Business Intelligence Engineer

finmid bags €17m as it moves into vehicle financing. October 8, 2026 finmid, a Berlin-headquartered embedded lending firm that powers financing for platforms including Wolt and Delivery Hero, has secured €17m in fresh capital as it rolls out a vehicle financing scheme with Bolt and a merchant lending offering with Skroutz. Big Pi Ventures led the Series A extension, with Mainset co-investing and existing backer Earlybird also taking part. The latest injection lifts the amount finmid has raised to date to €52m. The company plans to channel the money into growing its asset-finance offering, its infrastructure for drawing on multiple funding sources and its underwriting capabilities. It will also back a push into new types of platforms, with mobility and e-commerce among the target categories. The first of the two launches, Bolt Vehicle Solutions, sees the ride-hailing company team up with finmid to give fleet operators access to vehicle financing built around their needs. According to the announcement, the European ride-hailing market is expected to be worth €157bn by 2034. However, operators supplying vehicles to meet this demand often struggle to secure funding, as conventional lenders have limited insight into how fleet businesses actually perform, while carmakers' standard finance packages are not suited to vehicles that are driven intensively for commercial purposes. Under the new scheme, operators can browse vehicles on the Bolt platform before being passed to finmid to compare financing options and submit an application. Repayments are set at a fixed monthly amount, and the operator takes ownership of the vehicle once the final instalment is made, converting an ongoing expense into an asset held over the long term. The second launch, Skroutz Funding, is a partnership with Greece's biggest online marketplace. It allows Skroutz to offer loans directly to the roughly 9,000 merchants that sell through it. Skroutz Group supplies the capital, while finmid takes care of underwriting, regulated lending, servicing and refinancing. This marks the first time finmid's credit infrastructure has been built around a platform's own funds. finmid was established on the view that business lending is shifting towards the platforms companies already rely on day to day. Its infrastructure lets platforms across Europe offer financing to their business users via one integration. finmid manages underwriting, regulated lending and servicing, with funding provided by the platform, its banking partner or finmid's refinancing partners. This is the firm's first funding announcement since it closed a €23m Series A in April 2024. Since its launch, finmid has made more than €4bn in financing offers to businesses in 30 European markets, working alongside partners such as Wolt, Delivery Hero, myPOS and efood. Roughly 85% of its borrowers come back for additional financing, and merchants that have received funding have increased their revenue on partner platforms by up to 45%, it said. finmid co-founder Alexander Talkanitsa said, "Two years ago, embedded lending meant a cash advance for a restaurant. Today the same rails carry a multi-year vehicle loan, a marketplace's own balance sheet, and the potential for more. Every platform with business customers now has a way to become their financing partner without becoming a bank." finmid co-founder Max Schertel said, "Small businesses have never lacked ambition - they've lacked a lender who could see them. Platforms, with their live and embedded view of the businesses they power, are uniquely placed to fill that gap, and finmid exists to make it happen. With Bolt we're financing the cars that fleets run on; with Skroutz the marketplace itself is putting its capital behind its merchants. Our job is to make that credit safe, fast and regulated - whoever provides the money and whatever businesses need it for." Bolt Europe BD lead Joshua Okeleke said, "Fleet operators are essential to making ride-hailing work, but access to vehicles and financing can be a real barrier to growing their businesses. With Bolt Vehicle Solutions, we're helping remove that barrier by combining preferential vehicle deals with a simpler path to financing and, ultimately, ownership. That gives our fleet partners a stronger foundation to invest in their businesses, put more vehicles on the road and grow alongside rising passenger demand." Enjoying the stories? Investors. The following investor(s) were tagged in this article.

A chatbot just did an investment banker's job. July 13, 2026 When CVC Capital Partners put Greek eCommerce platform Skroutz up for sale earlier this year, it skipped investment bankers and used artificial intelligence to run the process instead, The Wall Street Journal reported. CVC sent prospective buyers a link to a data portal that functioned as an investment memo and a chatbot answered questions on financials and due diligence; more complex issues were escalated to the management team for direct discussion. Blackstone agreed on May 11 to acquire a majority stake in Skroutz in a deal that values the eCommerce marketplace at 635 million euros ($747 million) including debt, Reuters reported. CVC manages roughly 205 billion euros ($180 billion) in assets, ranking among the largest private equity firms globally. Skroutz operates Greece's leading eCommerce marketplace with roughly 9,000 merchants listing more than 12 million products and approximately 2.5 million active users. The platform has since expanded into Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria, according to Blackstone. Under CVC's ownership, Skroutz evolved from a price-comparison site into a marketplace with logistics, fulfillment and a licensed FinTech arm. "We are proud of all that Skroutz has achieved during our productive partnership," Alex Fotakidis, CVC's managing partner and head of Greece, said in the deal announcement. Functions AI took over in the Skroutz sale. A traditional sell-side advisory engagement covers a range of functions: preparing the information memorandum that describes the business to potential buyers, managing the data room where due diligence materials are housed, coordinating buyer outreach, fielding questions on behalf of management and controlling information flow throughout the process. Had CVC hired a traditional investment bank, a deal the size of Skroutz could have generated roughly 9 million euros in sell-side advisory fees, based on the 1.48% median fee for deals over $100 million reported by Deal Point Data, according to a separate Wall Street Journal report. Global M&A advisory fees reached $24 billion in the first half of 2026, up 18% year over year, according to LSEG, The Investment Executive reported. The CVC approach replaced the information memo and question-answering functions with a data portal and a chatbot, according to the Journal. That covers a significant portion of what a junior and mid-level banking team handles during the early and middle stages of a sell-side process: drafting, fielding diligence queries and coordinating information flow. What it did not replace were the later-stage functions that still required human judgment, including valuation, negotiation and deal structuring, which were handled by the management team and the parties themselves. What the model points toward for investment banks. The Skroutz deal is a data point, not a trend. CVC is a sophisticated firm with the internal resources and deal experience to manage a sale process independently. Most sellers, particularly in the middle market, lack those capabilities and still need advisers to run buyer outreach, manage process timelines and negotiate on their behalf. If AI can handle information delivery and early diligence Q&A reliably, the value of a full banking engagement shifts toward the judgment-intensive work that remains: positioning the asset, running a competitive process, navigating buyer relationships and structuring the transaction. PYMNTS reported that Goldman Sachs is deploying AI agents to automate transaction reconciliation, client vetting and onboarding, work that sits on the operational side of banking rather than the advisory side. RECENT PRESS RELEASES July 13, 2026