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General Partner
Venture | Munich
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Investments & Exits Podcast
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The most compelling fintech founders I back know exactly how financial services work, and have absolutely no interest in replicating them. That combination of insider knowledge and outsider conviction is what produces category-defining companies. It's what I look for before everything else.
The most durable companies aren't building better products on top of broken infrastructure. They're replacing the infrastructure itself. That foundational layer, modular, adaptable, globally relevant, is where I've focused since before most funds had a thesis around it.
What keeps me in venture capital after more than a decade is the same thing that drew me in. The founders I work with are always operating at the frontier, and staying close to that requires genuine curiosity. That intellectual restlessness, equal parts technical rigour and openness to what comes next, is what this work demands. And what I love most about it.
The first wave of fintech was about the front end: better apps, better experiences, better ways to reach customers. What's happening now is deeper. To genuinely reimagine financial products, you have to rebuild the infrastructure underneath them. More modular, more adaptable, more global and potentially more decentralised. AI and blockchain technologies will accelerate this in ways that are still being understood, making it possible to create financial environments that are genuinely personalised, built around each person's actual situation rather than the broad categories the industry has always defaulted to. The opportunity is still early. And still enormous.
Barbod taught himself programming as a teenager and never really stopped thinking like an engineer. That instinct has taken him further than most. He studied Software Engineering at Imperial College London with First Class Honours, completed his MBA at Columbia Business School, and spent his early career moving between worlds that rarely overlap: London trading floors, global equities at GMO, and a role backing the first privately funded submarine cable on Africa's east coast.
From there, VP of Investment Management at Rocket Internet as Berlin's startup ecosystem was just finding its footing. When Barbod joined HV Capital in 2013, fintech infrastructure in Europe was still an open field. More than a decade later, his portfolio includes Qonto, Yapily, Midas, Payrails and Zopa. He didn't follow the fintech wave. He was already there.
Founders: James Kirimy
Founded: 2021
HV Entry: 2024
Funding: Fund IX Ventures
HQ: Paris, France
Website: https://www.doorfeed.com/
Founders: Sean Ward Martin Szummer
Founded: 2023
HV Entry: 2024
Funding: Fund IX Ventures
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Founders: Peter Hill
Founded: 2021
HV Entry: 2021
Funding: Fund VIII
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Website: https://www.januus.io/
Founders: Thibault Lancksweert Xavier De Pauw Edmund Parsons
Founded: 2021
HV Entry: 2023
Funding: Fund IX Ventures
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Founders: Dennis Dinkelmeyer Fabrice Grinda
Founded: 2020
HV Entry: 2024
Funding: Fund IX Ventures
HQ: Berlin, Germany
Website: https://midas.app/
Founders: Soo Choi-Andrews Christopg Hartmann Dominik Richter Patrick Münch
Founded: 2019
HV Entry: 2024
Funding: Fund IX Ventures
HQ: San Francisco, United States of America
Founders: Orkhan Abdullayev Emre Talay
Founded: 2021
HV Entry: 2021
Funding: Fund VIII, Fund IX Growth
HQ: Berlin, Germany
Website: https://www.payrails.com
Founders: Alexandre Prot Steve Anavi
Founded: 2016
HV Entry: 2019
Funding: Fund VII
HQ: Paris, France
Website: https://qonto.com/
Founders: Stefano Vaccino
Founded: 2017
HV Entry: 2018
Funding: Fund VII
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Website: https://www.yapily.com/
Founders: David Nunn
Founded: 2020
HV Entry: 2021
Funding: Fund VIII
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Founders: Nick Bortot
Founded: 2013
HV Entry: 2016
Funding: Fund VI
HQ: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Founders: Abe Smith
Founded: 2009
HV Entry: 2017
Funding: Fund VI
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Website: http://www.dealflo.com/
Founders: Stephen Upstone Marco van de Bergh
Founded: 2011
HV Entry: 2014
Funding: Fund V
HQ: London, United Kingdom
Founders: Dr. Roland Folz Jörg Diewald Dr. Jörg Howein Thomas Rasser
Founded: 2016
HV Entry: 2020
Funding: Fund VIII
HQ: Berlin, Germany
Website: https://www.solarisbank.com/