In 2014 almost nobody in Germany knew what a fintech was. Erik Podzuweit has said the first job was just explaining what Scalable Capital did. It managed clients' money using software, and no independent German startup had done that before.
Podzuweit had studied business administration and economics in Kiel and at Warwick, and then worked at Goldman Sachs, where his future co-founder Florian Prucker also worked. Prucker had studied business and electronics at the Technical University of Munich. Wealth management, as they saw it from the inside, was a product kept for the rich. They wanted to change that exclusivity.
Handing savings to an app run by people you have never met is a strange ask, and Germans are famously wary of shares.
In December 2014 they started the company in Munich with Adam French and Stefan Mittnik, a professor of financial econometrics at LMU. Munich was a deliberate choice: engineers from the city's tech firms, a university down the road and, in Podzuweit's words, strong infrastructure for founders.
The first product, a robo-advisor, launched in 2016. The hard part was trust. Handing savings to an app run by people you have never met is a strange ask, and Germans are famously wary of shares. BlackRock led a €30m round in 2017 and ING Germany signed on as a partner, which lent the young company a borrowed credibility.
What changed the shape of the business was a decision to add a broker in 2020, where clients could pick their own ETFs. Growth followed. A Series E of about €150m led by Tencent in 2021 made Scalable a unicorn, and in the same year it bought the ETF portal justETF.
It has not been smooth. In 2020 a former service provider suffered a data breach that affected more than 33,000 people in Germany and the UK, leading to court cases over damages. In 2025 consumer advocates warned it over how it described interest on cash, and the Financial Times reported access delays during April's market turmoil.
Still, in 2025 it received a full banking licence from the European Central Bank. By August 2026 it reported more than a million clients and over €60bn in assets.
The lesson for founders is about patience with a boring promise. Podzuweit and Prucker did not invent investing. They spent years explaining a simple idea until the market caught up, and they were still there when it did.