Founded by the founding team of Wise and ex-banking executives, Grünfin has set out to make sustainable investing into a values-based portfolio, simple and accessible, for anyone able to invest from 100€ per month. When they realised how hard it is to invest without deep industry knowledge, they decided to tackle it head on.
Stellar team with a strong foundation of professional collaboration
Grünfin (Estonia/ Germany) are building a European investment platform for change-makers who want to put their money towards improving the health of our planet, reducing gender inequality and improving global healthcare. They are licensed to manage portfolios across 30 EEA countries. Germany normally takes 2 days whereas Grünfin has instant account opening, mobile identification and contract signing without uncomfortable video identification.
Meet Team Grünfin:
Triin Hertmann — 2nd employee & founding team at Wise and early employee at Skype. As Head of Payments, Triin grew Wise’s back office from 10 to 10,000 payments a day and later was Head of HR Operations.
Karin Nemec — Swedbank’s first female Head of Corporate Banking. Karin also looked after sustainable investments at a Family Office, Zero to One and worked in M&A at Grant Thornton.
Alvar Lumberg — Software Architect at Swedbank simultaneously to Karin and then joined Wise as Director of Engineering simultaneously to Triin.
The team have worked together across Grant Thornton, Swedbank and Wise for years with a lengthy professional relationship behind them. They also have a very clear founder-market-fit as Karin has 20 years of portfolio management experience and Triin scaled one of the largest Fintechs globally, working in payments and people management. Having a very strong, experienced, technical team, as well as a deep understanding of how to manage risk and select portfolios, is crucial to build and scale this alternative investment platform. It’s clear to see why we were impressed by the strength of the Grünfin team at such an early stage of their company’s lifecycle. We also knew they had the credibility and networks to attract top talent and expand accordingly.
Triin Linamagi, our founding partner, first met Triin Hertmann, 10 years ago in Estonia, during the early days of Wise. It’s worth noting that Estonia is the birthplace of at least 1400 startups and 10 unicorns. We reconnected with the Grünfin team when they started to raise their pre-seed round and followed their journey since. Triin Hertmann also became a member of Sie Syndicate as an angel investor. When the Grünfin team approached us as they started raising their next funding round, we were very excited about the opportunity to back such a stellar team.
Making sustainable investing accessible to consumers and employers
Grünfin’s core proposition has always been to allow end users to invest passively, over the long term. Their core target audience are individuals — particularly women, families and millennials — who are concerned about climate change, gender inequality and health. However, they found that only 30% of people have access to ethical investment portfolios or current platforms are overly complicated and require you to be a sophisticated investor.
The Untapped Opportunity in Employer Benefits
There’s also an enormous opportunity in offering a new investment platform for employers. This enables companies to equip and encourage their employees to invest, save and build wealth, whilst also making a positive impact.
“Finding and keeping talent is one of the most difficult challenges for companies today. Employees, particularly the younger generation, expect meaningful work and a sense of mission from their employers. In addition, due to high demand from investors, employees and clients, many companies are looking towards more sustainable options and actions they can take,” says Grünfin co-founder Triin Hertmann.
Essentially, the Grünfin investment plan is like an option program with flexible options, providing every company with a vehicle to value employees (and their children), offer financial security and help them establish positive financial habits. Another aspect of this strategy is rooted in incentive and reward; companies can opt to interlink the ownership of an investment portfolio with an employee’s career progress and company tenure. Research has proven that financial stress is one of — if not the most — important factors influencing performance and productivity at work. Grünfin’s plan tackles this directly, with the support of the employer, by providing the employee with the opportunity to safely and consciously start investing.
When an employee leaves the company, they can continue growing their wealth with Grünfin on the B2C side of the platform. Grünfin is targeting a hugely underserved market that is growing at a rapid rate — both women and families as well as activists in sustainable investing practices. With more wealth transferring to women and their children over the next 10 years, there is an increasing need for this type of product. We see ample opportunity for B2B partnerships and/or acquisition in this space and the team have already onboarded their first B2B customer whilst also in multiple conversations with Fortune 500 companies.
Scalability and Speed
Having diligenced many players in the alternative investments and robo- advisory space, the inevitable question-marks always appear around scalability. However, Grünfin stood out for us as they have already obtained the European Portfolio License — a steep feat for most robo-advisors who typically hold a broker or advisor licence, meaning they can’t actively manage funds internally.
We have also tested the user-journey of other platforms and can confidently share that Grünfin offers 10 times faster and 6 times cheaper onboarding than most other companies, largely owing to compliance laws as they’re headquartered in Estonia. Although Grünfin has offices in Germany, opening a securities account in Germany normally takes 2 days, whereas Grünfin can instantly open an account and allow contract signing via video identification. Grünfin also allows investors to see exactly what they are investing into each quarter and the direct benefits of these investments.
Estonian sustainable investment startup Grünfin raised €2M as a top-up to their pre-seed round (€2M raised in 2021). We are very excited to join the round alongside Norrsken VC, Specialist VC, Lemonade Stand, HoneyBadger VC and we are looking forward to supporting the team on their journey.
If you’re interested in learning more about our work at Sie Ventures, please do reach out: hello@sie.ventures
