Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we go behind the craft of building and backing venture-scale companies in Europe.
Today, we’re joined by Sean Mullaney, Founder & CEO of Seapoint, and Will Prendergast, as the Founding Partner at Frontline Ventures.
Seapoint has just come out of stealth with a $3M pre-seed to rebuild the fragile and fragmented financial stack that European startups (and later: mid-market companies) rely on.
With a Stripe-forged team, AI-native development culture, and operators from Revolut, Tines & more on board, Seapoint wants to become the financial home for European startups.
This conversation dives deep into founder pain, broken tooling, AI-native product building, engineering culture, the changing shape of startup teams, syndicate-building, and why Frontline backed Sean with high conviction.
Here’s what’s covered:
01:07 The Mission: “The financial home for European startups”
03:32 Frontline’s conviction moment
06:24 The founder pain: 5 tools, 5 accounts, zero clarity
08:07 The invisible tax: fragmentation, reconciliation hell, no real-time view
10:14 Why this problem is structurally important
12:19 European vs US lens: why Seapoint is ahead
13:18 AI-native engineering: “We rebuild the stack from processes, not accounts”
15:19 AI agents allow senior engineers to ship full-stack features alone — compressing timelines that previously required 2–3× more engineers.
17:19 Rethinking teams: fewer people, more senior, more generalist
19:33 Productivity does NOT reduce funding needs — it increases ambition
21:27 Culture: curiosity, experimentation, and founder-led technical push
36:11 Syndicate design: Angels as a go-to-market weapon.
40:23 From startup financial home → to powering Europe’s mid-market backbone: lending, treasury, automation, embedded finance.
✍️ Show Notes
Seapoint, The Company
What they are building
A single financial home for European startups.
Where founders:
open accounts
run payments
manage payroll
receive and pay invoices
get real-time cash visibility
automate reconciliation and bookkeeping
earn treasury yield
run multi-currency
handle VAT
and eventually access lending + financing
All in one system.
Automated. AI-native.
Purpose-built for the way tech companies run.
The Founders’ Insight
Every founder builds a custom finance stack.
It always looks like this:
1️⃣ A legacy bank account (for VC capital)
2️⃣ A neobank (for daily ops)
3️⃣ An expense/card provider
4️⃣ An FX tool
5️⃣ Stripe (or similar)
6️⃣ An accountant
7️⃣ Spreadsheets
8️⃣ Screenshots, emails, inbox chaos
→ No real-time cash visibility
→ No unified ledger
→ No automated workflows
→ No treasury
→ No coherent financial process
→ Huge waste of time
Founders describe the system with profanity and Sean heard it hundreds of times.
What changed (Why Now)
Four forces collided:
New banking-as-a-service rails
→ It’s suddenly possible to build a unified financial platform in Europe.AI-native software development
→ Financial processes (VAT, reconciliation, approval flows) can be automated, not outsourced.SVB’s collapse exposed the problem
→ Every VC asked: “Where is your cash?” and realized:
Nobody had a system; everyone had a patchwork.Europe’s mid-market is starved of modern financial tooling
→ Startups are the ideal early adopters → the mid-market is the real prize.
AI-Native Company Building — The Seapoint Playbook
Seapoint isn’t “a bank with AI features.”
It is a process-native, AI-orchestrated financial operating system.
How they build a product
Sean introduced a loop:
Technical discovery every 3–6 months (because AI capabilities shift)
Prototype agentic workflows
Release to design partners
Gather real data
Train/iterate
Productionize
Re-run discovery as models evolve
Engineering culture
Small team of ultra-senior generalists
Every engineer acts like a “mini founder”
AI agents act as junior devs
Senior engineers orchestrate end-to-end features
Invest time in exploring tools
Founder personally prototypes and experiments
Outcome
9 months → automated three core processes + business accounts + more.
Would have required:
2–3× the engineers
2–3× the time
pre-AI.
What This Means for the Venture Model
Sean’s contrarian take:
AI productivity increases the value of capital.
Why?
Because 1 engineer now ships like 3–4 did before.
So every €1 of investment produces far more product.
Thus → raise more, build bigger, faster.
Will’s macro view:
This mirrors the early cloud era:
Lower cost to start
Higher cost to win
Category winners still raise huge rounds
Competition accelerates
AI doesn’t reduce venture. It amplifies both ambition and category size.
Why Frontline Led the Round
1. Deep diligence + insight density
Frontline went out and interviewed customers, partners, and experts — coming back with data Sean himself hadn’t seen.
2. Pattern recognition from Pointy, Intercom, Stripe, etc.
They’ve seen when a team approaches a problem differently — and builds the “missing system.”
3. A founder-worthy team
Sean has:
built Stripe Europe
built Algolia’s AI search
founded multiple companies
mentor/angel to dozens of startups
extreme clarity on the problem
ability to attract “founder-caliber” engineers
4. Seapoint is not a tool, it’s an infrastructure play
And infrastructure is Frontline’s sweet spot.
Where Seapoint is Going
Today:
→ “Financial home for startups”
→ automate finance
→ simplify accounts
→ single ledger
→ real-time cash
→ integrated workflows
Soon:
→ lending, treasury, FX, invoice financing
→ embedded financial workflows
→ mid-market financial systems
→ full automation of ops, payables, receivables
Massive market.
Massive timing.
Built with an engineering model that didn’t exist 18 months ago.
💡 One-Liner Takeaway
Seapoint is building what every European founder wishes they had: a single financial home that's AI-native, unified, automated, and finally replaces the patchwork.
