German Fintech collects USD 45 million from index and Creandum

• Berlin-based fintech Topi has raised $45 million in a mix of debt and equity funding.
• The Index Ventures-backed company was founded in 2021 by former Apple and Goldman Sachs employees.
• Topi offers a hardware subscription platform for resellers and SMEs to connect.

Topi, a fintech that enables companies to offer hardware subscriptions to other businesses, has raised $45 million in a mix of debt and equity funding.

The Berlin-based startup, founded in 2021, has developed a B2B platform where retailers and businesses can connect to offer rental equipment such as office monitors and cameras. The company aims to take advantage of the rise in popularity of hardware-as-a-service (HaaS).

Topi was created by Estelle Merle and Charlotte Pallua, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Apple respectively, who met during their MBA at Harvard Business School. The pair told Insider they wanted to bring Silicon Valley-style execution to Berlin’s fintech ecosystem.

“The hardware market has changed a lot in recent years as the digital payment ecosystem matures and software-as-a-service becomes more common than businesses buying software licenses,” said Topi founder Charlotte Pallua.

“For businesses to be competitive, they need to offer products as subscriptions as well. This is more capital efficient for SMEs, but also helps more items to be refurbished or properly recycled as part of the circular economy.”

The startup has raised $45 million in a combination of equity and debt, of which $15 million was equity led by Index Ventures and Creandum, which also led the company’s $4.5 million pre-seed funding round. Silicon Valley-based TriplePoint Capital also participated in the fundraising.

“The round came together quickly and earlier than expected,” Merle told Insider. “It’s exciting that our investors wanted to double down and meant we didn’t have to go to the external market, despite great interest, so we had more time to build and hire.”

Topi’s platform is a multi-faceted set of tools for both sides of the transaction, with proprietary credit decision algorithms built on open banking software that combine with payment providers to build out monthly subscription fees for a variety of electronics.

Many retailers will already offer some form of financing or leasing, but Topi wants to bring companies onto its platform to offer credit options to the wider market.

The co-founders said that the business could potentially expand to other verticals or expand geographically, depending on the data.

Topi currently has around 35 employees with the new funding going towards increasing the external company’s pool of engineering talent.

Similarly, Merle said the startup had signed a strategic partnership with Gravis, a major German electronics retailer specializing in Apple products, and was looking to form other such partnerships going forward.

Check out Topi’s pitch deck below: