Danish fintech startup ZTLment raises €2.4 million in pre-seed funding round

Having raised €2.4 million in total pre-seed funding from investors PreSeed Ventures, Upfin, Giant Ventures, and strong business angels, ZTLment aims to eliminate the need for outdated banking infrastructures once and for all and make it easy to make programmable and peer-to-peer payments.

Led by the three co-founders, Mads Stolberg-Mathieu, Harry Kearney, and Jason Spasovski, the company is the first in Europe to figure out how to do fiat money transfers on decentralized rails in end-to-end compliance with Europe’s open banking law.

ZTLment’s innovative approach addresses the longstanding challenges faced by ordering and booking platforms, including automating fund flows, enhancing payment transparency, and maintaining regulatory adherence. It also addresses a broader shift in the market between finance- and product teams.

“We are seeing a transition, where payment operations become so important for the platform user experience that it is carved out of the finance function and handed over to the product team”, explains Mads Stolberg-Mathieu, CEO, and co-founder of ZTLment.

Commercially, the company makes this transition easy without its customers having to recruit expensive payment operations specialists that can easily cost €70k or more per year.
The company does this by offering Compliant Wallet Infrastructure. Each platform customer is empowered with an unlimited number of wallets to streamline payments efficiently and transparently without the burden of navigating – or having to worry about – technical or regulatory complexities. With an upcoming product launch, customers can allocate a multicurrency wallet for every platform vendor, facilitate split payouts, and release funds in escrow based on data events – all without worrying about the underlying rails.

“People outside of crypto don’t care what ledgers you use, as long as it is fiat money and regulatory compliant. They do care about the functionality though”, says Stolberg-Mathieu.
The potential of programmable payments, like ZTLment is bringing to market, has been widely recognized by global institutions like Citi, HSBC, JP Morgan, and even the Bank of International Settlements, which is often regarded as the central bank for central banks.

“Blockchain provides programmability, integrity, and 24/7 availability without a single point of failure. All of this is massively valuable for financial transactions”, explains the Head of the European Blockchain Center and Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Roman Beck. He adds: “Automated, instant, and integrated payments can ultimately help mitigate the 2.5 trillion dollar gap in trade finance, which is holding back growth for millions of SMEs”.

Leading investor, Richard Breiter, envisions a future where ZTLment’s technology not only benefits digitally native platforms but also transforms traditional trade finance processes within global supply chains:
“The ability to lock and unlock money between multiple parties based on data events will help create trust, transparency, and workflow efficiency in cross-border transactions. It also provides a foundation for letting AI agents decide when to release funds while setting limits on the amounts,” states Richard Breiter, partner and co-founder of the PSVTech01 fund.
But what is the difference between what the big banks are doing and the product offered by ZTLment?

“We are not trying to make interbank transactions slightly better. We are seeking to make them redundant. Instead, money moves programmatically and peer-to-peer between wallets owned by businesses, people, and the platforms they use”, concludes Stolberg-Mathieu.