At the beginning of January, the Hamburg-based fintech Ruuky filed for insolvency. At the last minute, a buyer for the startup has been found. A press release said that a strategic investor wants to continue and expand the fintech, which has developed a banking app for young people.
“The sale of Ruuky will then take place after the opening of the insolvency proceedings, which I expect at the coming turn of the month,” insolvency administrator Jens-Sören Schröder announced, according to the release. Further details of the deal were not initially disclosed.
At the beginning of March, the startup had still stated that it had yet to find a buyer in time and that the banking app would cease operations at the end of April. The 250,000 customers had been asked in an email to empty their checking accounts by April 30. Transfers and payments would continue to be possible until then, it said.
The founding team of Jes Hennig, Deepankar Jha, Max Schwarz, and Timo Steffens had filed for insolvency with the district court in January. “We did not succeed in obtaining new capital in the current market environment,” CEO Hennig said. Previously, well-known seed VCs such as Cavalry Ventures and Vorwerk Ventures invested four million euros in the fintech.
The founding team launched Ruuky in May 2021, then still under Pockid. Berlin-based industry leader N26 had previously abandoned such a business model without success. Managing pocket money via an app and enabling initial payments via debit card hardly paid off. The period in which the product would interest young people seemed too short. Nevertheless, the fintech founders from Hamburg believed in the success of their offer.
To increase dwell time, the startup relied on savings plans and a feed in the app, for example, in which payment and savings functions can be used together. On top of that, Ruuky did target-group-specific marketing at Tiktok: employees performed short video sketches, had passersby compete against each other in mental arithmetic, or explained technical terms such as inflation and monopoly. More than 230,000 followers and around 2.8 million likes were thus collected on Tiktok.
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