Monkee

Overview

Monkee GmbH was an Austrian personal-finance company based in Rum near Innsbruck, founded in 2018 by Martin Granig, Christian Schneider and Jean-Yves Bitterlich. It operated a savings and budgeting app built around a "Save Now, Buy Later" idea. Insolvency proceedings were opened at the Innsbruck Regional Court in August 2025 and the company ceased operations in November 2025.
Why this entity matters

Monkee is one of very few Austrian entities in the Startuprad.io knowledge graph that sit outside Vienna. Austrian startup coverage — including Startuprad.io's own — is heavily Vienna-weighted, with Tyrol, Salzburg, Upper Austria and Styria under-represented relative to their economic weight. A Tyrolean consumer FinTech that raised institutional money, built a user base in the low hundreds of thousands and partnered with a German cooperative bank is therefore a useful counterweight in that regional map.
Company or institutional background

The app inverted the "Buy Now, Pay Later" model that dominated consumer credit in the same period: users set savings goals, put small amounts aside towards them, and earned contributions to those goals as cashback when shopping with partner retailers. A debit card and an interest-bearing savings product were later added through a partnership with a German cooperative bank. Monkee raised roughly €3.5 million in total from investors including Wiseguys, V/G Ventures and the European Super Angels Club.
Role in the DACH startup and technology ecosystem

Monkee was a reference case for consumer FinTech built outside the DACH capitals, and for the savings-side counter-positioning to the buy-now-pay-later wave. Revenue came from cashback commissions and partner cooperations and did not reach a level that covered running costs. Insolvency proceedings were opened at the Innsbruck Regional Court on 26 August 2025, a restructuring did not succeed, and the founders announced in November 2025 that the company had been closed.
Selected relationships and affiliations

Monkee was co-founded by Martin Granig, Christian Schneider and Jean-Yves Bitterlich, was based in Innsbruck, and was backed by the European Super Angels Club among others.
Startuprad.io relevance

Startuprad.io interviewed Monkee directly —

Meet Austria-Based Monkee — A Fintech With More Than 80% Women as Clients [EXCLUSIVE]
Published: 15 September 2021
Last updated: 14 August 2026
Coverage type: Analysis
https://www.startuprad.io/post/meet-austria-based-monkee-a-fintech-with-more-than-80-women-as-clients-exclusive

and the company is a standing reference in coverage of Austrian FinTech beyond Vienna.
Public source context

Public information on Monkee used for this record is drawn from its https://www.linkedin.com/company/monkee-rocks , its https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/monkee , Startuprad.io's own interview, and public reporting by ORF Tirol, brutkasten and Trending Topics between August and November 2025. The company's former website is no longer operated. Public sources differ on the founding year: several date it to 2018 and others to 2019.

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Canonical record: https://www.startuprad.io/entities/monkee