Key European FinTech investment stats in Q1 2026:
- European FinTech funding fell 31% YoY in Q1
- Deals over $100m halved as investors grew cautious
- Upvest, an API-driven investment infrastructure provider serving banks, brokers and wealth managers across Europe and the UK, raised $90m in a funding round, marking one of the biggest European FinTech deals of the quarter
European FinTech funding fell 31% YoY in Q1
European FinTech raised $3.7bn across 192 deals in Q1 2026, a 22% decline in funding compared to the $4.8bn recorded in Q4 2025, though deal volume was 10% higher over the same period.
Against the same quarter a year earlier, the contrast is even bigger, with funding down 31% from the $5.4bn raised across 184 deals in Q1 2025, despite deal volume edging up 4% year on year.
The divergence between rising deal counts and falling funding levels is a theme that runs through the period, and average deal size captures it clearly, declining from $29.6m in Q1 2025 to $27.5m in Q4 2025 and further to $19.5m in Q1 2026, pointing to a market in which transactions are becoming more numerous but considerably smaller in scale.
Deals over $100m halved as investors grew cautious
The breakdown by deal size underlines where the pressure is most concentrated.
Funding from transactions under $100m reached $2.1bn in Q1 2026, up 22% from the $1.7bn recorded in Q1 2025 and 39% ahead of the $1.5bn seen in Q4 2025, a resilient performance that suggests smaller deals are finding a receptive audience.
Larger transactions of $100m or more tell a very different story, coming in at $1.7bn in Q1 2026, down 56% from the $3.7bn recorded in Q1 2025 and 50% below the $3.3bn seen in Q4 2025.
The scale of that contraction in high-value deals is difficult to overlook and points to a meaningful withdrawal of large-scale capital from European FinTech, with institutional investors appearing to adopt a more cautious stance as macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties weigh on deployment decisions.
Upvest, an API-driven investment infrastructure provider serving banks, brokers and wealth managers across Europe and the UK, raised $90m in a funding round, marking one of the biggest European FinTech deals of the quarter
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Tencent, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and BlackRock.
Berlin-based Upvest provides regulated infrastructure supporting trading, custody and back-office operations, enabling financial institutions to offer investment services without building these systems in-house, and currently processes more than 100 million client orders annually across over 30 institutions including Revolut, N26, DKB and Raisin.
The raise comes just 12 months after the company’s Series C and will be used to enhance local tax handling capabilities, simplify the deployment of pension products across European markets and develop AI-supported investment features leveraging real-time execution APIs.
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