N26

N26 was founded in Berlin in 2013 by Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal, first under the name Number26, and launched its app in 2015. In 2016 it became the first fully mobile bank to be granted a full German banking licence; N26 SE is headquartered in Berlin.

Customers open and run their account entirely in the app: accounts and cards, instant payments, savings, investing in stocks, ETFs and crypto, and eSIM data for travel. According to N26, it serves millions of customers in 24 countries and has raised about $1.8 billion since its launch.

N26 has about 1,600 employees from more than 90 nationalities, working from Berlin, Barcelona, Vienna, Madrid and Paris. Its banking platform is built as microservices, mostly in Kotlin and Java on AWS, with native iOS and Android apps.