Berlin-based fintech startup lemon.markets raises €15M to launch a stock trading API for developers

Berlin-based lemon.markets, a financial technology company that offers an API for stock trading, announced on Monday that it has raised €15M in its Seed round of funding. The company intends to launch its brokerage platform for developers and tech companies. 

The startup claims that this is one of Europe’s biggest Seed fundings for a fintech company.

The investors

The round was co-led by investment firms Lakestar and Lightspeed, with participation from Creandum and System.one. Angel investors, including operators from N26, Public.com, sennder, Taxfix, Finoa, and Stripe, also participated in this round.

Nicolas Brand, Partner at Lakestar, says, “lemon.markets is providing tech companies technical and regulatory infrastructure to integrate brokerage in their products – all through a single API. With companies facing increasing regulatory, compliance and structural hurdles, lemon.markets abstracts these complexities away for their customers through technology. The current technical infrastructure that makes up our world of finance is being rebuilt entirely.”

Lakestar is a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies led by ‘exceptional’ entrepreneurs. Its sector expertise includes ten years of investing in fintech, where the team partnered with Revolut, Blockchain.com, Opendoor, Cedar, Oscar, Public.com, SoFi, Solarisbank, Uncapped, Rhino, and ZEBEDEE. Current investments range from early-stage companies to those in their growth stage.

Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Since 2000, Lightspeed has backed companies like Snap, Affirm, AppDynamics, OYO, Nutanix, Byju’s, and Udaan. Currently, the firm manages more than $10B across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in India, Silicon Valley, Israel, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe.

Capital utilisation

lemon.markets says that the funds will help accelerate its product development as well as extend its usage to businesses that wish to integrate stock trading into their services. The company will also invest in onboarding fresh talents. It will especially focus on strengthening its in-house regulatory knowledge as it scales and enhances its offering.

The company also mentions that it will launch its stock trading API in Germany, with other markets to follow.

API for stock trading and market data

Founded in 2020 by Maximilian Linden and Marcel Katenhusen (who left the startup in Nov 2021 as per LinkedIn), lemon.markets is a stock trading API for developers. It claims to provide frictionless trading, reliable market data and a vivid developer community – with no hidden costs. 

Currently, the platform powers personalised savings plans and automated trading strategies. In the future, it looks to enable neobanks to embed stock trading in their product and contextual use cases like reinvesting tax refunds. The company aims to become the infrastructure for the next 100 million European retail investors.

Maximilian Linden says, “European brokerage is ripe for disruption. We strongly believe that every tech company should be able to embed financial services into their offering and lemon.markets wants to facilitate that. The demand is already there. Our infrastructure solution takes care of all the plumbing, so developers in these companies can dedicate their focus to creating value for users. We can’t wait to see the many different ways our API will be applied.”

The company’s features are co-designed by its users, including software development kits (SDKs) that wrap around the company’s API. Users have been executing trades in closed alpha, helping to shape the product before its full commercial launch in Q2 2022. 

The company claims that leveraging its footprint in the developer community provides a systematic approach for the company to become the go-to partner for businesses in launching a stock trading product. This allows lemon.markets to build exactly what developers need to reshape what brokerage is, one line of code at a time.