From €25,000 to nearly €500M: Solaris's rebound arms its founders against SBI

What happened? Berlin banking-as-a-service provider Solaris is once again valued at almost half a billion euros in company documents, Manager Magazin reported on 14 October 2026. Only about eighteen months earlier, when Japan's SBIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → took control in a rescue financing, the fintech that had been valued at €1.6 billion in 2021 was worth just €25,000 on paper, and its share price had shrunk to 10 cents.

The rescue: In early 2025 Solaris raised about €140 million in a round in which existing shareholder SBI put in around $100 million and took a majority stake of more than 70%, Tech.eu reported. For shareholders who did not follow, including co-founder Andreas Bittner, the value per share fell from €7,000 to 10 cents, according to Bittner. SBI has since moved to buy out everyone else: the invitation to Solaris's 30 June 2026 annual meeting shows SBI Ventures Two holding 99.69% of the shares and proposing a squeeze-out of the remaining minority at €38.51 per share, based on a Grant Thornton valuation checked by a court-appointed auditor. Across all 11.36 million shares, that price implies an equity value of roughly €437 million. The squeeze-out was approved at the meeting but has not yet been registered because of several legal challenges, according to the legal blog SpruchZ.

The fight: Bittner, who called the 2025 deal a "raid", and fellow plaintiffs are pursuing SBI in three court cases, according to Manager Magazin. They argue the crisis was staged to let SBI take control as cheaply as possible, and the rebound in value gives them new arguments. Bittner has said no third party confirmed the low valuation in the rescue round and that around €600 million would have been a more reasonable figure at the time. A higher valuation today does not by itself prove the 2025 price was unfair: Solaris was loss-making, under regulatory pressure and in need of capital when the rescue was agreed. The courts will have to decide what the company was worth then, not now.

The bigger story: Rescue rounds and down rounds have wiped out early investors across European fintech since the 2021 peak, often at token valuations set by the one investor still willing to write a cheque. Solaris is a rare case where the same company's own documents later put a value on it thousands of times higher, which turns a routine recapitalisation into a test of how crisis-era pricing holds up once a business recovers.

Sources: Manager Magazin (14 Oct 2026); Manager Magazin Finance Briefing (14 Oct 2026); SpruchZ (14 Oct 2026, quoting the AGM invitation); deutsche-startups.de (19 Oct 2026); Tech.eu (6 May 2025).

Image: Solaris co-founders Andreas Bittner, Peter Großkopf and Marko Wenthin (Max Threlfall / Solaris)