This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Paul Becker, Co-Founder & CEO of re:cap, a fintech platform helping digital businesses unlock capital and understand their financial position through intelligent forecasting, real-time data insights, and flexible financing.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Paul walks us through re:cap’s journey from an idea for automated due diligence software to becoming one of Europe’s fastest-growing capital platforms, recently securing over €125M in debt financing to power its next phase.

We explore the intricacies of fintech business models, investor expectations, the realities of growing a company during AI hype cycles, and what it takes to build enduring value in modern financial infrastructure.

In this episode, we discuss:

💰 How re:cap evolved from an underwriting tool to a full capital + finops engine
📊 Why Paul obsesses over gross margin more than revenue — and how that influenced product decisions
🚨 Lessons from building through hype: “growth at all costs” vs quality of revenue
🧠 The role of AI in financial tooling — and why re:cap built its copilot carefully and quietly
🏗️ Building a remote-first, values-aligned company from day one
📍 What it’s like starting multiple companies with the same co-founders — and how friendship and complementary skills helped them scale
🔁 “Back to the future”: how re:cap is returning to its original thesis, now with product-market fit
🌍 Vision: re:cap as the capital allocation engine for the modern CFO
📉 How investor expectations flipped 180° in 18 months — and why Paul sticks to economic logic over trend-following