Hamburg-based DivTax raises €1 million to help investors reclaim overpaid withholding tax on foreign dividends

DivTax, a Hamburg-based FinTech startup, today announced that it has raised €1 million in a pre-Seed financing round to accelerate product development and institutional partnerships.

Participants in the round included Angel Invest, CapCircle, Superangels, ING COO Dr Ralph Müller, and lemon.markets founder Max Linden. Additional angel investors from the financial sector, including Christian Stiebner and Matthias Goegele, also participated. According to the company, Müller and Stiebner had previously invested in the company’s 2024 angel round.

Nicolas Oldag, co-founder of DivTax, mentioned in his LinkedIn post, “During my time at lemon.markets and Deutsche Börse Venture Network, I witnessed first-hand how fintech solutions made capital markets accessible to broad segments of the population and how the equity culture grew stronger and stronger. In the process, I realised that while many aspects of equity markets were simplified by technology, the universally unpopular topic of taxes mostly remained in the background. Yet taxes represent one of the most important drivers of shareholder returns. 

“These insights strengthened my desire to create and build something of my own in the FinTech world. During my Master’s in Entrepreneurship, I met Julius Holzer, who not only became a close friend, but also my co-founder, together with Linus Holzer, our technical brain. Together, we created DivTax to fight complicated withholding tax refund applications.”

Founded in 2023 by Oldag, Linus Holzer, and Julius Holzer, DivTax is on a mission to enable investors to increase foreign dividends. According to the company, private investors are often taxed twice on foreign dividends due to withholding tax. DivTax claims to handle the refund of withholding tax fully digitally and in a few minutes, resulting in increased dividends by up to 25%. 

DivTax noted that it is developing the first standalone full-service platform for international withholding tax management. It uses its proprietary technology, in collaboration with DivTax-Legal (founder Fabian Druschel), to handle the entire withholding tax reclaim process for private investors and institutional clients. 

“The startup addresses a structural market problem: rising transaction volumes and increasing regulatory complexity, combined with a lack of end-to-end solutions in the withholding tax space,” mentioned the company in the press release. 

The platform aggregates transaction data from various brokers and systems, calculates optimisation and reclaim potentials across different jurisdictions, and manages the entire processing workflow.

DivTax notes that it does not profit from your data and stores it exclusively on German servers with the highest encryption standards. 

The company currently only offer its service to German citizens, but plans to expand to other countries in the future. Its B2C platform for retail investors went live at the beginning of 2025 and features strategic integrations with leading fintech and broker platforms. It has also secured a strategically significant client. It has secured a grant from IFB Innovationsstarter GmbH. 

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