Float raises €4.5M Series A to bridge Europe's funding gap

Float, the Stockholm-founded fintech that lends money to tech companies without taking equity, just closed a €4.5 million Series A. Hamburg's CHAPTERS Group AG led the round, and CHAPTERS CEO Jan-Hendrik Mohr is taking a board seat as part of the deal. It's a modest sum by Silicon Valley standards, but Float isn't playing that game — it's playing the one where European founders actually get funded at all.

Since launching in 2022, Float has pushed out more than €100 million to over 130 tech businesses across Europe, including names like RoomPriceGenie and RedTrack. The pitch is straightforward: revenue-based financing, credit lines, working capital — money that doesn't cost founders a slice of their cap table. That matters because venture capital in Europe still trails the US badly, and the founders who can't raise equity rounds often end up either stalling out or packing up for markets with deeper pockets.

Cedric Notz, Float's CEO and co-founder, built the company out of his own frustration trying to secure working capital. His argument is that financial infrastructure hasn't caught up to how startups actually operate. Companies go global on day one now, he says, but the banking and lending systems serving them are still stuck in local, paperwork-heavy silos. Float's answer isn't just faster loans — it's an attempt to rebuild the plumbing.

And that's really where this round gets interesting. Float wants to stop being just a lender and become what it's calling an AI-native financial platform, stitching together capital, banking, and financial data into one system. Think real-time insights pulled straight from bank accounts and accounting software, automated expense management, faster decision-making on payments — the kind of back-office grunt work that eats founder time for no good reason. Lending stays at the core, but the new tools are meant to reduce how much energy startups spend just managing money instead of building product.

The fresh capital will double Float's team, deepen its footprint in the UK — already its biggest market — and open the door to M&A opportunities through the CHAPTERS partnership. None of this fixes Europe's venture capital shortage on its own. But it's a bet that if founders can't easily raise equity, at least they shouldn't have to fight outdated banking infrastructure on top of it.