Before GameStop stocks and diamond hands were a thing, Trade Republic was founded with the promise to bring investing in stocks and ETFs to the masses.
Since 2015, the company has picked up over $1.2bn from VC heavyweights Sequoia, Accel, Project A and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, earning it a place as one of Germany’s most valuable startups.
Like other fintechs such as Revolut and N26 — and Paypal, Wise and Klarna before them — Trade Republic has spawned its own generation of employees-turned-entrepreneurs who have gone onto found new ventures, primarily in software. It’s these kinds of second-generation, alumni founders that investors say are key to the future success of European tech.
Meet seven Trade Republicers-turned-founders below. Sifted reached out to everyone for further detail, but not all responded. If we’ve missed any alumni who are now founders, please reach out at miriam@sifted.eu.
Nilaxsa Yoganathan — 8Returns
Role at Trade Republic: Yoganathan was a senior customer success manager at Trade Republic between April and August 2019. She joined the company before its public app launch and was responsible for setting up processes for customer inquiries and a support team.
New venture: Yoganathan founded her own company in January 2021: 8returns, a returns management platform that offers an automated system for refunds, exchanges and product repairs.
Felippe Wick — Cliqe
Role at Trade Republic: Wick was a product manager at Trade Republic between April 2020 and June 2021. He developed features for trading stocks, saving plans and integrations with external parties for asset servicing and was responsible for building and maintaining integrations with outsourcing partners for securities transfers, among other things.
New venture: Wick launched his own creator economy company, Cliqe, in January this year, with his cofounder Tiên Grünewald. The pair are building an influencer marketing platform to helps brands and smaller content creators to connect and work together easier.
Ruben Hassid — rubenhassid-ai
Role at Trade Republic: Hassid was Trade Republic’s international social media manager between November 2021 and September 2022.
New venture: Jumping on the developments in generative AI, Hassid has founded his own business centred around ChatGPT. He’s created a ChatGPT pack, full of prompts, tools and resources for how to use the tech in marketing and has become somewhat of an influencer, with 150k+ followers across his social media channels.
Max Deichmann — Finto
Role at Trade Republic: Deichmann was a software engineer at Trade Republic from June 2020 and May 2022 — during which time the company raised $975m across three rounds, the bulk of its total funding to date.
New venture: Two months after Deichmann left Trade Republic, he cofounded Finto, a monetisation tool for B2B SaaS companies.
Jannik Schumann — Basec GmBH
Role at Trade Republic: Schumann was Trade Republic’s chief information security officer between 2020 and 2021, responsible for building up and leading its information security and taking care of governance, risk and compliance, among other things.
New venture: Before Trade Republic, Schumann was DACH security lead for governance, risk and compliance at Accenture. Schumann has now founded his own company, Basec, which provides IT security services for German SMEs.
Cezar Sampaio — Overdeck
Role at Trade Republic: Sampaio has spent much of his career so far as a software engineer at German tech companies such as Contentful, HelloFresh and, most recently, Trade Republic, where he was a front-end engineer.
New venture: Sampaio left his job after ten months at the fintech in February this year and has now set up his own company: Overdeck, an app which turns your phone into a controller for streamers, integrating with platforms like Twitch, Twitter and Youtube. The device is still in private beta.
Frederic Lapatschek — Flyla.com and Vitolus
Role at Trade Republic: Lapatscheck was Trade Republic’s first ever intern in 2016, when the company consisted of just three founders and two interns, who were all cooped up together in a single Airbnb in Hamburg. At the time, the team was working on developing the first proof of concept app and platform for mobile stock trading.
Lapatschek focused on back-end development, constructing platform components that managed stock quotes and facilitated trade execution for a trading simulation.
New venture: Since leaving Trade Republic, Lapatscheck has cofounded two ventures: Flyla.com, a booking platform for students to find discounted flights; and Vitolus — which started out as a healthcare service provider delivering testing and vaccination infrastructure to governments during Covid-19, and now focused on elderly care.
Founders in stealth
Ivan Vasylchenko: Trade Republic’s COO between May 2018 and October 2020 is building his own fintech venture behind the scenes.
Thies Hansen: Between January and December 2021, Hansen worked in trading operations at Trade Republic. After a brief stint at VC firm Partech Ventures in 2022, Hansen has now founded his own company in an unknown sector.
Benedict Tostmann: Between 2020 and 2022, Tostmann worked in the strategy department at Trade Republic. He's now been working on his own startup in an unknown sector for the last ten months.
