Why Getquin’s Founder Never Stops Fundraising

Raphaël Steil built getquin from Berlin. Now based in Luxembourg, he’s betting the Grand Duchy can host its next chapter.

Five years ago, getquin was a portfolio tracker with a social layer bolted on, the kind of app investors used to compare notes and flex their gains. Today it’s an aggregation platform sitting on €25 billion in connected liquid assets, pushing hard into digital wealth management on the back of a freshly closed €12 million round co-led by State Street Investment Management. And its co-founder, Raphaël Steil, is now running the company from Luxembourg rather than Berlin, where getquin was built and where most of the team still sits.

Berlin still has the keys, for now

Steil is careful not to overstate the symbolism of his move. “I don’t believe in being fully remote as a company,” he says. “Having an HQ is still a worthwhile investment for us, and it’s where most of the team sits, where we meet partners, where we hold board meetings.” getquin drifted into a hybrid setup almost by accident, partly a legacy of the first Covid lockdown, partly just growth spreading teams across cities. His job, heavy on partnerships and investor relations, already meant constant travel. “I’m still in Berlin a few days a month regardless, and if anything the move has made the travel side easier to arrange.”

Rewind to 2020, though, and Luxembourg wasn’t in the conversation. Steil was living in London, and Berlin won out for reasons that read like a standard founder checklist: proximity to his co-founder, cheap rent, talent, investors, other founders. “Luxembourg honestly wasn’t on my radar back then,” he admits. Would he make the same call today? Probably not, because Berlin’s old advantages have eroded. “Affordability has become almost unreachable across most European tech hubs, so that’s less of a deciding factor now. But I’d pay a lot more attention to the structural support you get, and on that front Luxembourg doesn’t have to envy other countries.”

A fragmented industry, ripe for disruption

Steil’s read on European tech is cautiously upbeat. “Building in Europe has never been impossible,” he says, waving off the usual complaints about red tape. “It’s annoying, but it doesn’t actually stop you from creating a company.” Finance in particular looks ripe for a shake-up: “It remains deeply fragmented and often running on outdated infrastructure, and at the same time you have a consumer base that’s asking for better digital products, and growing fast. Add the recent progress in AI on top of that, and the case for building fintech in Europe has never been as compelling.”

He’s blunt, though, about where the continent still falls short: capital. Pointing to the AI-driven data centre race as the latest proof, he argues the constraint was never talent. “It’s not that Europe lacks talent or ideas. But if you know your company has better odds of succeeding elsewhere, that’s where you go.” EU funds, he notes, deploy roughly a fifth of what US counterparts do for a comparably sized economy, which is why getquin’s own institutional cap table sits mostly outside the bloc. He’s watching the proposed “EU Inc.” legal entity with interest: “On paper it should make a real difference and hopefully narrow that gap.”

Luxembourg, seen from the inside

Back on home ground, Steil says the ecosystem has genuinely surprised him — “in a good way.” He points to government backing, forward-leaning AI centres, and well-designed funding programmes. But he doesn’t think Luxembourg should settle for supporting the companies already here. “There’s room to think bigger, to pull in more founders and whole companies.” Rules on employee share options that didn’t exist when he founded getquin in 2020, plus new angel investor incentives, are, in his words, “exactly the kind of details that decide where a founder sets up.”

Could a company at getquin’s scale actually be built from Luxembourg today? “Yes, definitely, otherwise I wouldn’t have made the move back home,” Steil says. As getquin pushes further into wealth management, he sees a fit with the Grand Duchy’s regulator, which he calls “genuinely supportive and open to innovation,” and its deep finance talent pool. Engineering and product stay in Berlin for now, but he’s eyeing local hires across commercial, growth and wealth-management roles. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting the people here who’d want to build this with us.”

From tracker to wealth manager — with AI doing the heavy lifting

The pivot from portfolio tracker to advisory platform looks, from the outside, like a pivot. Steil insists it was the plan all along. “Our very first product prototype in 2020 already had a feature to help people build more robust portfolios, and we’ve held the advisory license since then,” he says. The team built the aggregation layer first, “the operating system for wealth aggregation,” before layering advice on top, on the theory that “you can’t properly advise someone without understanding their full financial situation. Ask any wealth manager and they’ll tell you that’s still a problem today.”

So what does “hybrid advisory” mean for a user? The line, Steil says, sits at anything regulated. “The AI does a lot, but it stops short of anything regulated, so no outright buy or sell recommendations.” It scans portfolios for high fees, weak diversification and hidden risk, and builds long-range projections on wealth and pension gaps, all of which users can discuss further with an in-house financial agent that “sits on all your data and follows the news and your portfolio around the clock.” Cross into real advice and a licensed human advisor takes over, “only after a compliant onboarding.”

The less visible part, he argues, is how much AI is quietly making the humans better: running retirement-planning simulations, drafting regulatory paperwork, flagging drifted portfolios that need a second look. “None of that replaces the advisor, it just makes them much more efficient and allows them to focus on what matters — the client.” The industry standard has one advisor covering 100 to 150 clients. “With a hybrid model like ours, I think that number can realistically be closer to 1,000.”

Fundraising as a long game

getquin’s cap table has evolved alongside the product: from early accelerator and angel money, including Heartfelt and Sino, an early backer of Trade Republic, through VC rounds with Portage and Horizons Ventures, to a strategic round anchored by an asset manager. “From the very start we looked for investors who actually shared what we were trying to build, not just backers, but people who believed in the same vision,” Steil says. State Street stood out because the fit went beyond a cheque: “It was obvious from our first conversations that this was a genuine strategic priority for them, not just an investment.”

Asked what he’d tell an earlier version of himself, Steil doesn’t hesitate: never stop fundraising. “You’re always fundraising,” he says. “The moment you wait until you actually need the cash to start talking to investors, you’ve already lost precious time.” His other piece of advice is more survival guide than tactic: “Fundraising is an emotional rollercoaster. The rejections, the false hopes, the meeting that felt amazing and then went quiet. You have to be ready for that.” Every round teaches you something, he adds, “not just about yourself but as well on things that can strengthen your business, which is what matters the most.”

Getquin, in numbers

• 2020 — year getquin was founded, and the year it secured its wealth advisory licence
• 500,000+ active users on the platform today
• €25bn in connected liquid assets
• €12m — latest funding round, co-led by State Street Investment Management
• ~€30m raised in total since 2020
• ~1/5 — the share of US-level VC funding that EU funds deploy, for a comparably sized economy
• 100–150 → ~1,000 — clients per advisor today, versus what Steil believes a hybrid AI model can support