The first thing Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal tried to sell was a prepaid card for teenagers.
That is not the story N26 tells today. In August 2013 the two Austrians registered a Berlin company under a name almost nobody now remembers, Papayer GmbH. Stalf, born in Vienna in 1985, had studied accounting and finance at the University of St. Gallen and, while still a student, worked in M&A at Deutsche Bank and in strategy consulting at Roland Berger. Then he became an entrepreneur in residence at Rocket Internet, where he helped build payment companies. He knew what a bank looked like from the inside and what a payments startup looked like from the outside.
The teen card launched in February 2014. In June a EUR2m seed round arrived, and with it a decision to throw most of the idea away. The company became Number26, dropped the teenagers and built a proper current account with an app. It had no licence yet; it borrowed one, running on a partner's backend until 2016.
Then came the turn. In 2016 the German regulator, BaFin, granted a banking licence and the name shrank to N26. Accounts opened across the eurozone. Tencent and Allianz X came in with US$160m in 2018, and in January 2019 a US$300m round at US$2.7bn made it Europe's most valuable mobile bank. In October 2021 a US$900m round valued it at US$9bn.
What almost nobody in the cheering years saw was the cost of speed. Accounts were closed in 2016 over suspected money laundering. By 2021 BaFin had fined the bank EUR4.25m over weak anti-money-laundering controls, installed a supervisor and capped new customers at 50,000 a month. Italy barred new customers for a time. The bank withdrew from the UK in 2020 and the US in 2022, and in 2025 the regulator threatened fresh sanctions. In August 2025 Stalf stepped down as co-CEO after tension with investors, and Tayenthal left operations at the end of that year. Mike Dargan took over in April 2026.
Still, the numbers are real: revenue of EUR120.4m in 2021, customers in 21 countries, and a company that now offers share trading as well as accounts.
For first-time founders the lesson sits in the name. N26 only exists because its founders were willing to bury Papayer after eight months. A bank, it turns out, is easier to start than to run.