Today we're announcing that Talentir has raised €4 million in seed funding to keep building what we believe is the most advanced payout infrastructure in the world.
The round was led by Redstone VC and joined by Inovia Capital (with backing from Patrick Pichette, former CFO of Google), Shapers, Tenity, NewSchool, Noia Capital, BFC, Cambrena Capital, and Mark Ransford. We're proud of who chose to back this round, and we'll talk more about that below.
But the round itself isn't really the news. What matters is what it validates: that the way the world pays out money is structurally broken, and that fixing it is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure work in fintech today. This article is about why we believe that, what we've built so far, and what the next chapter looks like.
The Unsolved Half of Fintech
When people hear "fintech," they think first about payments. Stripe, Adyen, PayPal — the platforms that made it trivial to accept money from customers anywhere in the world. That problem is genuinely solved. Any business today can collect payments with a few API calls and a card form on a checkout page.
The other half of the same problem — sending money out to thousands of recipients worldwide — has not been solved. It's still manual, still expensive, still constrained by regulatory complexity, still built on infrastructure that wasn't designed for the operational shape it now has to handle.
Most companies that need to pay creators, freelancers, distributed teams, artists, partners, or affiliates end up building their own workflows around the gap. Spreadsheets. Whole finance teams. Hacked-together combinations of bank rails, PayPal Business, and Excel exports. The cost shows up in headcount, in FX evaporation on every cross-border payment, in the campaigns that get scoped down because finance pushed back, and in the relationships with recipients that quietly erode every time payment is late.
We've spent a lot of time over the last year articulating why this is structural rather than incidental. If you want the long-form version of that argument, it lives in our thesis on why the creator economy is still behind. The short version: the world's existing payout infrastructure was built for a different shape of business than the businesses that now need to pay people at scale.
That's the gap we exist to close. Money-out, made as standard as money-in.
What We've Built So Far
The Talentir platform combines three technologies that, in combination, we believe make it the most advanced payout infrastructure in the world today. Each pillar matters individually; together they enable something none of them produces alone.
1. Stablecoin settlement infrastructure
We bet early on stablecoins as the underlying settlement layer for cross-border payouts — at a time when most of the fintech industry treated them as a curiosity. The reason is operational, not ideological. Traditional cross-border bank rails take days, cost percentages, and pass through multiple correspondent banks that each have veto power over the transaction. Stablecoin settlement happens in seconds, costs cents, and operates 24/7/365.
From the customer side, none of this is visible. They fund their wallet in EUR or USD. The recipient receives their preferred currency through their preferred method. The stablecoin layer is the rail underneath; nobody in the workflow has to think about crypto. We've covered the technical and operational details in our stablecoin payouts explainer.
2. AI-native automation
The largest operational cost of payouts isn't the payment itself — it's the preparation work that happens before. Reconciling revenue. Splitting it correctly across recipients. Verifying identity. Handling tax treatment. Generating compliant invoices. At scale, this work consumes entire finance teams.
Our AI handles this preparation layer end to end. It cleans data, catches errors, applies the right split structure to each transaction, generates the right tax treatment per jurisdiction, and produces the right compliant invoice for each payment. Critically, it never moves money on its own — final approval is always made by a human. The AI is the layer that turns a multi-day reconciliation process into seconds; the human is the layer that ensures every payment is intentional.
3. Full Merchant of Record responsibility
Most payout providers ship software and leave the regulatory burden with the customer. We take a different position: as the Merchant of Record for the transactions running through Talentir, we absorb the compliance obligations, the tax handling, the recipient KYC, and the regulatory responsibility. Our customers keep their brand, their relationships, and their workflows; we carry the regulatory weight.
This is the single most under-appreciated part of what we do, and the part that means the most operationally to growing customers. The compliance burden of cross-border payouts compounds with scale; absorbing it at the platform level is what lets our customers grow their programs without proportionally growing their compliance functions.
Where We Are Today
A team of six. Seven-figure payout volumes flowing through the platform every day. Customers across creator agencies, UGC platforms, music distributors, in-house brand programs, and affiliate networks. Our next operational milestone is €100 million in annual payout volume, which we expect to reach within the next few quarters.
We're proud of being capital-efficient. Six people, this much volume, this kind of technical complexity — that ratio is the part we care about most.
What This Funding Enables
The €4 million seed round funds three priorities.
Expanding the AI-native platform. We have a deep roadmap of automation that pushes more of the manual preparation work into the platform. Every step we take here is a step our customers' finance teams don't have to take.
Strengthening the Merchant of Record infrastructure. Compliance coverage is one of the highest-leverage investments we can make. The more jurisdictions we absorb the regulatory weight in, the more our customers can operate globally without building their own compliance functions.
International expansion. We're European-headquartered (Vienna and Zurich), but the payout problem is global. The next year is about expanding meaningfully outside Europe while keeping the regulatory rigour that defines our platform.
We'll have more to say about specific roadmap milestones over the next quarters. For now, the headline is that this round buys us the time and resources to keep building at the level our customers and the market require — without compromising on the regulatory standards that make us defensible.
Why These Investors
We were deliberate about who we wanted on this round.
Redstone VC leads the round. Redstone is one of the most data-driven European venture firms, with deep fintech expertise and a track record of backing infrastructure businesses through to scale. Richard Würl, the principal leading the investment, said something in the diligence process that's stuck with us: "Payout infrastructure is one of the last major unsolved problems in B2B fintech. What Talentir has built, the combination of stablecoin settlement, AI, and full regulatory responsibility as a Merchant of Record, is technologically unique." The fact that Redstone shares the thesis is the strongest validation we could have asked for.
Patrick Pichette, former CFO of Google (via Inovia Capital), brings a CFO's lens to one of the largest operational scaling stories in technology history. Having someone who has personally run finance at internet scale paying attention to what we're building tells us we're working on the right problem.
The rest of the round — Shapers, Tenity, NewSchool, Noia Capital, BFC, Cambrena Capital, and angel investor Mark Ransford — brings a combination of fintech infrastructure expertise, creator economy depth, and operational scale-up experience. Each one contributes something different.
We're grateful for the confidence. And we know what's expected.
Why Europe
Most of the great infrastructure businesses of the past two decades came from the United States. Stripe, Adyen, the broader payments ecosystem — mostly American or American-adjacent.
We think the next generation of global financial infrastructure can be built from Europe. The talent is here. The regulatory standards are among the strictest in the world, which forces a discipline that pays off when you operate at scale. And the technological conditions — stablecoin frameworks under MiCA, AI capability, modern payment rails — are aligned in a way they weren't ten years ago.
Talentir is built between Vienna and Zurich. That's not incidental. We believe Europe is where the next major financial infrastructure company will emerge from, and we believe Talentir can be it.
If you're a business that pays creators, freelancers, partners, or external teams at any scale that's outgrowing your current setup, we'd love to talk. Book a demo and we'll walk through what we can do for your specific shape of activity.
Thank you to everyone who made this possible!
— Lukas, Johannes, and the Talentir team
