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Hamburg-based fintech Ruuky filed for bankruptcy in early January. At the last minute, a buyer was found for the startup.
The Hamburg startup Ruuky has found a buyer. A strategic investor wants to continue and expand the fintech, which developed a banking app for young people, according to a press release. “The sale of Ruuky will then take place after the opening of the insolvency proceedings, which I expect at the beginning of the next month,” said the insolvency administrator Jens-Sören Schröder. Further details of the deal were not initially announced.
At the beginning of March, the startup explained that it had not been able to find a buyer in time and that the banking app would be discontinued at the end of April. The 250,000 customers had been asked in an email to empty their checking accounts by April 30th. Transfers and payments are still possible until then, it said.
The founding team around Jes Hennig, Deepankar Jha, Max Schwarz and Timo Steffens filed for bankruptcy at the district court in January. “We did not succeed in obtaining new capital in the current market environment,” said CEO Hennig at the time. Well-known seed VCs such as Cavalry Ventures and Vorwerk Ventures previously invested a total of four million euros in the fintech.
N26 had failed with a similar business model
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The founding team started Ruuky in May 2021, at that time still under the name Pockid. The Berlin industry leader N26 had previously unsuccessfully given up such a business model. Managing pocket money via an app and enabling initial payments via debit card was hardly worthwhile. The period in which the product is interesting for young people seemed too short. The Hamburg fintech founders still believed in the success of their offer.
In order to increase the length of stay, the startup relied on savings plans and a feed in the app in which payment and savings functions can be used together. On top of that, Ruuky did targeted marketing Tiktok: Employees showed short video sketches, had passers-by 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 came together on Tiktok.