Seapoint Founder Sean Mullaney: Ex-Stripe CIO Builds Startup Banking

Sean Mullaney spent years inside the payments infrastructure that powers much of the internet. He still watched a bank fumble something as basic as accepting a £600,000 check from a newly funded startup.

That specific moment is what pushed him to found Seapoint in Dublin in January 2025.

The company has now raised €7.5 million in a fresh seed round, bringing total funding to €10 million in just over a year.

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A Founder Who Built the Infrastructure Before Building the Startup

Mullaney's background is unusually deep for a first-time-in-this-specific-role founder.

He served as European CIO at Stripe from 2020 to 2022, then became CTO at Algolia, an AI-powered search company that reached unicorn status.

Before that, he worked at Google for several years, and he's advised both the European Central Bank and the Bank of England on digital currency policy, including a role with the Bank of England's CBDC Technology Forum.

That's a genuinely unusual resume for a startup founder: deep technical payments experience, direct exposure to central bank digital currency policy, and operating experience scaling a fast-growing tech company, all before starting Seapoint.

More than half of Seapoint's roughly 20-person team are also Stripe alumni, alongside people who previously worked at Tide.

Several team members, including Mullaney himself, are repeat founders who say the product is shaped directly by frustrations they experienced firsthand while running their own companies.

The Specific Gap Seapoint Is Targeting

Seapoint's positioning is narrower and more specific than most fintech pitches. The company describes its target customer as founders who are too big for neobanks and too small for corporate banking, a genuinely underserved middle tier.

Challenger banks like N26, Revolut, and Tide have made basic business banking accessible, but they generally skew toward consumers and very small businesses.

Traditional corporate banks, meanwhile, tend to ignore fast-growing venture-backed startups until they're much larger.

Seapoint's platform connects to a company's existing bank accounts, accounting software, and email within about ten minutes, then uses AI to automate bookkeeping, payroll, expense categorization, invoice payments, and financial reporting.

The company also offers embedded financial products directly: multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, international payments, and treasury products, including access to BlackRock money market funds through a partnership with WealthKernel.

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The Money and Who's Backing It

Seapoint's €7.5 million seed round was led by London-based fintech VC 13books, with participation from more than 40 angel investors alongside additional venture firms.

The investor list is notable for how many of them are recognizable operators from the exact companies Seapoint is trying to differentiate from or build on top of.

Backers include Claire Hughes Johnson, Stripe's former COO, Laurence Krieger, former UK CEO of Tide and former COO of Revolut, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, and Luke Mackey, CEO of workplace benefits platform Kota.

Existing investors Frontline Ventures and Tapestry VC also returned for this round, alongside 13books partner Michael McFadgen, who is joining Seapoint's board.

That's a genuinely strong signal, less about the dollar amount and more about who chose to write a personal check.

When former C-suite operators from your most direct competitors and comparison points back your company, that's a form of validation that's harder to manufacture than press coverage.

What's Next, and the Honest Competitive Picture

With this round, Seapoint has opened self-service signups to all founders in the UK and Ireland for the first time, removing its waitlist following a private beta that included more than 80 design partner startups.

The company's most direct competitors, Brex and Ramp, are strong in the US but not widely available in Europe.

Pleo operates in the same general space but focuses specifically on expense management rather than the full financial operations stack Seapoint is trying to own.

That's a real, if narrow, competitive opening.

Seapoint's bet is that European startups genuinely lack a comparable all-in-one option, not that its individual features are unmatched by any single competitor.

The honest risk here is integration rather than differentiation.

Seapoint's pitch depends on connecting cleanly to whatever tools founders already use rather than forcing them to switch, and as the company scales past its current design-partner base into general self-service signups, keeping that integration experience reliable across a much wider range of existing bank accounts, accounting systems, and company structures will be the real test of whether the product holds up at scale.

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