The Opening of the Fintech M&A Window
With Patrick Stäuble, founder & CEO of Teylor AG.
Patrick Stäuble is a child of the universe. Swiss, but born in the Netherlands to a geologist father and a physics professor mother, he spent his childhood living in Colombia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Oman. As a young kid, he loved traveling, discovering new places and trying new food. So it was a real culture shock when, at 18, he had to return to Switzerland for military service and settle into a more “normal” life. However, he quickly found a way to turn the situation to his advantage. Being bilingual in a non-English-speaking country gave him a clear edge.
Patrick’s English is flawless, and his pronunciation is impressive—not like mine (R is still a weak spot for a French speaker). He studied economics at the University of Zurich and, alongside his studies, started a small side business earning 18 francs an hour translating documents for university departments. Without really thinking of himself as a startup founder or entrepreneur, he launched a platform with a friend that hired bilingual students to do technical translations for small businesses.
Over a few years, this side project grew into a small, profitable company, employing 20 students. But this growing business wasn’t easy to manage. First, because Patrick was still a student and had to prioritize his studies. Second, because during exam periods, the student translators were far less available, which made it hard to meet customer demand. The business wrapped up nicely when Patrick completed his studies. He had never planned to become an entrepreneur or scale a company. There was no masterplan and I like the way this started for fun, but turned out to be an incredible playground to learn how a business really works.
Maybe he’ll do it again one day.
“Venture capital for fintechs was drying up, and private equity activity had slowed. With fewer transactions taking place, many of these companies were suddenly open to being acquired.”
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In 2014, after spending 10 months in the Swiss Army as a Military Observer, Patrick joined Numbrs, a mobile banking app, as a project manager. While 80% of his friends went into consulting or investment banking, he was drawn to the growing wave of digital neobanks like Revolut and N26. Instead of following the traditional career path his studies had prepared him for, he chose to join a brand-new fintech startup.
At Numbrs, he truly learned what a startup is. What a VC is. What a go-to-market strategy looks like. He realized he loved the chaos, the ups and downs of startup life. He had found his path and stayed for nearly four years, eventually becoming Head of Business Development.
Patrick took three key lessons from this experience. “First, I learned how to bring together engineering, UI, cybersecurity, legal, everyone you need to build a great product. Second, I was impressed by how strong the founder and leadership team were when it came to fundraising and communicating their vision. They were excellent storytellers. Whether with the team, investors, or the broader ecosystem. I saw how crucial it is not only to build a strong product, but also to clearly and compellingly articulate your vision. And third, I learned from what didn’t go so well. The company struggled with monetization. That was very representative of the 2014–2018 period, where user growth was everything and revenue wasn’t a focus. But when the market shifted around 2021, and suddenly profitability became the priority, it was a tough transition,” Patrick reflects. “What I took away is that a growth-at-all-costs mindset and a profitability mindset are fundamentally different. If you’re not able to shift your mindset and your way of doing things when the market changes, that becomes a real problem for your company.”
While working at Numbrs, Patrick witnessed the digital transformation of the banking industry firsthand. His attention quickly turned to credit. Over just five years, the B2C credit landscape changed dramatically. BNPL platforms like Klarna and Afterpay saw rapid adoption. In B2B credit, early players like Funding Circle began to emerge—raising a notable $150 million round in 2015—but the space was still far less trendy compared to B2C. Patrick had always been impressed by the UK’s ability to stay ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the continent, and he was convinced that this shift would soon spread across Europe. He saw B2B credit as the next frontier for fintech and decided to build in that space.
In 2018, he founded Teylor AG.
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Patrick quickly brought on a part-time CTO, and together they spent the first few months figuring out how to digitize the entire credit process for small business loans: onboarding, KYC, underwriting, portfolio management, everything from start to finish.
To understand how things worked, Patrick got on the phone with as many banks as he could, asking detailed questions about their credit processes and how they might be digitized. The model they developed was simple: banks would remain in charge of granting the loans, while Teylor would handle the entire digital infrastructure around it. Patrick’s product experience at Numbrs proved invaluable. He used Figma to design a seamless user experience and convince banks to adopt their solution. After signing a few partners, Teylor raised a €200K seed round and hired two engineers working remotely from Poland and Bulgaria.
From that point on, the startup had one focus: finding customers. Teylor’s office was a shared apartment in Zurich, home to four other startups. As the office was tiny, the sales team—actually just Patrick and another person—made the bathroom their call center, looking up companies they thought might need a loan, googling them, and cold-calling sitting on the edge of the bathtub. After over 100 calls, they finally landed their first customer.
It turned out to be a disaster.
When that first client applied for a loan, the entire process collapsed. “He failed 37 times before finally making it through,” Patrick recalls. “It was, honestly, the most horribly embarrassing MVP you can imagine.” That moment reminds me of a conversation I shared earlier in this newsletter. There’s a common saying in startups: If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. That definitely applied here. But what works in the earliest stages can become risky at scale, so the team had to fix this issue quickly. Because if your product creates friction or simply breaks, growth will only magnify the problem. Scaling demands speed, yes. But it also requires reliability.
In its early years, Teylor focused on providing working capital financing to German businesses through partnerships with banks. After strong validation of their model, the company raised funds twice: €6.5 million in equity in 2022, followed by €275 million in debt financing in 2023 when they set up their own funds.
Today, Teylor works with thousands of SMEs and has received €5.5 billion in funding requests. Besides its lending business, the company has launched its software arm Teylor Technologies, which offers the SaaS solutions CreditFlow and AutoInsights to enable more efficient SME credit processes for lenders.
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To finish, I want to highlight Teylor’s latest growth strategy—acquisitions—as it reflects a broader trend I’m seeing in the fintech industry. “Two years ago, we noticed the market was shifting. There were many strong companies operating in similar spaces, either offering the same SME lending products in different geographies, or complementary SME lending products in the same markets as us. At the same time, the funding environment was deteriorating. Venture capital for fintechs was drying up, and private equity activity had slowed. With fewer transactions taking place, many of these companies were suddenly open to being acquired.”
It’s true that M&A is a growing trend in fintech. Fintech M&A activity surged in Europe in Q1 2025, reaching more than $10.6 billion in volume. That’s more than 4x the volume of Q4 2024, and a 38% increase in deal count compared to Q1 2024.
On his side, Teylor approached acquisitions opportunistically. Nine months ago, it acquired the German SME financing platform creditshelf. And just last month, the company signed an agreement to buy the factoring division of grenke AG, expanding its footprint to six European countries. These acquisitions allow the company to expand in two key ways: first, by broadening its product offering; second, by growing its geographic footprint. With acquisitions in several countries, Teylor can now take the products it sells in one market and offer them quickly in another, because it already has a team and customer base on the ground. Like a spider’s web, the network builds on itself.
Patrick now sees the next 18 months as a major opportunity to consolidate the market. Some companies won’t reach the necessary scale. Others won’t have the funding to survive.
That opens a window to grow fast.
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Thomas