Taavet Hinrikus turned his startup into the one of the world’s biggest digital-payment firms, giving returns of about 35,000% to early investors including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures.
Now Wise’s co-founder wants to help other startups expand rapidly as he looks to boost his personal investments in early-stage companies across his home region of Europe.
“I spent the past 10 years building one iconic European company,” Hinrikus, 40, said in a recent telephone interview from London. “In the next 10 years, I would love to have 100 or even 1,000 similar iconic companies come around.”
In October, Hinrikus sold an 81.5 million-pound ($110 million) stake in London-based Wise after offloading almost $50 million of the shares when it went public in July. He still owns stock worth more than $650 million.
The Estonia native, who stepped down as Wise’s chairman in December, made his first early-stage investment around 2008. Since then, he’s backed more than 100 European startups in the the Netherlands, Germany, France and elsewhere. Some of his latest bets were in the Estonian energy-storage firm Skeleton Technologies and the U.K. contract-automation platform Juro this year, as well as the trading app Lightyear in 2021.
He’s already picking up big gains from some of his earlier investments, including a more than 700% return from a stake in the Estonia transport company Bolt he acquired in 2018, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“I want to make sure Europe has a great chance,” Hinrikus said. “Silicon Valley has a 50-year head start.”
Other tech founders from Europe are bolstering their early-stage investments. UiPath founder Daniel Dines, 50, last year bought stakes in the Serbian cybersecurity firm Trickest and the German digital-health company Avi Medical, while Checkout.com’s Guillaume Pousaz, 40, recently boosted his bet on the Irish e-commerce business Wayflyer.
They have net worths of $4.1 billion and $19.4 billion, respectively, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Hinrikus started Wise — previously known as TransferWise — in 2010 with fellow Estonia native Kristo Kaarmann. The pair raised $6 million in series A funding during 2013 from investors including Thiel’s venture capital firm to value their startup at $23.2 million, according to PitchBook. Since its direct listing, Wise shares have fallen by a third, putting the company’s market value at about $8 billion.
Hinrikus said he’s currently considering “multiple things in climate” as a possible investment. “It’s a little bit early to talk about,” he added.
