of digital banking and investing with a sustainability-focused bent aimed at millennial and Gen Z investors.
The start-up was founded by Sana Al-Badri and Marco Vega Seeberger, who met while they were students at the University of Sussex.
SageWealth offers a mixture of sustainability-themed investment options, with both growth-focused equity-based options and safety-focused bond and commodity-based options available.
SageWealth claims all its investments abide by EU sustainability guidelines as defined in articles 8 and 9 of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.
The new funding will apparently be used to build out its digital platform, including rolling out more "financial life" planning tools and sustainability-focused ETF offerings.
Investors in the seed funding were said to include Dr. Marta Ra, founder of Women in Sustainable Finance, and Marie Louise Seelig, the founder of digital debt technology firm CrossLend.
Other backers in the round included Till Behnkel, founder of german social media platform Nebenan.de; Hans Raffauf, founder of female-focused health app Clue, and Aleksander Orlic, founder of business bank Penta.
The start-up claims it achieved 20% month-on-month growth after it launched last year, with €1 million in assets under control prior to this latest funding, and that it was bootstrapped and had no marketing budget up until this point.
In addition, the funding round was supported by several senior hires, reportedly including former executives from the Trade Republic, Getquin, Join Capital, and Northvolt.
“Basically financial advisory has not changed since the 70s,” said Sana Al-Badri, co-founder and chief product officer of SageWealth. “Our generation distrusts banks because they simply don’t understand our values and needs”.
Berlin remains a popular destination for fintech funding, in July, German insurtech firm WeFox raised $400m in a Series D.
Despite many success stories, overall Germany lagged behind the UK in fintech funding by a large margin as of late.
German fintechs raised just £2bn in the first quarter of 2022, barely half the £7.6bn raised by the UK, though still beating out the £1.9bn raised by French fintechs.
