In 2025, one of the men who founded Solaris went to a Berlin court to contest the rescue that was keeping the company alive. Andreas Bittner had left the firm five years earlier, when his five-year contract ended on 30 June 2020. Now he was challenging the capital increase through which Japan's SBI Group took control.
It is an odd ending for a story that began with a simple bet. In 2015 Bittner and Marko Wenthin set up a banking platform inside Finleap, a Berlin company builder. They did not want a pretty app. They wanted the licence behind it. In March 2016 the bank launched with a full German licence, and an idea that was almost boring in its logic: let other companies rent the plumbing.
Reports described a heavy loss, the closing of the e-money unit, and the loss of roughly a third of the workforce.
The pitch worked. Mastercard signed a partnership within months. In February 2017 the company raised €26.3M from investors including UniCredit, Arvato and SBI, and by March it reported over twenty customers and the ability to serve six European countries. Roland Folz arrived as CEO in 2017. A €56.6M round followed in 2018, then €60M led by HV Capital in 2020.
But a bank is not a startup. It answers to a regulator. BaFin ordered a special audit in January 2022 after finding organisational weaknesses in an earlier review, and Folz publicly welcomed it. Late that year the regulator demanded corrective steps on risk management and money-laundering prevention, and fined the company €6.5M for filing suspicious-activity reports late. The firm took a new name, Solaris SE, in November 2022, the year it reported about $130.9M in revenue.
The cost showed in 2024. Reports described a heavy loss, the closing of the e-money unit, and the loss of roughly a third of the workforce. Then SBI, which had been an early investor in the 2017 round, led a €140M Series G in 2025 and became the majority owner.
The dispute with Bittner shows the awkward side of that kind of rescue. Early shareholders get diluted. The people who built the thing sit outside the room.
For a founder of infrastructure, the lesson is plain. A licence is a moat, but it also owns you. Solaris proved banking could be built like software, and then spent years finding out that regulators do not accept software's habit of moving first and fixing later.