Announcing Upvest as Confluent’s 2026 EMEA Data Streaming Startup of the Year

Based in Berlin, Upvest is transforming how financial institutions deliver embedded investments. The company focuses on enabling rapid client onboarding, robust data governance for audit and compliance purposes, and operational resilience through modern disaster recovery (DR) practices. As one of Europe’s leading digital-native fintech platforms, Upvest represents a new generation of infrastructure-first financial technology companies built for real-time scale and reliability.

Confluent for Startups is proud to recognize Upvest as the inaugural EMEA Data Streaming Startup of the Year. The award reflects not only the company’s impressive growth and technical sophistication, but also its leadership in building real-time investment infrastructure capable of supporting the next era of digital banking and embedded finance.

From Startup to Real-Time Fintech at Scale

Upvest has been a longstanding Confluent partner since September 2021. Since then, the company’s trajectory has accelerated dramatically as it has scaled to support major financial institutions such as DKB, N26, Revolut, and more. This rapid growth has required continuous adaptation to the rigorous demands of the fintech industry, with a strong focus on scalability, operational efficiency, and architectural best practices such as instantaneous automatic scaling. What stood out to Confluent for Startups, however, was not simply the pace of Upvest’s growth, but the sophistication of the real-time architecture powering it.

The Real-Time Backbone of Modern Fintech

In fintech, milliseconds matter. Key processes like fast client onboarding, operational resilience (DR), and data governance for audit purposes increasingly depend on the ability to move and process data continuously in motion. Upvest has embraced this challenge by building its platform around event-driven architecture powered by Confluent. Today, Confluent serves as the mission-critical backbone of Upvest’s infrastructure, enabling high-throughput, asynchronous communication across a modern microservices environment.

Operating within Europe’s highly regulated financial environment — including compliance requirements under DORA (the Digital Operational Resilience Act) — Upvest requires exceptional resiliency, uptime, and operational reliability. Confluent’s cloud-native data streaming platform helps provide the high SLAs and fault tolerance necessary to support these regulatory standards while maintaining the speed and flexibility expected of a modern fintech platform.

Engineering Financial Resilience at Scale

Confluent’s Stream Governance capabilities, including Schema Registry, play a central role in enabling Upvest’s scalable and resilient event streaming architecture.

As Upvest continues to grow transaction volumes and increase platform complexity, Confluent provides a foundation for consistent, reliable, and evolvable data streams across services.

With multi AZ deployments, the platform delivers high availability and fault tolerance required for financial workloads, while flexible deployment options allow Upvest to adapt infrastructure to evolving needs. Integration with CI/CD pipelines further enables rapid, controlled changes to streaming applications.

Stream Governance strengthens this foundation by enforcing data quality, schema consistency, and auditability, supporting regulatory compliance and operational integrity at scale - crucially aiding Upvest  meet regulatory requirements

Building the Next Generation of Real-Time Investment Experiences

Looking ahead, we’re particularly excited about Upvest’s adoption of stream processing technologies, including its use of Confluent Tableflow to expose Kafka topics as Iceberg tables with one-click simplicity. This capability is foundational for enabling next-generation data platform use cases such as real-time analytics and intelligent event-driven decisioning, leveraging open table formats like Iceberg alongside platforms such as BigQuery Data Lake.

Upvest exemplifies a new generation of European fintech innovators building not just digital-first products, but truly real-time businesses. We’re proud to recognize the company as Confluent’s 2026 EMEA Data Streaming Startup of the Year and look forward to supporting its continued growth and innovation in the years ahead.