Penta provides banking for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and is headquartered in Berlin, with offices in Milan and Belgrade.
With Penta, companies are able to apply for a business account within minutes and receive a German IBAN, debit cards for expense management and other financial services.
“Penta’s story begins with a deep frustration. Our founders, Lav, Luka, Jessica, Aleks, Igor, and Sir, all serial entrepreneurs, many times had terrible experiences with their business banks. After the brief research in February 2016, they found out that thousands of businesses all over Europe were frustrated with their business bank as well”
The management consists of:
Interim CEO – Lukas Zörner, Co-Founder & CCO Jessica Holzbach, Co-Founder Luka Ivicevic and CTO Henrik Jondell.
As the co-founders have seen other banks as slow, inefficient, offering terrible online banking interfaces and bad support on top of it all they decided to take an action and to tackle the problem and build a brand new business banking solution for SMEs.
Penta launched in Germany in December 2017 and already aimed to be available in other European countries. In April 2019, it was “acquired” by Finleap, the German company builder that co-founded and also owns a stake in banking platform solarisBank.
Penta provides business banking for digital companies, like Airhelp, bepro11 and Global Digital Women. The partnership with solarisBank enables Penta’s business in Germany with their banking licence.
Penta is trying to be as user friendly as it gets from the very beginning. Penta’s customers can open a business bank account online in only a few minutes. They are also able to issue multiple cards for their employees or have a real-time spending overview and connect with accounting providers, like lexoffice.
At this point, Penta has a 20,000-strong customer base. In March 2020 Penta raised €18.5 million in the first closing of a new funding round backed by new and current investors and added €4 million in July in the second closing. The total amount raised makes €39.7 million
Among the new investors were: RTP Global, ABN AMRO Ventures, S7 Ventures and VR-Ventures.
Penta’s current investors are also Finleap (as mentioned), Europe’s leading fintech ecosystem, and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, one of Europe’s largest venture funds.
To the amount raised in the second closing, the fromer CEO, Marko Wenthin said: “We are very pleased to complete the second closing and that we can welcome such great new partners.”
“Especially, in the current corona crisis, it is a strong signal that there are still investors looking out for outstanding companies. With the new capital, we plan to accelerate our growth path in Germany and continue developing our product offering for SMEs,” he added.
This July Penta also partnered with a company called CANDIS. With this partnership, Penta’s business banking can be interlocked with the customer’s accounting. All their transactions from the Penta account are transferred to CANDIS completely automatically.
After one year at the head of the Berlin business banking start-up Penta, Chief Executive Officer Marko Wenthin left the company for personal reasons.
Marko Wenthin will remain a shareholder of Penta after his departure and will continue to support the company on its successful path.
Other Penta’s feature called ‘Penta Kompass’ is a package that navigates startup founders through the complexities of setting up a business, offering documentation, consultation with expert lawyers and Penta’s core banking products for business accounts and expense management. This option is based on co-operation with legal network Jurpartner.
The package is available for EUR 99 for a light touch user, EUR 239 for an express service, and EUR 349 for a full advisory service.
