Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer both worked at Wise before founding Lightyear in 2021, and the lineage shows in the product: multi-currency accounts, a transparent FX fee stated as a number rather than buried in a spread, and a deliberate refusal to make money from the things retail brokers usually make money from. The app gives European investors access to over 6,000 stocks, ETFs and money market funds with zero commission on ETFs and a flat 0.35% currency conversion charge. Estonian-founded and London-based, it is regulated by Estonia's EFSA — which makes it one of the few genuinely pan-European brokers built from the Baltics outward rather than from a large domestic market.
The cap table is a roll call of the Estonian technology diaspora: Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Bolt CEO Markus Villig, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, Checkout.com's former CTO Ott Kaukver, and Veriff's Kaarel Kotkas, alongside institutional backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Virgin Group and NordicNinja, which led a $23 million Series B in July 2025. Total funding stands at $58 million, with the Series B reportedly valuing the company between $200 million and $300 million. That round coincided with customer assets passing $1 billion and expansion to 25 European markets in 10 languages. In 2026 the company was named FinTech Company of the Year at Baltic Fintech Days, and its founders took EY Estonia's Entrepreneur of the Year.
The strategic bet since the Series B is AI, and it is more specific than most fintech AI announcements. Lightyear shipped features that explain why a stock moved on a given day, generate balanced bull and bear cases, and summarise portfolio developments in plain language — research tooling of the kind that was previously professional-only. Sokk's framing is that investing splits into "self-driving money," where an AI pursues a stated goal, and a "manual gearbox" for people who want to make their own decisions, and Lightyear is building for the second. The competitive position is harder than the product: it sits between Trade Republic and Scalable Capital, both of which now hold full banking licences, and DEGIRO's incumbent scale. Lightyear's answer is to be the cleanest and most genuinely multi-currency of the group rather than the biggest.